Can We Celebrate Life?

In preparation for Orlando, I wrote this artticle for The Mennonite's online opinions page.

Can We Celebrate Life?

by Dave Swanson

Three months ago, after a few years working as pastor of Pittsburgh Mennonite Church, the PMC community ordained me.  Ordination is a kind of baptism. The ordination liturgy reaffirms baptismal vows.  And this baptism is an immersion in a beautiful “Yes!”  My ordination was performed by people I have come to know, love, and trust—who have seen me at my soaring best and floundering worst. As the service drew near, it was all smiles.  It was being known.  It was being seen.  It was grace.

But beneath a baptism of “yes” that was about me, was a deeper and wider yes.  The people of Pittsburgh Mennonite Church and Allegheny Mennonite Conference were saying yes, not because they like my work or me, but because they have seen God’s life happen in our life together. They were saying, “God’s life happens among us when you do your work in this community.”  These friends and congregants were first hand witnesses to the life of God happening in our church fellowship and they made a connection between my work to help that happen, and the thing itself.  I am so grateful to have experienced this.  It is a kind of miracle.

I asked Isaac Villegas to preach in this service of “yes.”  I chose Isaac because I have seen and felt God moving when he ministers and does his work. I first registered this at a meeting I attended five years ago in Durham, NC.  Isaac invited me and five other congregants from Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship (CHMF) who were interested in ministry to meet with Clyde Kratz, the Conference Minister for Virginia Mennonite Conference.  Of the six of us who came, five are now MCUSA pastors, and the sixth is a hospital chaplain.  What other pastor of a church of 70 assists six people to enter church ministry in one season?  Probably none. 

In Isaac I see the Spirit at work—driving people to open themselves to God and each other and drawing people into a larger, more complicated and connected life than before.  Given the life that flourishes under Isaac’s ministry, it seems tragic that Isaac has been publicly censured by Virginia Mennonite Conference and forced to resign from the Executive Board and Council for faithfully doing his work.  But what feels like tragedy is actually irony.