An Anabaptist View of Church - Val Yoder - Anabaptist Perspectives Ep. 106

Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I’m here with Val Yoder. You’re from northern Minnesota, and have been quite involved in a church up there. I think it was a church plant back in the day. You’ve also been involved with teaching people as far as missions and family and church and how these things work. One of the things I’d like to discuss today is what is our position on church as conservative Anabaptists? Like how do we in the Anabaptist worldview I guess you could say do church together? What does that look like? I think it goes back to our view of salvation to begin with. We see the necessity, and the joy, the blessing of our record in heaven being cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ, and so the forgiveness that He offers in our time of repentance and becoming a believer in salvation - it’s a wonderful reality to know that the record book of heaven is clean, and His forgiveness is so lavish that Paul anticipated us saying, well, we can sin freely then. He forgives so freely.

Why don’t we just sin freely? And then he follows that by saying, God forbid. How can we who are no longer sinners continue to sin? So that’s a reality that I think most of the Christian church has a concept of, and enjoys, and is blessed by that, but I think one of the things that’s often missing is the whole thing of how we submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and that we learn to live out our Christian experience in the context of people. We’re not islands to ourselves, and God designed that we would learn how to love the unlovely, to work with those who are more cranky, or whatever, and we do that in the context of people, and I don’t pick and choose who I’m going to be kind to. I have something within me because of Christ that reaches out to anyone. I don’t create my own church. I’m not the author of the church. God tells us in 1 Corinthians 12 that He places us in the church as He designed us to be, and He specifically places us there, and so He’s placed me along with other people, and those people are going to be used by God to tweak my understanding of what it means to be a believer, and to cleanse my soul of wrong responses toward people.

I see that as being a part of submitting 03:13 - to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and it’s done in practical relationships with other people around me, and so God places those people in my church that will bless me, and sometimes they will be frustrating to me, and yet those different things are what help develop my spiritual walk. It’s more than just something that happens in the record books of heaven. It’s something that happens within me - the changing that happens within me, and the pressure for that change comes with relationships with His bride - with the people of the church. So, yeah, I feel like we have - I have so much to learn in my Christian experience that I would not learn as an island Christian, or as someone who is out by themselves choosing who they’re going to relate to. I need to learn how to relate to those that God has chosen, and placed beside me in the church. It’s the idea of community I guess.

A group working together even when it’s not like you said 04:21 - super easy sometimes I guess. Is that a good way of thinking about it? That’s right. Yes. In fact I think some of the best development spiritually that we can experience is when we are in times of testing. When everybody believes the same way I do, I’m not necessary, or they’re not necessary, but it’s when we’re struggling to see each other’s perspectives, and to love while we’re speaking the truth to each other, and continuing that tension of loving and speaking truth. God doesn’t want us to fall off on one side, and just love everybody no matter how the truth is violated, nor does He want us to fall off the other side where we’re so strong on truth that we don’t care about people.

05:08 - It’s a constant sense of tension that can happen as I learn how to love those who would understand something a little bit differently. I’m not talking about heresy as such. I’m talking about varieties of understandings of how to live out a certain Christian principle. Well, and that goes really well into the next question because I’m guessing people that watch this will think, oh yeah, like Amish or conservative Mennonite - those people that stand out distinctly in the way they apply things. Like you were saying there is a fair amount of variety within that as well. So how does our view of church - I guess you could say our world view of church - as Anabaptists contribute to our distinctive culture? The worldview of Anabaptism is distinctive in that we would understand that our salvation is two-pronged in a sense.

It’s our relationship with the Lord, 06:12 - the Bridegroom, and our relationship with the bride of which we are a part, but we’re not the only part of the bride. That’s a multifaceted, multicultural group of people that God has called out, and so our Christianity isn’t only as it relates to the King, but it’s also as it relates to the Kingdom - the people of the King. First of all it’s initiated by our relationship with Jesus, and yet as personal, and as wonderful, and as distinctive as that is, it doesn’t stop there. It’s a relationship that also involves other people, and that’s why when Jesus was praying or gave us the Lord’s prayer, He talks about His Kingdom. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth. And so it’s a group of people. It’s not just one individual, and I think much of our Christianity in the West has focused on personal individual experience which is important, but that’s always integrated into a Kingdom.

It’s integrated into 07:31 - (and the word we use would be….) the church. Now the New Testament uses both of those. Kingdom. And Paul talked more about the church. Jesus talked about Kingdom, but I think that’s the same group of people that it’s talking about, and so we’re learning to relate to the Kingdom as we relate to the King, so I see that as being somewhat distinctive. There’s more people today within the broader Christian church who are beginning to talk about that, and I’m glad to hear that. I think there’s a growing awareness that our walk with the Lord is involving other people as well. We don’t live this thing solo, so that’s a good movement, but I think the Anabaptists are the ones who caught that primarily.

Back in Martin Luther’s 08:19 - day, he did a tremendous job of kind of breaking this works religion that had been developing for about 1200 years, but the weak side of what he brought was that he had this idea of faith only, and that it only relates to Christ rather than the body of believers. He admitted in his own anguish toward the end of his life that those who were under grace were less principled than those who were under the papacy, and so he was seeing something was going wrong here. Something wasn’t fitting the way it should be, and I think that’s where the Anabaptist movement attempted to bring a proper understanding of how Christ is going to transform us, and we’re going to relate to people differently than just having this thing with the Lord. We’re going to also relate to people so much so that some of the neighbors to the Anabaptists would say, oh, this guy’s become an Anabaptist because he’s no longer beating his wife. You know that had to be the sign that this guy was an Anabaptist because it changed the way he related to the people around him.

I think that’s the root of salvation - that 09:49 - it changes the way we relate to the Lord, and it changes the way we relate to those around us. Yeah, well, and that fits really well with where I want to go next, and that is how is Anabaptism distinctly different from Western protestant thought, or the catholic system as well. I think historians have called it kind of the third option of the reformation cause you have the protestants, catholics. The Mennonites, or the Anabaptists were different from both. Explain that a little. The catholic church had a fairly strong authoritative line from God to the Pope to the monsignors, and on down through the priests, the archbishops, the bishops, and the local priests, and so the layman kind of at the bottom of this hierarchy if he wanted to get word from God, it kind of went up through the structure to get there.

They would come for mass on 10:47 - Saturday or Sunday at the end of the week, and they would ask forgiveness of the priest, and the priest then would resolve their problem, so that was the structure. Well, along came the reformers, and they said that there’s something wrong with this system especially as they began selling indulgences, and you could sin if you paid for it ahead of time, and you know there’s all kinds of problems with that, so they said this is wrong, and they built a different structure. They had God up in the heavens, but then the pope, the priests, the layman, and all these guys were kind of equal, and it was faith only. Each one had their own avenue of faith personally, individually, so my relationship with you as another believer really didn’t have any connection this way. It was directly reaching God, and so I would affirm you, or you know maybe don’t get along with you, but it didn’t matter how I related to you because I had this relationship.

My relationship with you didn’t really count 11:52 - because I had this nebulous faith in me that you can’t critique. You can’t really tell whether I’ve got it or not. You might see some things, but faith is too personal for anybody else to critique, so that was kind of what came out of the faith only belief system, but what the Anabaptists I think attempted to do - and we’ve had our struggles as you know all through history, but what they attempted to do was to say that our relationship is more like a triangle. God is over us, and He relates to you. He relates to me, but there’s also this relationship with each other that is foundational to the structure of what salvation is. It’s not me independent of you, but it’s me interdependent, and relating to you.

They put a lot of emphasis on the local church 12:45 - being together, speaking, working on issues as a brotherhood, and rather than me independently making my decision as to how I’m going to live my life, I made those decisions in context with you, and so it became a triangle where this relationship never supersedes a relationship with the Lord, but it’s never missing either. It’s never absent, so I think that’s what they brought in their theology. A good book that has been a blessing to me is a book by Harold Lettel. He wrote this as - I think it was a graduation thesis or something from Union Theological Seminary in New York. The Anabaptist View of the Church is the name of it. It’s an excellent book, and he does a good job of helping understand the difference of those three different views of salvation. .