“To be a Christian in the generous, orthodox way is not to claim to have
the truth captured, stuffed, and mounted on a wall. It is, rather, to live
and grow in a loving community of people who are seeking the truth on
the road of mission, and who have launched on the quest by Jesus, who,
with us, guides us still.”
-Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren
Cassie and I are calling room 405 in the Asia House at the MCC headquarters in Akron, Pennsylvania our home for the next two weeks. Our room is decorated with much Asian flair including a mirror made from banana leaves and furniture crafted from bamboo.
We are here making sure that all of our preparations are in order for international work. We are also gaining a less esoteric and more succinct vision of MCC. We thought this would be helpful:
MCC is a worldwide ministry of Anabaptist churches, sharing God's love and compassion for all in the name of Christ by responding to basic human needs and working for peace and justice. MCC envisions communities worldwide in right relationship with God, one another and creation.
So far it has been a joy meeting and making new friends from Canada, the United States and abroad. Of special note has been the opportunity to meet David Mercado. David is from Nicaragua and we will be working with him while we are there. It has been fun to meet him, talk with him about Nicaragua and bounce some Spanish phrases his way.
This summer we created a bucket list of various activities that we wanted to do before we moved to Nicaragua. One of the activities on the list was going to The A to Z Pizza Farm just outside of Stockholm, Wisconsin (a trip that we ended up making three times this year). A couple of weeks ago we went down with “the newlyweds” (Cassie's brother Justin and sis-in-law Kate) for our last time for awhile. The drive was gorgeous as we headed down the St. Croix River Valley, taking in the fall colors and the picturesque bluffs. Our first stop was Stockholm itself. This quaint river town is filled with Swedish nostalgia, including blue bikes which are scattered throughout the town for anyone to ride. We rode down to the river, walked on the pier, and biked around the town before heading to a nearby cidery/winery . We had been there before and were hoping that it would have improved in quality, but again we were thoroughly disappointed.
Our final destination was the farm itself. A to Z has become quite famous in this neck of the woods, offering pizza made from ingredients produced by the farm and even using agrarian byproduct's in their latrine. The pizza was great, but not as good as the company and conversation enjoyed with Justin and Kate. We played a few hands of hearts (sorry Kate) and broke open a special “Kate and Cassie” bottle of wine which was given to us by Chelsea, our great friend out west.
“The importance is an ability to bring together an improbable set of people, cause it is going to be that that shifts it. What we attempt to do is to create more people that think like we do and I think the difficult work of peace building is to create a quality of relationships among people who don’t think alike.”
-John Paul Lederach
Real progress emerges not through mass movements, but through unlikely relationships.
Lederach served with MCC in Belgium, taught at EMU for a decade and is now a part of the Kroc Institute at Notre Dame. We really appreciated this dialogue between Krista Tippett and him. Take an hour to listen to the link below (click on Listen Now at the top of the page):
http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2010/art-of-peace/kristasjournal.shtml
