Isaac took a recent trip to Boonsboro, MD, and spent a week with Mt. Zion Mennonite Church. Here’s an excerpt from the reflection he wrote for the Mennonite Weekly Review:
From the window of the nursery I can see the cemetery that stretches across the hill alongside the church — a field planted with rectangular stones to mark the graves of the faithful: Stauffer, Newcomer, Reiff, Funk. A couple of centuries of weather have made the older headstones undecipherable. Mennonites settled here along the Beaver Creek in the middle of the 18th century. I imagine some of the jagged and blackened gravestones honor the dead from those years. The life of this church rests on the foundations laid by those who now populate the field of graves. “We are born of the dead,” Robert Pogue Harrison writes in his book The Dominion of the Dead, “of the worlds they brought into being.” We are clothed with the faithfulness of the past: cherished histories and memories, cultures and traditions that invite us to a fresh experience of the same old gospel. Anabaptism is not a set of disembodied principles or core convictions. It is the legacy of the dead handed down to us in real places, through particular congregations and specific people.
For the rest of the article, follow this link: “Faith handed down, yet new.”