Anabaptist leaders form Global Mission Fellowship

For more than 100 years, Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches in North America worked out their plans for mission efforts in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Now the churches that emerged from those efforts have their own identity and leadership and want to discern for themselves where the next mission fields should be. In some cases, new mission work could begin on other continents without North American involvement.

Meeting in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe on August 9–10, representatives from Mennonite World Conference churches on five continents voted overwhelmingly to create a new mechanism that will begin to shift mission leadership to churches in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Called the Global Mission Fellowship, the plan calls for regional meetings on each of the five continents “where Anabaptist-related churches and mission groups . . . can meet for encouragement, vision-sharing, networking and cooperating in mission.” The regional meetings will occur every three years.

“This is a very significant shift,” said Stanley Green, who chaired the committee that created the proposal. “The vision for what happened in Africa and Asia and Latin America [emerged from North American agencies]. But now the vision for Africa, for example, will originate in Africa and be shaped in Africa and then North American agencies will need to discern how we can participate.”

Such visions emerged quickly in the Africa caucus, which began to discuss possibilities for new mission efforts on their continent. For example, Fikru Befirdu, from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, suggested that the African churches should work together on a new mission to unchurched people living just 100 kilometers from his home who are cannibals and practice animistic religions.

But the question of funding the regional gatherings was a concern to other representatives who worried that money spent on such meetings would be taken from existing programs, many of which already face funding shortfalls.

Green, president of Mennonite Church USA’s Mennonite Mission Network, said that if this reduction “is met by the creation of a forum that encourages the sending of workers from the south, it is an exchange that ought not be considered a loss.”

The relationship of the new fellowship to Mennonite World Conference has not yet been clarified.

—Everett J. Thomas