Building Mennonite Belonging
Toward an Intercultural Church
Attending public school in Washington, DC, in the 1980s and ’90s, I was taught to embrace my ethnicity—Pennsylvania German with ancestors who emigrated from what is now Switzerland—among other ethnicities. From an early age, I also learned to distinguish between a faith tradition shared by people around the world and an ethnicity shared with people who may not be part of that faith tradition. (For example, in the ecumenical Christian community my Mennonite family belonged to, I knew that one multigenerational family was Lutheran religiously and Norwegian ethnically.) After reading Hyung Jin Kim Sun’s book, however, I see that religion and ethnicity can’t be fully separated in church settings.
Kim Sun has experienced this challenge firsthand. The child of Korean immigrants, he grew up in Paraguay, where there are colonies of Mennonites who left Canada a century ago because of changes to the laws that restricted their ability to educate their children in German-speaking private schools. Although he heard about and visited the Mennonite colonies, Kim Sun did not think of them as religious. It was only during seminary in the United States that he came to know Mennonites as a Christian tradition and joined a Mennonite church. In recent years, Kim Sun has been working ecumenically in Canada while seeking to understand power dynamics, dominant ideologies, cultural imperialism, and settler colonialism. He draws on this expertise to argue that Christians need to strive specifically to be anti-racist, to decolonize, and to bring to the center the voices and experiences of those who have historically been relegated to the margins.
As a Mennonite who worked for three years for a newspaper covering the Anabaptist world, I’ve seen many examples of what Kim Sun describes in his book. While 70 percent of Mennonites globally are African, Asian, and Latin American, the dominant Mennonite ethnic identities remain Swiss, German, Dutch, and Russian. I found that Mennonites accepted me easily because I have two common Swiss-German last names. People of other ethnicities “experience barriers to being fully integrated into church life,” Kim Sun writes. “They also name whiteness as another barrier that excludes them,” because of its association with the dominant ethnicities.
