CHAPTER THREE: FAITH AND WORKS

"True evangelical Faith cannot lie sleeping, for it clothes the naked, feeds the hungry and comforts the sorrowful." - Menno Simons

My faith cannot be separated from my life. If an action I undertake threatens to violate firmly held beliefs, then the question inevitably becomes theological in nature. This is not a statement about how the world should be, or how it is for others, but simply a statement of how it is for me. This is my story.

My Story

I am a Christian, an evangelical, and a Mennonite. I am not evangelical in the sense that I need to work only with Christians, or that I feel the need to convert all who are around me to my way of thinking. I do believe that I must show through words and actions that I am Christian. I spent 2 years studying for pastoral ministries at the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries (now Seminary) in Elkhart, Indiana. After I left, I worked first with Canadian Aboriginal peoples and then as a community development worker in a low-income apartment complex. I held these positions through various Mennonite church organizations. I will tell stories from these experiences that illustrate the nature of my faith. I hold to theological and ethical positions concerning the personal, subjective, and the narrative and the integrated nature of faith and practice that explain, to a certain extent, who I am and why I reacted to the statements of the SREB.

Personal Faith

Mennonites were not Protestants in the strict sense of the work. We were the product of the Radical Reformation, a parallel movement to Luther's reformation. Among other things, Mennonites rejected the notion of the State Church and advocated a radical separation of Church and State. Along with this separation came the fundamental notion that faith was not mediated but personal. They taught believers to read the Bible since it was vitally important that everyone have direct access to the revelation in the Bible. We believe in the priesthood of all believers. Mennonite churches are not set up hierarchically. There are no layers between the people and God, and no one needs to intercede for another before God. One struggle faced by my wife and other Mennonite pastors is the lack of a priestly understanding of the pastorate. We have not seen the pastor as a mediator or a conduit between the people and God. Structurally, the triangle that represents the church -- if there is one -- is inverted. The people are at the top, and the pastor is underneath and is accountable to the church to present their understanding of the faith. The model is one of servant leaders and not of a channel of revelation from God. No one can claim to be more ethical or holy than another. I do not need anyone to mediate my faith for me. Universities are remnants of the State Church in the middle ages and reflect that hierarchical understanding of life. They understood that the leaders of the university were closer to God than the people and understood revelation better. I do not believe this. An institution may in fact be right in the views that it expounds, but it is not more right because it is an institution. A single person has the right to question the views of the many, and, in the eyes of God, both views are on equal footing.

The SREB, backed up by the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans laid claim to know what constituted ethical action. They are neither right nor wrong because of the multitude of people supporting their views. If what they are asking me to do concerns my understanding of what is right or wrong, then my understanding of what is right for me to do is equal to theirs. I am not making the claim that the views of the SREB or the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans are wrong or misguided, only that they do not work for me. Their ideas do not fit with my firmly held belief that I have the right and the ability to decide what is right for me. I made the choice not to undertake research within the university because I could not accept that the university could tell me what was ethical behaviour. To do so would mean that I would have to accept the beliefs that under girded the statements of the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans, and those statements were also contrary to my world view.

A Higher Power

For some people that I have met, the term Mennonite conjures up images of black robed people in horse-drawn buggies. Although this image is accurate to a point -- the "Old Order Mennonites" do still exist -- the picture is not complete. The buggies of the Old Order Mennonites are emblematic of a belief -- held by all Mennonites to a greater or lesser degree -- that we are to be in the world but not of it. The understanding is that Christians are of the Kingdom of God and answer to a higher power than any of this world. In effect, this means that the actions of Christians are to be consistent with the understandings of faith first.

When I was in high school, I went on a hay ride with other youth from mine and surrounding churches. Many boys on the wagon were strong farmers, well used to throwing hay bales for hours on end. As often happens with hay rides, a car with a group of older boys chose to "buzz" the wagon, racing by at high speed. When this tactic had little effect, the car stopped in front of the wagon, and three or four drunk individuals approached us. The strangers jumped up on the now stopped wagon and went on to challenge anyone and everyone to a fight. An assailant even tore the shirt of a leader in an attempt to urge him to fight. Had my friends chosen to, they could have beaten these boys to a pulp. They amazed me: as someone that had not been brought up as a Mennonite, I found it hard to comprehend my friends' ability to resist the urge to fight. All these boys would say was, "We will not fight," over and again. Eventually the other boys left because they could not get any satisfaction from their victims.

This story left an indelible mark upon me. In my mind, my friends had just cause to fight. No one would have faulted them for beating up these fools who had endangered the lives of so many people. They deserved to be taught a lesson. However, for Mennonites, there are no "just wars." The Martyrs' Mirror, a collection of stories of the early Anabaptist Martyrs, tells the story of Dirk Wilms who was running from two men who had accused him of being a heretic. As they ran across a frozen pond, one pursuer fell through the ice and began to drown. Dirk turned back and pulled the man from the water, upon which they arrested and subsequently burned him at the stake. Stories such as these were ingrained in the minds of my friends. The Bible said to turn the other cheek, to love your enemies, and do good to those who would hurt you. Hurting someone was therefore not right even to the point of allowing harm to come to someone. This truth applied even if your action threatened your own life. The question was not whether the action was justified in the eyes of the world, but whether it was justified in the eyes of God.

As I reflected upon these and other stories in the light of the statements of the SREB, I realized that I had to abandon my plans to do research. I was not answerable to the university. I was answerable to God and the understandings of faith. I could not abandon those understandings of faith even to pursue academic goals. I realized that some of my colleagues might suggest that I was accusing them of "copping out" by choosing to pursue research ideals. I could not change that understanding. I can only say again that it was not right for me. I do not have a religious life and an academic life. There is only one Kingdom for me, and that is the one of faith. There is no expediency and no room for understanding that some areas of my life do not fall under the purview of faith. I believe in the fundamental integration of life.

Integration of Life

The Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans was based on a positivistic view of the world (Stuart, 1998) and as such represented what Schön (1987) saw as a separation of theory and practice. Theologically, I could not hold to that fundamental dichotomy. Only one kingdom was important for me -- the kingdom of God. I could not believe one thing and act oppositely. I saw the split between theory and practice as symbolic of a split between faith and works, and for me, these two are not split.

In 1987, I went to Elkhart, Indiana to study at Goshen Biblical Seminary one of the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries (AMBS) -- since joined with Mennonite Biblical Seminary into Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary. Here I came to understand the nuanced view of faith and works evidenced in the quotation from Menno Simons at the head of this chapter.

Faith is often considered a personal internal system of beliefs about a deity, or about how the world should be, or about how one should act in the world. It is not generally considered to be the actions that one undertakes as a result of faith. For many, these are the works of faith, but not faith itself. For Christians, those who hold to a separation of faith and works tend to emphasize verses such as the one from Ephesians 2:9: "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not of your own doing; it is the gift of God- not the result of works, so that none my boast (New Revised Standard Version). For the writer of Ephesians, our actions -- or works -- do not gain us salvation. Salvation comes as a gift from God to those who believe that Jesus Christ is the vehicle of salvation. Thus no one can be more righteous or worthy than another.

As Mennonites, we hold on to the teachings of Jesus in Matthew 5-6 -- the Sermon on the Mount. Here Jesus calls the believers to a higher standard than simply attending to the letter of the Law. The law says that we should not murder, but Jesus likens anger and insult to murder, placing them on the same plane (Mt 5: 21-23). Here we find the basis for the refusal to take oaths. Jesus tells us simply to agree or disagree. Our "yes" is a yes and our "no" is a no (Mt 5:37). All responses are placed on the same level. A verbal agreement to do something is no different from a signed contract in the eyes of God. We have emphasized also the understandings of faith and works found in James. "What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you say to them, 'Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,' and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith without works is dead (James 2:14-17, NRSV). For James -- and subsequently for Mennonites -- there is an interplay between faith and action. While we are still "justified" by what we believe -- our faith -- we must show our faith through our actions in a sense to show that our faith exists.

Thus the argument sways back and forth. On one side are those who see a separation between faith and works and can be faulted for inconsistency. They may appear to contradict the tenets of their faith in their actions. They appear to separate the world of Faith from the world outside, and yet they live and act in both. Emphasis is placed upon a core of firmly held beliefs with the understanding that living them in the world is not always possible. On the other side are those like me who also hold that there are two kingdoms, one of the world, and the other of God. However, we are to live only in one. It is this radical separation of Church and State that led to the persecution of early Anabaptists for their refusal to baptise and thus register their children for baptism and the draft. Nonetheless, modern Mennonites suffer from the criticism that we emphasize works over faith and focus only on actions. Thus some Mennonites criticize the Mennonite Central Committee for removing the words "In the name of Christ" from aid packages when workers feel that those words might offend the recipients.

For me, the dichotomy became real while taking a course in urban ministries in Washington DC while I was a student at a Mennonite Seminary. The course was in two parts, in the morning we spent the time in lectures, primarily from a prominent pastor in the area, who, although he did not in fact work with some the poorer member of the urban environment, did have significant experience in evangelism and had extensive contacts in the DC area. The afternoons and evenings were spent visiting and interacting primarily with people who were poor and homeless and with those who worked with them. At one church, a rich benefactor provided practically all of the funds required to operate a large soup kitchen. Three things in particular struck me about that church's ministry. First, the pastor required the people to attend a church service before breakfast, and those that did not attend were required to wait until all had eaten before they were allowed into the meal. Second, the food was often substandard, and some of us found it impossible to serve the obviously mouldy bread. Finally, some younger members of our group felt that they could not criticize the church because the pastor was from the same racial group as many recipients of the service. Not so for me and some of my colleagues. One -- a peace worker from Northern Ireland -- went as far as to call "demonic" their practice of segregating the people based on their willingness to participate in the service. I remember silently cheering on one proud man who refused to cooperate with the service even if it meant getting scraps for food.

In my view, the church's insistence on the practice of faith without the accompanying belief on the part of the homeless people implied that those who refused to believe might just as well starve. It is all very well to suggest that "spiritual food" is more important than material food, but that is easier to say when you are not hungry. In my eyes, the food from the church -- food that came without cost to them -- was merely being used as a vehicle to coerce empty words of faith from the recipients. There appeared to be little if any understanding that the coercive action and indeed the quality of the food was antithetical to the message of the Gospel.

The other side of the argument -- if I can so term it -- came from a church in an area known for prostitutes. The pastor was working with the cooperation of some members of the church and the tolerance of others. They had opened their basement as a shelter for homeless people against the cold of winter. They lined the room with cots and mattresses, and they were full to capacity every night. Nevertheless, for him, the crowning achievement was that he had managed to get the church to unscrew the pews from the floor of the chapel so that prostitutes could sleep on the floor of the room where they held communion in the mornings. His goal was to detach the pews in the sanctuary as well. This pastor was rough, his language did not fit the stereotype of a pastor, and some questioned whether he had any faith at all. Yet his actions were consistent with a commitment to bringing the good news to everyone despite their station or their expressed beliefs.

Neither of these two pictures is perfect. There are strengths and flaws in both views, and yet I find myself drawn to the side that puts faith and action together. More particularly, I felt that the morning lectures -- removed, as they were, from the context of our afternoons -- became irrelevant. The lecturer attempted to codify, to reduce, to parcel ministry into a series of definable segments. Everything was to be neat and tidy and understandable. In the end, I came to the realization that, for me, the carefully chosen words of the lectures with their cogent theological arguments could not make up faith, even though they were true to the Biblical record. Faith was in the smoky church basement, sleeping with the homeless -- prostitutes, mentally ill, poor -- working out a messy Gospel.

There are measurable standards against which we can place our faith. We can measure the extent to which our beliefs conform to these linguistic standards, but this will not make us faithful. The test of faith is not in the statements, nor even in the intent of the believer. It lies in the actions of the person. Not what should I do, or what will I do, but what do I do.

After leaving the seminary, I accepted a volunteer position with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) working at a Friendship Centre for Aboriginal peoples in Northern Ontario. This Centre had been set up by two groups of people, one native to the area, and one from farther away. The two groups were not in agreement about how they should operate the centre. Only one group contacted MCC and requested assistance, and some members of the other group boycotted the centre as a result. When I arrived, I was not aware of the conflict. As I worked with the people at the centre, I realized that one problem was that they were not getting the necessary government funding for their venture. Very soon after coming, I found that the approval of another organization was crucial to any funding application -- the Ontario Federation of Indian Friendship Centres (OFIFC). The OFIFC was a strong, Aboriginal-run organization whose mandate it was to oversee the formation of, and recognize the individual centres. It became apparent to me that since our centre had not contacted the OFIFC, and was not recognized by them, they would probably not get funding. I also felt that the OFIFC would only help the centre if they dealt with the infighting. I came to a position where I could no longer justify my presence in the Centre. I believed that I had an ethical duty to help, and, indeed, they had asked for and still wanted MCC's help. Simultaneously, I felt that my presence enabled the community to hold on to the notion that they were progressing toward the goal of a Friendship Centre without having to deal with the problems that would prevent that goal. My help was not helping. I embodied a contradiction, and once I came to that realization, I needed to find a way past it. I eventually had to leave the Centre as I could not see that way past.

To be able to say that I wanted to help, my actions had to be helpful. It was not only that my belief informed my actions; it was that my actions were my beliefs. The term "embodiment" comes closest to describing the relationship. Faith is not linguistic but embodied in a person. Thus I see theory as embodied in the practice of the person, hence the "living theory" (Whitehead, 1993). When the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans expected that I cordon my research off from my practice in discrete time periods, I felt that they were forcing a false dichotomy, suggesting that we must create theory apart from those who embody the theory.

Narrative Faith

My research had to include my stories, but how was it that narrative became an issue of faith? The SREB had raised the question of ethics, and ethics were, for me, based on stories.

One of my most meaningful courses in Seminary was one in ethics. Although we read many ethicists and theologians and became familiar with ontological, teleological, absolute, relative, and other forms of ethical reasoning, the focus of the course was essentially personal. For the final assignment, the professor required us to outline, in three to five theses, how we arrived at our ethical norm. In other words, rather than dealing with issues, we had to decide the manner in which we dealt with issues. What was the process we would use to decide what was ethical action? My first thesis was that my ethical action arose as a response to a gift from God.

I believe in a story -- a story of a people of faith contained in the Bible. It is a personal story but not an individual story. It arises out a community. It is the belief that I continue in that particular story that creates within me the necessity to act in a manner true to the story. In the Old Testament, ethical norms such as the "ten commandments" are prefaced by the phrase, "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. . . ." (Ex. 20:2,3, NRSV) therefore you shall have no other gods before me. Therefore, there will be no murder; therefore, there will be no stealing, etc.. If I believe that God was the deliverer from Egypt, then I will act according to these commandments. But more, these statements describe the community that believes in the story of God as the deliverer. Rather than prescriptions, I see the decalogue as a description of the believing community. I believe, therefore I do. My faith is a narrative faith, based on a story of the community of faith, with actions arising from the history of the people. For me, we embody ethics in the stories of the faithful community.

Subjective Faith

It seems self-evident that within an understanding of faith as personal and narrative, I should see faith as subjective. However, there is another piece of the puzzle of my faith, and that is the integration of liberation theologies.

One winter day at the seminary, we awoke to find a pile of large snowballs created by some Canadian students in honour of one of the infrequent Indiana snowfalls. The sign by the clump read "Let justice roll down like snowballs" in reference to the passage in Amos that reads: "But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" (5:24, NRSV).

The Mennonite Church, along with being an historical peace church, has a strong view of social justice. When I was at Seminary, liberation theologies were finding their way into the curriculum of some schools. At AMBS, some faculty and students resonated with the call for justice inherent in the formation of liberation theologies in Central America. Several students and faculty members had lived and worked in South and Central Americas, and Daniel Schipani, a professor of Christian Education -- himself from South America -- had worked with and written his dissertation on Paulo Friere. As a result, we encountered strong advocates for liberation theologies, ones who knew of what they spoke.

Liberation theologies were in the class of critical theology and, particularly in the earliest form from South America, parallelled some conflicts evident in the origins of Anabaptist faith. Like Anabaptists, liberation theologians moved against the authority of the church by reinterpreting scripture in the light of the experiences of the poor. Theirs was a profoundly subjective view, reading scripture as providing a preferential option for the poor. Liberation Theology accepted that we read the Bible in ways that reflect who we are as people and our experiences. In essence, Liberation Theology put the "I" into Biblical interpretation. Paulo Friere took his faith as the impetus to bring literacy to the poor and illiterate in his native Brasil. Friere's addition to the complex mix was his call for "praxis" or the spiral of action and reflection (1970).

Juan Luis Segundo appropriated German theologian Rudolf Bultmann's "hermeneutic circle" to describe the "continuing change in our interpretation of the Bible which is dictated by the continuing changes in our present-day reality, both individual and societal (1976, p. 8). He described the preconditions and factors necessary for fashioning such a circle as:

...(1) profound and enriching questions and suspicions about our real situation; (2) a new interpretation of the Bible that is equally profound and enriching. These two preconditions mean that there must in turn be four decisive factors in our circle. Firstly there is our way of experiencing reality, which leads us to ideological suspicion. Secondly there is the application of our ideological suspicion to the whole ideological superstructure in general and to theology in particular. Thirdly there comes a new way of experiencing theological reality that leads us to exegetical suspicion, that is, to the suspicion that the prevailing interpretation of the Bible has not taken important pieces of data into account. Fourthly we have our new hermeneutic, that is our new way of interpreting the fountain head of the our faith (i.e., Scripture) with the new elements at our disposal. (Segundo, 1976, p. 9)

The theologian working to create a hermeneutic circle began with the subjectivity of personal experience and used it as the impetus to construct a new understanding of the text (here the Bible). In the hermeneutic circle, action came before reflection, and subjectivity was valued. Practice, therefore, informed and created theory. When theory or theology did not match with experience, then theory changed. The relativistic nature of liberation theologies caused consternation for many students and faculty members. The idea that theology was not absolute and unchangeable was objectionable to some. However, in liberation theologies, I found a basis for subjectivity in faith. Who I was as a believer could be included as a legitimate question of faith. I began to ask the question; "What do my actions say about who I am as a believer?" This was, in effect, the praxis question. It combined both ethical action and the reflection upon that action, leading to changed action. The Liberation theologians also put the "I" into Biblical interpretation. Rather than the objective view of a theology, which suggested that knowing the essential nature of God apart from who we were as people was possible, Liberation and other critical theologies recognized a subjective interplay between the reader and the text. There was an "I" reading the text, and that "I" viewed God and revelation in a particular way, based on the story of that particular "I."

As I approached research with this subjective understanding, I realized that the value in the understanding that I brought to the practice of teaching. My individual practice could create a theory of teaching. Liberation theologians were not speaking to the world when they created their theology. Their theology was for themselves (Segundo, 1976). Every year, a group of women in the Mennonite church organizes a conference called "Women doing Theology." Like liberation theologians, they see theology as an action, not as a study. Individuals undertake actions; they are personal. The stories of individuals embody their actions and their beliefs and theories. Individuals do their theology; they do their theory. Theory and practice; faith and works are inextricably bound together. My faith dictated that my research should be a personal subjective narrative that embodied my theories of teaching in my practice.