| Mennonites have been drinking deeply from contemplative spiritual formation wells in the past 30 years. I wanted to know why. In order to find out, I read relevant literature on Mennonite spirituality, especially the literature written in the last 20 years. I interviewed a woman who is representative of 20th c. Mennonite agrarian spirituality, my grandmother, Susan Ruth, and wrote a summary of her life and the influences on it. And I researched how and why the spiritual formation curriculum was developed in the 1980s at the only Mennonite seminary that has a degree program in spirituality, the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries, in Elkhart, Indiana.; I discovered that Mennonites are in a new historical situation and need to rethink how they do spiritual formation. The formative/shaping environments Mennonites used to grow up in—the coherent social contexts for spiritual formation based on a communal agrarian life—are largely gone. Secondly, there were significant gaps in traditional Mennonite spirituality: personal spirituality was recognized as a missing ingredient, at AMBS, and subsequently in Mennonite churches; an ingredient needed to balance and complement the intensely—sometimes too exclusively—communal and ethical nature of traditional Mennonite faith practice.; I describe the patterns that shaped my grandmother's life, extract some themes and practices, then describe and compare that with the spiritual formation program developed at AMBS in the 1980s. There are values and themes that Mennonites need to preserve, even as they recognize that the way they embody these themes is changing drastically. I describe “themes then and now,” attempting to define Mennonite spirituality for the future.; In conclusion, I discovered that the shapes people live among, shape them. Now that the shape of Mennonite lives is basically Western and American—which in significant ways is inimical to the Spirit—Mennonite Christians need to be very intentional about giving a God-shape to their lives. I argue that Mennonite spiritual formation is necessarily changing from a spiritual-formation-by-just-living-in-community to a more intentional spiritual formation-by-contemplative-and-communal-disciplines. |
