Rev. Dr Martin Junge addresses the Mennonite World Conference, saying the forgiveness of Mennonites brought Lutherans and Mennonites closer together to serve the world. Photo: Jon Carlson for Mennonite World Conference
"Transforming power of reconciliation”
HARRISBURG, United States/ GENEVA, 24 July 2015 (LWI) - Five years after Lutherans asked Mennonites to forgive violence against their ancestors, The Lutheran World Federation (LWF) General Secretary Rev. Dr Martin Junge told the Mennonite World Conference (MWC) their forgiveness brought Lutherans and Mennonites closer together to serve the world.
Through the Mennonite action at the LWF Assembly in 2010, the LWF apologized for Lutheran persecution of Anabaptists in the 16th century, the ignorance towards these actions till the present day and for inappropriate and hurtful portraits of Anabaptists by Lutheran authors. The Assembly prayed for healing of memories and reconciliation between Lutherans and Mennonites. That action and the subsequent forgiveness by the MWC also brought new energy into the relations between Lutherans and Mennonites, Junge said.
“Your forgiveness has helped us to continue engaging in much deeper conversation about issues we still see differently, differences, however, that do not prevent us from seeking closer witness to the Triune God,” he said.
A church to serve the neighbor
In a greeting to the Mennonite World Conference Assembly on 23 July (local time) the LWF General Secretary also recalled the financial contribution that Mennonites offered to support LWF’s services in the Dadaab refugee camp in Keyna, which at the time was home to half a million refugees from Somalia.This contribution was made only a year after the Mennonite Action at the Assembly in Stuttgart.
“We understood as never before that reconciliation among Christian Communions will always want to transcend the realm of the church and become a telling story to people suffering, deprived from life in abundance,” Junge said, thanking the Mennonite Central Committee for “both that contribution for the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, and for that lesson, which continues to inspire us, also in view of our relations with other Christian World Communions”.
He received a standing ovation for his speech.
Catholicity and diversity
Speaking at the General Council of MWC, meeting at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on 20 July, Junge reflected on LWF’s experience of being a communion of churches that emphasizes both catholicity and diversity.
He emphasized that communions of churches ought to follow God’s call for unity, and connect Christ’s universal message of salvation to local contexts.
Junge pointed to the experience of the apostles who gathered lovingly and in prayer to discern about the diversity they were experiencing in those early years of being the church. “. To be the church in apostolic tradition is to stick both to the faith of the apostles, and to the ways the apostles related to each other on the basis of this faith, even in difficult times,” Junge added. “To be the church in apostolic tradition is to care about both: the truth of faith, and the unity of the church”.
Relationship as a gift and a task
He said that for its part LWF comes together as a communion of 145 churches worldwide not as a matter of strategy but because God calls them together. Their relationship is a gift of God.
“As such, communion relationships demand a special attention, a special accountability and a special responsibility. All this calls for mutuality both in relationships and in the way this ownership is expressed,” said Junge. “Communion relationships call for creativity, theological coherence, patience and love as member churches discover how to express God’s call for them, and how they should act towards each other”.
Member churches continue to be called to witness in their local contexts, serving people who need justice, healing and reconciliation. “They offer the universal message of God’s love for the world and of God’s works of salvation in Jesus Christ to their specific reality,” Junge said.
Speaking from the LWF process, Junge shared the experience that catholicity and contextuality or diversity must be held together even though they can sometimes be in tension. “That is then the gift and the task of being churches in communion relationships. It is about understanding the need of, and giving the space to each member church to be the church in its context, thereby avoiding an alienating hegemony on each other; and it is to understand the need of each member church to connect to its catholicity, thereby avoiding its cultural captivity or absolutism,” Junge added.
