The Bridgefolk Movement in Ecumenical Context

Gerald W. Schlabach

Bridgefolk is a semi-formal movement of Mennonites and Roman Catholics who are indebted to, interested in, or exploring one another's traditions. Some of us search for better ways to embody a commitment to both traditions. All share a vision for making Anabaptist-Mennonite practices of discipleship, peaceableness, and lay participation more accessible to Roman Catholics, while sustaining those practices by reconnecting them to their spiritual, liturgical and sacramental roots in the Catholic tradition.

Bridgefolk leaders are undoubtedly among the keenest and most supportive observers of the first bilateral ecumenical dialogue between Mennonites and Catholics that began in 1998 between representatives of the Vatican's Pontifical Commission for the Promotion of Christian Unity and of the Mennonite World Conference (MWC). But they are also convinced that official conversations and potential negotiations toward greater Christian unity cannot bear fruit without grassroots sharing and work. That is particularly true where a great strength of one tradition is its long institutional continuity with Christianity's historical roots, while a great strength of the other is voluntary participation by every new generation at Christianity's sociological grassroots.

Even as the ecumenical movement of the past century has born fruit it has exposed its own limitations. Formal ecumenical dialogue has helped Christians become increasingly comfortable collaborating with one another at many levels, but it has only been one factor. Meanwhile, vast stretches of the Christian community are oblivious or even hostile to what remains largely a project of mainstream churches tracing from the magisterial and Catholic reformations of the 16^th century. Both in the U.S. and globally, many of the fastest-growing Christian communities are evangelical and pentecostal groups with affinities to the "free church" tradition that may be traced through the 16^th-century radical reformation. When ecumenical conversation means formal top-down bilateral dialogue between representatives of major blocks of a divided Christendom, the untidy bottom-up ecclesiology that “free church” communities bring to the ecumenical table sometimes keeps them from ever reaching the table.

Just as Anabaptist-Mennonite churches have often served to represent the radical reformation, their role in ecumenical affairs could be paradigmatic here too. Certainly the international MWC-Vatican dialogue is one sign of continuing ecumenical commitment and its widening scope. Nonetheless, such high-level dialogue is scarcely imaginable and will hardly be promising apart from community based-initiatives such as:

· grassroots collaboration by Mennonites and Catholics in peace and justice work

· a growing liturgical sensibility and more frequent eucharistic practice in some Mennonite churches

· new programs in spirituality and spiritual formation

· Mennonite participation in Catholic retreat centers

· efforts to place Anabaptist history and theology in a broader and more catholic context

· appropriation of Mennonite peace theology by Catholics theologians and ethicists

For the international dialogue to bear fruit, it will need to attend not simply to doctrinal or structural questions but to the grassroots dynamic that is already bringing Mennonites and Catholics into unity in some ways, yet remains a cultural barrier or can even seem threatening in other ways.

Fortunately a conceptual category exists that already bridges the looser ecclesiological tradition of Mennonites and the more structured ecclesiological tradition of Catholicism – what Vatican officials favorably refer to as "ecclesial movements." The category is not well known (even among Catholics, but especially in the U.S.) and its implications have largely gone unnoticed. The Vatican has encouraged ecclesial movements such as Sant’Egidio and Focolare even though their membership is predominately but not solely Roman Catholic, and their leadership is lay-oriented rather than clerical. In order both to fulfill a pastoral responsibility and to seize a neglected ecumenical opportunity, Bridgefolk seeks to explore and perhaps move into the space that the category of ecclesial movement supplies – a common space between high-church and low-church Christianity.

Theologians and historians have already noticed ways in which Anabaptist-Mennonites may share more with Roman Catholics than Protestant Reformers – the continued integration of faith and works, conceptions of salvation more communal than individualistic, ecclesiologies that resist territorial definition and underscore global or trans-national understandings of the Church, and spiritualities of sanctification and discipleship with roots that intertwine through centuries of monastic practice. On the contemporary scene, the growth and recognition of Catholic pacifism as well as more explicit Catholic commitment to a "consistent ethic of life" further strengthen these linkages.

Meanwhile, all Christians find themselves meeting in the common struggle to identify their calling and chart their witness within those disorienting phenomena alternately named post-modern, post-Christian and post-Christendom. Here, ancient traditions are sometimes spurned, sometimes celebrated, but often trivialized either way. Amid this challenge, the Bridgefolk initiative holds forth promise to all Christians, not just Mennonites and Catholics. If it is able to develop the model of an ecclesial movement that bridges divided traditions, it could suggest ways to move toward greater Christian unity and witness while avoiding two false and opposite solutions: By moving toward not away from the Roman Catholic magisterium, it should avoid any superficial combining of traditions and spiritualities known as "cafeteria religion." By doing so through grassroots not top-down initiatives it should avoid such habits as remain from the imposition of unity known as "Constantinianism."

July 2001