Bridgefolk is a movement of sacramentally-minded Mennonites and peace-minded Roman Catholics who come together to celebrate each other's traditions, explore each other's practices, and honor each other's contribution to the mission of Christ's Church.
One of the major challenges that ecumenical dialogue between estranged Christian churches always faces is the question of eucharistic intercommunion: Can they share the Lord’s Supper, or Table of the Lord, or Eucharist, as varying traditions call it?
After struggling with this question for nearly ten years, the board of Bridgefolk — the grassroots organization for dialogue between Mennonites and Roman Catholics — decided that they could not resolve it. There were simply too many ecclesial and liturgical differences. They would need to explore a different approach in order to celebrate, liturgically, the measure of unity and communion that Bridgefolk participants were experiencing when they came together.
Footwashing service at Bridgefolk 2011.
As a result, the Bridgefolk board charged Professor Mary Schertz of the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary and Abbot John Klassen OSB of Saint John’s Abbey with the task of creating a liturgical framework for footwashing. Now, after practicing this rite in its annual conferences for nearly 15 years, Bridgefolk is making it available to all Christians on its webpage, at www.bridgefolk.net/rite-of-footwashing, along with background materials.
As is well known, in John’s Gospel, chapter 13, where one would expect to find an account of Jesus handing on the Eucharist to his disciples, instead he washes their feet in a profound act of service and humility. Since deepening ecumenical relationships involve precisely those commitments, and since John’s Gospel provides a precedent, a rite of footwashing seemed to offer an alternative expression of communion where the sharing of Eucharist is not yet canonically allowed.
In response, Schertz and Klassen created a full liturgy that draws on both Mennonite and Catholic traditions. It includes a formal opening with the sign of the cross, a formal liturgical greeting (from Saint Paul), a specially crafted opening prayer, followed by a Liturgy of the Word (first reading, responsorial psalm, Gospel, and homily). They also composed a major prayer modeled after a eucharistic prayer which includes an institution account, an epiclesis, and anamnesis. After this prayer, the invitation to the sacrament of footwashing follows. The rite concludes with a sign of peace, intercessions, a concluding prayer, and an invitation to an agape meal.
Schertz and Klassen likewise structured an agape meal with formal prayers and scripture that echoes eucharistic language from the early Christian centuries (Didache, chapters 9 and 10). The liturgy opens to a simple meal shared by all participants. A variety of hymns and chants from both Mennonite and Catholic traditions can surround these elements, and a menu of possible scripture readings is available for different situations.
“Bridgefolk has found that this foot washing-agape rite has served us well as a body,” notes Klassen, “because we have freedom to choose preachers and presiders, men or women, from either tradition. The celebration of this rite has become the high point of our conferences each year because it embodies our unity in the mission of Jesus Christ.”
Klassen also notes that the experience of taking an existing rite and shaping it for Bridgefolk’s specific purposes has brought the group to a fundamental insight about the work of mutual exchange. “In formal ecumenical dialogues, there tends to be little formal prayer and liturgical experience because usually those very elements are contested, and adequate ecumenical agreement does not yet exist to practice them. As Bridgefolk, we found it essential to create and shape some existing liturgical experiences to help us celebrate our being together.”
This year Mennonites are marking 500 years since the birth of the Anabaptist movement in January 1525 in Zurich. Within two years, some of those who had been “re-baptized” were martyred. We know the period that followed as a time of persecution and martyrdom, in which Anabaptists were killed by both Reformers and Catholics.
Thankfully, relations grew less violent, but even 50 years ago, recognizing each other as Christians was often a challenge. Now, there is much more understanding and cooperation between their descendants.
A good example is in Winnipeg’s North End, where a small Mennonite congregation is renting space from the St. Kateri Tekakwitha Indigenous Church, (or Aboriginal Catholic parish), through a history that involves cooperation with a Lutheran church as well.
The World Conference on Faith and Order in 2025 (Alexandria, Egypt) will mark the 1700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea under the theme “Where Now for Visible Unity?” International ecclesial dialogues seeking ecumenical convergence as a step towards visible unity have generally focused on issues of a doctrinal nature, paying little attention to the role of “experience” and, more specifically, “experiences of unity” in and between churches.
Larry Miller, former Secretary of Global Christian Forum and General Secretary of Mennonite World Conference.
Is this pattern beginning to change, thanks in particular to the globalization and the “pentecostalization” of the churches, as well as initiatives for ecclesial “reconciliation”?
In this Figel Event on Ecumenical Dialogue, Rev. Dr. Larry Miller, first full-time Secretary of the Global Christian Forum, and former General Secretary of the Mennonite World Conference, will receive the Consortium’s Ecumenism Award for 2024. Dr. Miller will address how experience and reconciliation between the churches is reshaping our understanding of Christian unity. He will draw upon responses to the Faith and Order Commission’s text “The Church: Towards a Common Vision,” conversations in the annual meeting of the Conference of Secretaries of Christian World Communions, encounters in the life of the Global Christian Forum, and the results of the international Lutheran-Mennonite reconciliation process.
PRESS RELEASE RE: Bridgefolk 2022 conference 21-24 July 2022
Collegeville, MN (BRIDGEFOLK) – Participants in the Bridgefolk movement for dialogue and greater unity between Mennonites and Roman Catholics have long made the phrase, “Proceed through friendship,” their byword.
Celebrating their 20th annual conference under the theme, “Standing at the Crossroads,” as they met at Saint John’s Abbey in Minnesota July 21-24, Bridgefolk found reason to hope that the steady relationship building that is basic to its “charism” or gift might also help their churches face a challenge that their traditions share. Both are at a “crossroads,” after all, reminiscent of the one where the prophet Jeremiah told Israel to “ask for the ancient paths” and walk “the good way.” The challenge is to find ways to repent and repair the legacy of harm done to indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States through historic removal, European settlement, and misguided mission efforts.
How to seek just peace through racial justice and indigenous/settler encounter has been an ongoing theme in recent Bridgefolk conferences. This year’s theme proved particularly timely when the Vatican announced that Pope Francis would take an apology just days after Bridgefolk’s conference to the Metis, Inuit, and First Nations peoples of Canada for the “deplorable” abuses they suffered in Canada’s Catholic-run residential schools from the late 1800s until as late as 1990.
Though church collaboration with governments in running residential or boarding schools did not last as long in the United States as in Canada, churches south of the border – including Mennonite ones – also face the legacy of their own mission efforts. Rather than sharing the Christian message as an uncoerced invitation consistent with host cultures, too often churches have joined in colonializing efforts to assimilate native peoples and strip children of their cultures and languages. Furthermore, Mennonites whose ancestors immigrated to the U.S. and Canada have begun to grapple with the fact that policies of Indian removal made possible their very presence on the continent, even if those ancestors participated unwittingly.
Introducing these challenges, Sister Pat Kennedy OSB of Saint Benedict’s Monastery and Jaime Arsenault, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the White Earth Nation in northern Minnesota, shared the story of their communities’ collaborative project to reckon with their history. From 1878-1945 the Sisters of Saint Benedict operated schools on three sites, including the monastery itself, along with the White Earth and Red Lake Reservations. The Sisters have officially apologized for their complicity in the boarding school program, but Kennedy and Arsenault both insisted that this can only be a beginning.
Jaime Arsenault, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the White Earth Nation
“My work on historical preservation for White Earth is future-oriented,” noted Arsenault, while Kennedy underscored that her community must now work to build relationships of trust with White Earth and Red Lake. Sharing long-forgotten documents and photos from monastic archives offers one opportunity for healing to indigenous descendants. Artifacts are still being discovered among the archives, and even if they were originally given to the community as gifts, the community is working with Arsenault to return them to families and communities where they will be treasured far more for their material and spiritual connection with ancestors.
Boarding schools and forced assimilation were part of a much larger set of policies aiming to strip indigenous communities not only of their culture, insisted Arsenault, but of their resource-rich lands. In the following session, Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation stated the implication bluntly: “For white congregations there is no pain-free path forward in this. Reconciliation will cost you something. It should cost you something because it cost me everything.”
In what may be the most revolutionary text in the New Testament, Jacobs explained, Jesus told his followers that making repair when someone has a grievance against them is even more important than “bringing your gift to the altar” in worship (Matt. 5:23-24). Jacobs called on every congregation in every denomination that was complicit in boarding schools “at the very least” to “commit a significant amount of your church budget to indigenous language and cultural reclamation projects” not simply as charity but as something “you wrestle with at every quarterly business meeting” just like salary obligations and light bills.
Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation
Jacobs also called on congregations and parishes to assess the stories that their buildings tell through their iconography, flags, symbols, stained glass windows, and especially their portrayals of Jesus. “Does he look like a good old-fashioned Swede? Or might I find a Jesus with brown skin?”
Jacob’s challenge was paired with a presentation by Dr. Jeremy Bergen of Conrad Grebel University College in Ontario in a session that asked, “How Does a Tradition Repent?” With expertise on the theology of church apologies, Bergen is regularly called upon to comment on the residential-school scandal in Canada and the Catholic Church’s response. But he also notes ways that the stories of his Mennonite ancestors’ flight as refugees from war and persecution in Europe has long blinded Mennonites to the realities and histories of the indigenous people unto whose ancestral lands they settled.
That churches have begun to make official apologies both to one another for past persecutions and mutual recrimination, as well as to the descendants of enslaved and displaced peoples, said Bergen, is a noteworthy historical development and sign of the Holy Spirit’s work – but never sufficient. Tests of whether apologies are authentic and appropriate include: Are they vague or do they confess specific sins? Do they use a request for forgiveness as a way to control relationships or do they invite those receiving the apology to move toward reconciliation at their own pace, on their own terms? Do they merely seek to alleviate a sense of guilt, or do they contribute to a longer process of action and repair?
Dr. Jeremy Bergen, Conrad Grebel University College, Ontario
Perhaps the hardest task of repair for white settlers and their descendants is to actually return stolen land or the resources indigenous communities need to recover land. “It may be unrealistic to return all the land,” noted John Stoesz in a final session on the topic of repairing the legacy of harm to indigenous peoples, “but it is unjust to return none.”
Erica Littlewolf, Indigenous Visioning Circle Program Coordinator, Mennonite Central Committee-Central States, and a member of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, elaborated on that legacy of harm and injustice. The Doctrine of Discovery by which Europeans rationalized their displacement of indigenous people from the American continents can seem “cerebral” at first but its consequences continue to impact her people and their very sense of identity. “If you fail to see the roots of social ills, you will always blame the oppressed for their oppression.”
Repairing 500-year wrongs may seem daunting, but as an advocate for land recovery, Stoesz has practiced what he preaches. When his family sold its farm near Mountain Lake, Minnesota, he turned over half of his share in the proceeds to the Makoce Ikikupe organization, which seeks to reconnect Dakota people to the homeland from which they were expelled in Minnesota in the 19th century. His personal story and his elaboration of the work Makoce Ikikupe is doing to return Dakota land, revitalize Dakota culture, and renew the natural environment, underscored that the work of repair really is possible.
More than possible, the work of repair is joyful when it is grounded in deepening friendship, suggested various speakers. Speaking warmly of her relationships with the Sisters of St. Benedict to whom she often brings wild rice or sunflowers, Arsenault told of her hope to return a hundred-plus-year-old pair of moccasins with a floral design to a family she knows in the White Earth community. “No matter how difficult things get, there will be moments like that peppered throughout this experience – I guarantee you. How interesting that I brought flowers to the sisters to bring joy and that flowers might return to equally bring joy back.”
Whether “reconciliation” is the right word for this work was a question that some speakers at the conference took up, since indigenous people see no time of right relationship between their ancestors and Europeans in the past to which they can return. When those who have benefited from past wrongs are willing to live with their discomfort, relinquish their need for control, and do what they can to repair past wrongs in tangible ways, however, new and deeper relationship can bring healing for all.
Friendship itself may help us navigate a crossroads, after all. Bracketing the 2022 Bridgefolk conference were two sessions commemorating the movement’s history and anticipating further work, and yet key themes and lessons carried through. The progress that Catholics and Mennonites in Bridgefolk have made by “proceeding through friendship,” noted Bridgefolk co-founder Marlene Kropf, may seem slow but is real. Even when our unity is incomplete, noted Bridgefolk co-chair Abbot John Klassen, new rituals like annual hymnsings and footwashing celebrate our work and relationships so far. Surely, they agreed, these Bridgefolk gifts have something to offer to other dialogues and processes of healing.
The 19th annual Bridgefolk conference was held August 13–14, 2021, via Zoom. The conference theme was Called Together to Face Racial Injustice: Starting Close In. Links to recordings of sessions have now been added to the conference page: https://www.bridgefolk.net/conferences.
