News Release
June 11, 2012
Collegeville, MN (BRIDGEFOLK) – As Bridgefolk meets for its 11th annual conference in July, the grassroots movement for dialogue and sharing between Mennonites and Roman Catholics will mark its hopes for a second decade by welcoming Darrin Snyder Belousek of Lima, Ohio, as its new executive director.
Snyder Belousek will replace long-time director and Bridgefolk co-founder Gerald Schlabach of St. Paul, Minnesota. Schlabach has been encouraging fellow Bridgefolk leaders to begin nurturing a new generation of leaders that brings fresh insights into the difficult and changing church scene that is challenging all Christian traditions.
A member of the Bridgefolk Board for six years, Snyder Belousek agrees. One of his hopes for a second decade of Bridgefolk, he says, is to “solidify what’s been accomplished in the first decade and put in place ways of handing that work over into the stewardship of a ‘next generation’ of leaders.”
Snyder Belousek has been actively engaged in Bridgefolk since its first summer conference in 2002. He has made significant contributions to the movement as a board member, as a presenter at summer conferences, and as writer. At the local level, he served as coordinator of the Michiana Bridgefolk group from 2005-2008 and also as one of the planners of the Mennonite Catholic Theological Colloquium, which met at Notre Dame in 2007.
A Mennonite, Snyder Belousek received his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame in 1998. He is the author of a major new treatment on the Christian doctrine of atonement entitled Atonement, Justice and Peace: The Message of the Cross and the Mission of the Church. In an article in the December 2011 issue of The Mennonite entitled “Surprised by Joy” he shared how his encounter with Catholics at Notre Dame led him back to Christianity and into the Mennonite Church.
Studying philosophy at Notre Dame was for him a “self-chosen exile” from the church of his “fundamentalist upbringing,” wrote Snyder Belousek, and the Catholic Church that surrounded him there was “the last place I would ever have expected to receive grace and find salvation.”
But when a fellow student invited him to join a regular lunch discussion, “I soon realized these were not only people I wanted to know but were the friends I needed. They had what I was longing for—faith and hope—and something more besides, joy. Yet they were Catholics, devout Catholics. Wasn’t Catholicism legalistic and graceless? How could they be both faithful Catholics and joyful people?”
Following an unexpected experience one Sunday morning in which “light suffused the room, filling my heart and my head,” Snyder Belousek began to attend Kern Road Mennonite Church in South Bend, Indiana. But he has always remained grateful to his Catholic friends: “In a moment, I was sure that God was near and love was real, for I had seen both through my friends. Fear fled. And then, unsought and unexpected, joy flooded my soul.”
Snyder Belousek’s selection as the next director of Bridgefolk came upon the recommendation of a search committee of Bridgefolk Board members earlier this year. The committee also hopes to name a new Bridgefolk coordinator within a few months, who will assist with organizational administration. Bridgefolk is now inviting applications for this part-time position.
Bridgefolk co-chair Marlene Kropf is serving on the search committee. “We have valued Darrin’s thoughtful contributions to our work on the board,” she notes. “We are especially impressed with his vision for the second decade of Bridgefolk – solidifying what we have accomplished in our first decade, cultivating a new generation of leaders, making the fruits of Bridgefolk discussions and discernment more widely available in both church and academy, and putting the Bridgefolk vision of sacramental life and active peacemaking into concrete practice.”
Kropf also expresses gratitude for Schlabach’s years of service to the movement: “Bridgefolk is deeply indebted to Gerald Schlabach for his energy and tenacity as the first executive director of Bridgefolk. As a fledgling movement, Bridgefolk would not have come to be without his vision and courageous imagination. With a breadth of skills, Gerald kept the movement on course, whether he was planning a conference, handling registration details, writing theological reflections, developing board agendas, or forging friendships among Catholics and Mennonites.”
Both Snyder Belousek and Schlabach find perspective in an observation by spiritual writer Richard Foster that we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in one year but underestimate what we can accomplish in ten years. “As Bridgefolk has explored uncharted territory, we have often wondered where God is leading us,” says Schlabach, “but we have always known that we should ‘proceed in friendship.’ I am confident that as Darrin gives leadership to Bridgefolk in that same spirit, God will have new surprises for us.”