 What is the relationship between community and identity? We're honored to have Melvin Layman with us today. Melvin is a pastor, a farmer, a teacher, a husband, a father, and a grandfather. We are here to talk about community and identity. So to begin, Melvin, what is community as it pertains to church? Define community. Very good question, Jerron. This is a question that has fascinated me and I've tried to define, and this will just be another shot at trying to define an idea that really is not all that easy to define. I'll just read a kind of a written definition I've given to that. The Christian community is a people group with shared values, underscore some of these important words, shared values, shared space, think geography, think where we live, shared goals, and shared commitments, all rooted in a first loyalty to Jesus, the head of the church individually and corporately. And I just want to, throughout this interview, I want those terms to be understood as community terms. They help to define a community, shared values, space, goals, commitments, but anchored in Christ. If it's a Christian community, it must be anchored there. But those four are the ones I would propose as helping to identify for at least my definition of community and a few comments I'd like to make as we go along. Good. Thank you. That is a good concise starting point. I think that many Mennonites and other Anabaptists feel a strong sense of identity with either their local community or the broader Anabaptist community. So talk about the relationship between community and identity. What helps foster the sense of identity in conjunction with their community? I can't help but comment on a book that is not an Anabaptist book, but a number of my friends said we read at school, FB occasionally dips into this book. It's Wendell Berry's stuff. I'm particularly going to reference his book, Hannah Coulter. I think it's one of the better commentaries on the connection between community and identity. Wendell's a Christian, I think, but when I read him, I kind of wonder sometimes where he's actually at, but an excellent analysis of the intersection between community and identity. I don't sell the book, so I don't make any money off of it, but if you want to read a good book that gives you kind of a, it's a novel, it's a story that gives you a good feel of the connection between community and identity. I'd recommend that one. But beyond that, in answer to the question, and according to the psychologist, and I suppose they're right on this when they say a fundamental question that every person has to answer for themselves is, who am I? I have found it interesting just to observe how people answer that question in various places. So, Sheila and I have been in Poland a number of times due to the mission we have over there. And when so, somebody asked me over there, total stranger. So, who are you? It's fascinating how I answer that question there, to who I am. I answer it differently, when I say differently, I don't mean one of them was a true representation, the other one untrue, but I answer differently. If I'm traveling in the United States and my wife and I stop at a Walmart somewhere and here there's a Mennonite couple in there and we bump into them and they ask, well, who are you? Then I identify myself differently. So, this question of who am I is a big question. You might call it the question of identity. In my other life, that is when I was young, my community was much smaller. My exposure was much less than what it is today. And it was much easier to answer who I am and the community identity. I'm from Chambersburg, I attend Strasburg Mennonite Church, I grew up on a dairy farm. I start into that kind of lingo in identifying who I am. We tend to have this strong sense of identity, probably stronger than many. I think it's deeply embedded in our culture, in our practices, which I know you're going to get to that question. I value that community identity. This is where I belong. The people who have the strongest sense of who they are are people who have been rooted in communities deeply and they know something about how they've been formed, shaped, and made and they're not reacting to it, they're not fighting that, they're living out of it. My conclusion is, or my general thought is that people who have a strong identity tend to be strong people and they have something to give. And that identity is almost always rooted deeply in a community that has nurtured them and they have not rejected that nurture. They maybe didn't adopt the entire piece, but they didn't reject it, they received it and lived out of it. That's the connection I see. Fruitfulness is adented, is connected to my identity as it has been lived out in community. You did not hear me say that's the only way one may be fruitful, but it's a powerful way for fruitfulness to emerge in a person's life. Just think of the term roots rooted, gives you capacity to bear fruit. So I'm supposing that community has something to do with shared practices too. So I'm curious if you could talk about the concrete practices that make Anabaptist churches full-orbed communities and not just religious gatherings. I think I'll approach it by just simply talking about those terms I used to begin with. So shared values, shared space, shared goals, shared commitments rooted in loyalty. So if you just took those one by one and thought about practices that are associated with them, I'm a history teacher, so I know I'm biased here. Are people have an interest in their roots historically? Not everybody, I know, but that's something pretty distinct about us. We have a distinct history. We have distinct stories and our values grow out of those. An example I would use here that most of us can easily relate to. So all across the Anabaptist communities, the story of Dirk Willems is told repeatedly over and over. Every generation tells the next generation that. I don't think it's news to you that the Anabaptist community is probably quite unique in their non-resistant position, some may call it that or unconditional love or refusal to take up arms at least. That's a unique value we hold. Well, what's the connection? Why? How come? I say it's a really concrete practice to say I'm not going off to the military. I'm going to try very hard to love my neighbor and my enemy. That's a concrete practice that grows out of a very strong value. That value is rooted in how we feel, like our commitment to Jesus Christ, and we carry that value forward in stories. So it's a concrete value based in scripture, and I'm willing to defend that. In addition to that, we've created stories around it so that it gets carried forward from one generation to the next. Hence, I reference the Dirk Willem's story, which perhaps not everybody who's listening to us will know that story, but I'd invite them to at least take a look at it. We'll link to it. There's a very concrete practice related to values. There are many like that that I could reference. It relates to the next term I've used in that space. This is unique, I think, to Mennonites. I'm not sure, and I smile here because I know, again, I have a penchant for this type of thing, and our people are moving away from it. I understand. It's space, geography, so that goes right directly to our interest in community. Your first question, so what is community? Well, part of it is geography. Those who know our history know that we almost all were farmers, not all that far back, and lived farm to farm. My best friend, to this day, is likely my best friend because he grew up in the same church, and he grew up on the farm next door, and we went swimming together, and we fished together, and we got into a little trouble off and on together as well. Why did all of that happen? Well, we lived right next door to each other. I could easily go off on a rant here, and I have to be careful about this, because I'd be misunderstood, but I might as well just sort of put it out there. I know there are two sides to this coin of geographical space and community, and I'm arguing to say that, well, you've got to live in some kind of close proximity to each other, and if you really want to experience what I think is a fullness of the fellowship of the believers. You did not hear me say it can't be experienced otherwise, but there's a richness that is associated with that. Jesus taught us to go and preach to all nations, and we picked up on that, I think, in good ways. We've gone to other areas of the world, spread out, you might say, and we've been confronted with this difficulty of, well, what happens when you're loosened out of your community and you're dumped into another culture entirely, and then what? I don't think we should abandon that by any means, and I want to be very clear on that. Part of the reason for strong community is to give you a capacity then to spread your wings that go elsewhere, but I'm arguing that as we have gotten so interested in this and that and the other thing, if we neglect this core community that actually needs the space, the church house. Interestingly, my grandfather refused to call the building we gathered in the church. He called it the meeting house. He said, Melvin, that place up there where we gather is not the church. The church is the people. The meeting house is where we meet, but you know how important meeting houses have been to us? It's like, well, we need a place that we can actually gather together physically and pray together and worship together. I can't help but touch on the COVID issue. We immediately felt that the impact of not meeting on a regular basis of talking space and uniqueness and what we care about and the values associated with it. While there it was, we pastors immediately began to feel uneasy. It's like, what? We're not going to meet together for whatever's worth. Zoom doesn't cut it. It's not geographic community. Geographic community is different than the community of social media. Here again, we could get off onto a rant, but we'll just let it lay there for whatever's worth. That's not going to do. The social media will not produce what I'm talking about. So concrete practice of living in close community, of providing the meeting places where we actually gather, we make it a point to fellowship with each other in the flesh is, I think, very important. A concrete practice among us is that if we confront some difficulty or problem or even opportunity, we're committed to each other in such a fashion that we will bring whatever issues we have, whether they be positive issues or negative issues, we will bring them to the brothers, to the congregation, the brothers and the sisters to gather body, and at the end of the day, we will submit to the gathered body. In my mind, this has been a unique way for us to solve our differences, to try to figure out what direction we're going, to just whatever we confront. That's kind of at the bottom of it. It's saying, look, we believe that God can, through the congregation, through the gathered body of believers, actually give us concrete direction about what we ought to be doing. Hence, we put a fair amount of confidence in the Holy Spirit moving in the group to help me solve my issues, to help the group solve their issues. The most important point is that at the end of the day, when we have agreed that this is the direction we're going or this is what the plan is, then we are all committed to that and we will all submit to it. I know that word is not well-liked, but that's the general idea. The reason I raise that issue specifically is we forever are wanting to get off onto the specifics, whether it be some form of conservative dress, what kind of building are we going to build, or how much money are we allowed to spend on cars, or how do we define modesty? We can get off on those pieces and hammer them to death, and I don't know, just get into endless disputes. But they would not be endless disputes if we stuck with that original concept that I'm in this community, I'm in this brotherhood, I've committed to this brotherhood, unless they just derail from what God has said in his word, and so on. I'm committed, I will submit myself to the decisions the brothers make. Now, you're going to hear me return to that point here a couple of times in some of these questions because it is unique, I think, and the concrete practice of trying to live that out under the worship of Christ is not an easy thing to do, but I'm committed to it personally and hope to be a part of a congregation that is committed to that. And I just want to underscore yet that the last point I had made on the community was that never forgetting that our first loyalty is to Jesus Christ and to his headship over us. And so just setting that in there to we're not talking about an unconditional submission to a brotherhood that whatever they say I'll do, but as the brotherhood is operating under the worship of Christ, coming together and making specific decisions, my heart goes with him. Well, that's very good. Thank you so much for engaging with these questions that we've presented. Like you've alluded to, we will be recording several episodes around this theme, this topic of community and culture. We'll end this episode here, but come back in the coming weeks and months and there will be several more episodes with Melvin to develop these ideas further. Thank you for joining us for this episode, and thanks to our donors and partners for making this possible. For more episodes, please subscribe or visit our website at anabaptistperspectives.org. You can also leave a comment or review to help more people find our content.