 What fun to be here together. I'm seeing heads nodding. The energy has built, and we are glad that we have arrived. I arrived without my travel companion this morning, and that is one sadness for me today, but I have joy in seeing all of you here. Friends, I am about to meet, and friends that I have enjoyed and learned from for many, many years, and it is a privilege. In 1950, a teenage boy from Southern Manitoba, United Church community and family, left eagerly his family and rushed off to join the Canadian Armed Forces. Now with little patience, no interest, and much less any aptitude for languages or cultures, he went off to serve in France. There he found his bride, a French-Canadian, French-Albertian Catholic girl. A son was born to them in France, and later a daughter came along on a now defunct military base in Ontario. As this young man had been clear that he never would be a good Catholic, his bride said, well, that's fine, I'll join your church. So the mother through the years traipsed off with the children, now a man ducking into the back door of a United Church, telling the children that they were going to your father's church, father with a small F. The daughter graduated from high school, left home eagerly as her father had, and went searching, not for the military, but for a God she had learned to respect, but not really know. A first Bible was purchased, a husband was found and with him came a church. Her church, his church became her church, and a time later, after being baptized as an infant in a United Church, confirmed as a Catholic, she was re-baptized as a Mennonite brethren and soon sent off to serve with the general conference, Mennonite Church, in international ministries, where she finally and definitively lodged her both membership and found her belonging. And today I stand before you. A church leader, a church agency administrator, an ordained minister, and yes, as some people scratch their heads, vice president of Mennonite World Conference. I am an eclectic Mennonite, an anabaptist Christian, re-baptized into this faith, and I often resonate with Paul, the least among you, grafted, not born into this marvelous stream of faithfulness. I am a Canadian Mennonite who has been shaped and nurtured, especially in my formative years as an anabaptist and a Christian, by my Congolese brothers and sisters and my Brazilian brothers and sisters, who I went, well, you people said you sent me to serve, I went to learn from. Last fall, I was a speaker at a women admissions event and to me, there's nothing more fun than speaking to a group of women who are dedicated to God's service. And they had been mentioned that I'm a grandma. And so after the speaking at coffee time, I was sitting at a round table and one of these dear older women put her arm on me and said, you know, I was so surprised you're a grandma because you don't have a, and she said a word I didn't understand. So I said, I'm sorry, I didn't understand that. And she said a little bit louder because you don't have a, and repeated the same word that I didn't understand. I said, trying again, I'm sorry, I don't speak German. That's why I didn't understand you. And at that point she rose to her full and imposing 85 year old stature, looked over her glasses at me and said, what? I thought you were a Mennonite. Apparently all Mennonite women who are grandmothers have a bun at the back of their head. Where culture blurs theology. What is an Anabaptist Christian? I have a completely unbaked and unproven theory and that that is that my own story of being a Mennonite shaped by a wide variety of both cultural and faith traditions is becoming much more common and perhaps even the norm. And so I think it's important as we consider the question of this week that we pay attention to those kinds of stories. Being Mennonite invariably brings us to that inevitable question. So what is Mennonite anyway? There are those both inside and beyond the church who assert that ethnic Russian Swiss culture and German language is somehow inherently connected to our Mennoniteness and to what binds us together as a body. We trace our heritage through genealogy, historical movements and migrations to gain a fuller picture of our place in the family and of our spiritual roots. Many in the global church have been helped to find their place in belonging by remembering the mission workers who brought the Anabaptist message and tracing through the missionary's genealogy to find their place on the Mennonite family tree tracing back to the 16th century. There's something wonderful about this in being able to belong and picture and place ourselves on a common family tree. I've heard this referred to as a taproot model. It does show a lot of historical and biological belonging. And so perhaps it's a valid exercise and I certainly understand because many have, well they quickly skip my history and they jump to my husband and so they can find him on the trees and I belong because he belongs because his family's on all those trees. But I as a newer Mennonite resonate much more closely with an image that I first heard John Roth from Goshen College elaborate or at least mention. John invites us to consider the rhizome as a model for explaining both what binds us together and how we're connected. I'm not sure if you're all familiar with the rhizome but a rhizome is an interconnected root system of plants and it's intertwined and intermeshed and very complex underneath the ground and from that system of roots it shoots up vertical shoots and those vertical shoots of course become different plants. These shoots can pop up anywhere actually in surprising locations quite a distance from other shoots. Above the surface these plants seem like individual separate plants but they are nurtured and sustained by a common interconnected interdependent system of roots with a single genetic makeup. I was fascinated to learn that scientists assert that these organisms can actually sense in one part of the plant what may be needed in another part of the plant and what's happening and when they do that they can actually detect that water is needed because there's less soil there and transport nutrients through the root system to where the need is greater. Amazing, amazing. Bamboo, ginger, lilies, rhubarb, that nasty stuff my husband can never get rid of. Aspen trees are all examples of rhizome organisms and the aspen tree is particularly fascinating. Its health actually depends on death. Some trees must die and when there is the death of an individual plant that releases and triggers hormones to be sent through the root system which triggers greater growth and shooting up of more sprouts and more shoots. So more trees are birthed as a result of the death and forest industry is learning that when they curb forest fires they're actually doing more damage to the preservation of these aspen trees because there's no death in the system or less death in the system and so there is even less growth. The most famous rhizome colony is a colony of 47,000 aspen trees in Utah and it's so famous it's been given a name it's called the Pando Colony. While the average age of the individual trees in this colony is 130 years the root system is estimated to be 80,000 years old. Amazing. Rhizomes strike me as a helpful image as we think about the church and as we think about what connects us, the genetic makeup we share, how history sustains and nurtures us, how we can all be unique while still being part of one organism, one theological and faith family, how parts of the church may form, adapt, grow, respond in response to the particular soil or needs and culture in which it shoots up and how we are all interdependent and feel the growth and the suffering of all parts of the body. I think it's quite an amazing image. Before we move on let's just remind ourselves some of the basics about this rhizomatic organism that uses the name Mennonite and yes who does get to determine whether we're Mennonite or not. It's a wonderful question we debate in Mennonite World Conference. The best estimate indicates about 1.7 baptized, self-identified Mennonites in the world and if we would talk about adherents and children and faith family it could easily be two and a half or three million in about 83 countries. But don't forget that just over 100 years ago, 99% of the world's Anabaptists lived in North America and Europe. Today, 26%. In Mennonite Church Canada, 20 languages give or take are used by our congregations and 40 of our 225 congregations use a language other than English as their primary worship language and quite different than you in Mennonite Church USA we in Canada have no identifiable second language that rises to the surface as our natural second language. Of the 85 newer congregations that have begun in Mennonite Church USA since 2008, I learned that about half of them are bilingual or non-English speaking. The growing edge of our denominations seems to be new immigrant groups, minority languages or new models of being the church. I really believe that if we are to see an Anabaptist expression of Christianity flourish, we need to embrace a rhizomatic understanding of our ecclesiology. I think it will be as we've seen and as we see happening around the world a bit more edgy, less homogeneous and it will be robed in a greater variety of cultural expression, language and richness. This flourishing Anabaptist rhizome will be lived out in big and small pockets of alternative communities springing up ready to be mutually accountable to one another as they live out their faith in communities that are both inwardly renewing and transformative of the society around them. For us to consider more fully the church today, I think it's informative for us to consider how Anabaptism is actually functioning around the world. Like the 80,000 year old root system of the Pando Colony of Aspen trees, which far out date the age of any particular tree, our roots include the 16th century radical reformation story. But the rhizome continues back in history to the first century and the early church story and of course beyond that. I've chosen to not prescribe what I think Anabaptism should look like in North America or globally, but rather I would like you to hear some stories and think about how it has actually been functioning. In keeping with the rhizome understanding of the church, I'm going to use three related and perhaps very visceral images, very theological concepts, the garbage pile, the compost bin and the garden. So put on your gardening gloves. Now for my U.S. friends, garbage is Canadian for trash. So when you hear garbage, no you're listening to a Canadian. One of the ways in which Anabaptism is functioning in global settings is that it is a hospitable space where experiences of betrayal, of various ecclesial and religious experiences can be expressed, exposed, critiqued and if necessary debunked and discarded onto what we might call a garbage pile. Whether we like it or not, Anabaptism is seen as a potential alternative to what is perceived to be by many inadequate ecclesial understandings of the past and thus a place where there's encouragement to dump such understandings on the garbage pile. Anabaptism often self-describes itself as a third way, a movement as radical, as an alternative, a space, as neither Catholic nor Protestant, a space to be an alternative. So when we step into this alternative space, one has the opportunity to systematically critique and reflect and yes, discard what hasn't been working or what no longer, excuse me, what no longer fits onto the garbage pile. Well, this may sound negative and at times it can be. It also serves a very positive purpose in inviting course corrections, new models, think tanks in which one can safely reflect. On the religious garbage pile, one can find understandings of the church when the church has been understood as institution or bureaucracy and the church is the fusion of religion and state. The debate in Vietnam and in Cuba today about being registered with the government or the state is very, very symptomatic of this. Should the church receive permission to operate legally or should the church have the freedom to leave that aside and worship and denounce the society's rules as they see fit? Hierarchical structures have often been dumped onto this garbage pile. South Korean Anabaptists have welcomed the opportunity to discard such hierarchical structures that are prevalent and well accepted in their own society. Patriarchal values that have been absorbed, prosperity gospel, authoritarian nature of leadership, the worship of violence as a redemptive potential, inequalities in the church. I just met with friends who live and work in Macau and they are discarding understandings of what's both prevalent in the churches around and the culture of pecking orders and there they have casino workers and former prostitutes and respected business leaders that worship as equals. Racial and gender divides. I remember touring a cathedral, a historic church in Latin America and up in the back was a section where the slaves and the blacks could be for worship. These things have been and need to be discarded on a garbage pile. Issues of wealth and poverty and educational status that gives rank in the church. And I'm sure you can think of other examples. For an Eritrean refugee in Canada, imagine the relief of being able to deposit on this religious garbage pile, the politically intertwined and intermeshed faith expression and restrictions of their home country. In Brazil, many have found it a relief to discard the expectation that you must attend church, four or five or six nights a week to be considered and viewed as a faithful Christian. They've been able to discard some of that and slowly Brazilian women who are being called into pastoral leadership have been able to reject together with their church the traditional patriarchal interpretation that has long taught that women did not have spiritual leadership gifts. In Cuba, people have swarmed to the churches after the 1992 constitutional reform that changed Cuba into a lay state. They did so in hopes that they could discard the political promises of an alternative community that had been unrealized. But then those doors revolved and the prosperity gospel and US politically infused mission with political motive has also now been discarded on the garbage pile as hopes for a different kind of faith community are aspired to. There has been much discontent and betrayal as expressions of the church are found lacking and inconsistent with the experience of a living Jesus and a Holy Spirit that gives grace and wisdom and breathes life. This can generate a very positive reform and can help strive for something better, purer and more faithful. Sometimes the failings are recognized but people feel stuck with what they aren't sure is a good system. Anabaptism has seen to function as an alternative that gives permission to reform and to set other models on the ecclesial or theological garbage pile. The compost bin, all those tomato vines. You know, when you pull in all those tomatoes at the end of the season and you have this pile of vines and they're choking out everything and that pumpkin. I did mean to cook that one into pie but it froze before that happened. Well, out they go, into the compost bin but look at how that fills up and now I have to turn it and water it and make sure it doesn't dry out. But look, there's more space in there now. It's changing, it's transforming, it's becoming compost and I'll be able to use it soon. And of course, no sooner than church structures and ideals and traditions and theological understandings have been thrown into the garbage pile, then people realize that some of those very same items are actually necessary for faith and church to exist. Some have the possibility of being redeemed as compost. So while authoritarian hierarchies maybe aren't what we think we should have in the church, the fact is that some kind of structure and leadership is necessary, albeit a different one. So leadership training, model, school, seminaries have been developed, wonderful compost. While we reject the notion of membership determined by infant baptism, we realize that our second and third and fifth generations kind of routinely get baptized in their last year of high school. Well, it seems a bit institutionalized too and maybe the compost will be a bit slower to form on that one. We reject the notion of extravagance and living and spending and so on and so we develop thrift stores and they serve well beyond ourselves. We've rejected justified violence and just war theories but we still need ways to understand, explain and work through the reality of violence in our world. And so restorative justice and mediation models, conflict resolution, training programs have all developed as part of this composting process. Attempts to jump into an alternative space immediately begins to use some of the same material that has been dumped in the past. Yeah, sometimes we recycle some of it and we review the same old issues with a new veneer but sometimes we get to compost those things and transform them into something new. It matures, it ripens, it's exposed to precious air to release the essential elements. It uses those rotten pumpkins and tomato vines to produce something that's actually nourishing and useful. So it's not a matter of making all new things but making all things new in a process that converts, re-thinks, reconceptualizes and re-imagines what could come out of the garbage dump and nourish a garden. Whether these desired outcomes can all be attributed historically, academically or intellectually to the 16th century or not, maybe it doesn't matter. The point is that this is one of the ways that anabaptism is actually functioning as a hook on which we can hang our head of desire for renewal, restoration and reconceptualizing the faith and the church. Anyone who has ever planted a garden knows, as we read, that the process is based both in science and in prayers in luck and in experience and a good measure of God's miracle. When a compost pile has been faithfully watered and turned with a good balance of brown and green to give it a good mixture, it becomes a dark loose soil that seems to see with the possibility of new life. But producing the compost is not the end result or not the end goal. It's there to serve a greater purpose, to nourish and bring strength to a garden. Think of the dozens of Facebook pictures you see in fall of proud gardeners with their platefuls of tomatoes and bowls fulls of peppers. Anybody ever posted their compost pictures? I haven't either. No one posts their compost pictures because even though we often compost, it's a process. It's a step of transformation from what was not useful into something that is life giving, that produces life. The church compost is rich with peace programs and conflict mediation programs, schools, hospitals, camps, publishers, disaster response programs, and oodles of other amazing, amazing programs. It is so rich, so ready to be used, so alive with possibility, but it needs to be taken out of the compost bin and spread over the garden to be truly effective. The Anabaptist Garden is nourished by this rich church compost. The garden is the church community, alive, interdependent, varied, using the compost in a mysterious combination with God's the creator to create a garden full of life, a living community that feeds itself and others with life giving produce. The way Anabaptism functions most effectively in the world, I believe, is ecclesial. So nourished by the compost pile, we see new life popping up around the world, new experiments in community, faith. In a poor community in Brazil, a new church has learned not only to worship and to pray and to study, but they've learned to play together and celebrate life milestones, something that had actually been thrown away by other models of church. When the schools went on strike in that neighborhood, some of the moms banded together through open the church doors every afternoon and with the skill and the love that they had welcomed all the neighborhood to come and do their homework together. Those kids did not fail that school year. They became a witnessing community who supported one another in many profound ways. In South Africa, there's been a tenacious anti-institutional approach to church and faith within some of the movements. Movements have insisted on being indigenous, birthed in their context and culture while using the fertile compost, but not the constructs of other churches and of the missionary movement. In Columbia, they have bucked every social construct in the country and opened their doors, heaven forbid, to both military and paramilitary and guerrillas as they created sanctuaries of peace. And when a movement came through the government to disarm or however you say that in English, to take the guns away from all the paramilitaries and reintegrate them into society, while we as foreigners applauded the Colombians were somewhat terrified. What would it mean for these people who had murdered at will to come into their stores and their banks and their neighborhoods and their churches? And it was the Mennonite churches, not just the rich compost of their peace institutions, but the churches that found themselves walking the agonizing road of welcoming their enemies. And I remember sitting in one small circle of a fledgling congregation in Bogota in one of the rough parts of the city, as a man who had murdered people, relatives of people in the circle, sat and told some of his story and others told their story. The pain of welcoming was amazing. But what a testimony to the power of the gospel of forgiving enemies that Jesus preached and lived. In South Korea, the garden experiment is one of egalitarianism of leadership in a culture of hierarchy, in a country of ultra-defined levels of authority, hierarchy and power. The small Jesus village church and Grace and Peace Mennonite church and other Korean churches, Anabaptist churches that are forming have planted a rhizomatic garden experiment where there is shared leadership, shared discernment, shared reading and reflecting on scripture and care and participation in each other's lives all through the week. The compost for this garden was the Korea Anabaptist Center. A test for the young Grace and Peace Mennonite church will be supporting Sangmi Lee, a relatively new member and the first South Korean Mennonite conscientious objector. When his 18 month prison sentence is complete for being a CEO, it is anticipated that he will face lifelong and widespread ostracism. The opportunity of this alternative church will be to continue to integrate and find ways to support him. In Winnipeg, it is little flowers community, a living room potluck turned church where the an incarnational approach to living among the city's marginalized and forgotten quietly sputters along. Whether discovering scripture together after a potluck of pre-packaged food or crying together after the suicide of a participant, life happens together in an attempt to be present and real with a diversity of mostly marginalized folks. In India, there is a Mennonite presence trying to overturn the power of the caste system and live as brothers and sisters, all equal and worthy before God and one another. After a recent Mennonite World Conference MCC-led workshop, the leader asked as part of the evaluation, what difference would I see in a year if I came back as a result of what we've been learning here together this week? And one young woman, note that it was a woman, because women were not considered leaders two years before this. So a woman was in this leadership seminar and she immediately raised her hand and said, come in a year and there will be no more discrimination in our church. I asked some of my global friends what they think the Anabaptist Mennonite contribution and function is today and I think their answers confirm the importance of the Ecclesial Garden nourished by rich compost. Xi Yao is a Chinese scholar like Gordon Conwell, a fervent Anabaptist who spent a year discovering Anabaptism right here at AMBS. To him, Anabaptism, quote, stands for a radically new way of living that is thoroughly revolutionary, subversive, and even scandalous. In other words, Anabaptism is counter-cultural, refusing to be domesticated by dominant culture and society. It has demonstrated its incredible courage to engage the world, face the tension with the world and challenge the world on a deeper spiritual level rather than just on political and ideological levels. And it knows how to do so with humility and love and has the tremendous ability to forge a community embodying this radical way of living. Raquel Contreras was the president of the 100,000 member Baptist Union Convention in Chile, South America. Influenced by the presence of Mennonites over a number of years, she and her executive leadership reexamined their church history because they were sensing such resonance with Anabaptism. In preparation for their 100th anniversary, they discovered that the very first churches in their convention were actually planted by Mennonites who had to leave the country and handed the fledgling congregations to the Baptist missionaries. During their anniversary celebrations, she committed to lead the denomination to rediscover. She thought this was very clever that they actually had a historic connection to Mennonites and they didn't have to plant it as something new. So they said they would rediscover their Anabaptist peace church roots and live it. Later that year in a return visit to Canada, she told her MC Canada gathered assembly that they had decided as a practical step towards being a peace church that they would eliminate gossip in all of their congregations. Randall Newdorf is a pastor of a newer congregation in Ontario that often thinks of itself as a church for people who don't fit the traditional church. Their draw to be part of the Mennonite church evolved with the resonance of the values and what they saw in Anabaptism. His view highlights very well this rhizomatic nature of the Atlesial Garden. He says what drew them is quote, the values of peace justice, community, simplicity, discipleship along with our commitment to local grassroots communities trying to follow Jesus in our local context. The values and commitment to local expressions of those values is the unifier but because of the local cultural and geographic emphasis, these will play out differently in each church. Hearing their eyes on there. Celebrating the authenticity of each of these unique communities, journeys is very important. Perhaps the sentence or the statement I treasure the most comes from Hanin. Hanin is my 11 year old friend in my congregation and I didn't ask her the heavy theological question but I did ask her about her church, my church. Hanin is 11, born to Iraqi parents of Palestinian descent. She has spent a third of her young life in Iraq, a third in a refugee camp in Syria and a third in Winnipeg where she and her family have all come to faith after Jesus appeared three times to her mother in dreams. Without knowing any of the deeper theological background or hardly even what Mennonite means, Hanin told me very simply, my church is where I feel most safe. It is definitely because of the living, breathing, loving, Jesus-centered community that has given her the ability to have that sense of security and peace and belonging. And you should see Hanin race around our church. I've tried to describe how anabaptism has been functioning globally. I think when we've seen anabaptism functioning at its best and fullest expression, it is this new garden teaming with new life sustaining produce. It requires wisdom and discernment to know which seeds from previous years get thrown into the garbage. It requires patience to tend and to encourage along the compost and then it requires that effort of the very best compost being laid on the soil that needs it most. When we use this image for the broader church, we see the rhizomatic connection of the various gardens and the plants. We see that nutrients can be transported from one part of this church organism to another. We see how compost can be used to enrich different soils. There is no one anabaptist soil or culture that is most appropriate and neither is it appropriate, I believe, to deny culture or to try and imagine a uniform Christian culture. Our global rhizome is strong and resilient. Culture is a gift of God to God's people that expresses God's multi-form imagination. We dare not deny its existence, colonize it to some sterile or impotent form. The living, breathing, dynamic, organic church, the body of Christ, is one of the most effective pedagogies of the gospel. It is God's key strategy for the transformation and redemption of our world. Praise be to God.