Former director sees prophetic role for MCC

Robb Davis

Robb Davis’ legacy at the head of Mennonite Central Committee – an 18-month period he describes as one of unrealized, even frustrated, potential – may be encapsulated in a single photograph.

The photo shows Davis conversing with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York, Sept. 20. It was taken at a meeting MCC was asked to organize between U.S. religious leaders and Ahmadinejad, who was in New York to address the United Nations. The encounter – coming amid growing U.S. tensions with Iran over its nuclear development program – was the kind of thing Davis thought MCC should be all about.

But only weeks later, on Oct. 23, Davis abruptly resigned as MCC’s executive director, leaving not only an organization trying to re-envision its future, but many unanswered questions about why Davis – an accomplished, charismatic man of service with the high ideals MCC traditionally has espoused – would simply quit and walk away.

“I know it felt out of the blue, and it wasn’t an easy decision,” Davis said in an interview May 4. “But I was not feeling that I had the patience or the maturity to really help move MCC into its future.”

His training and his passion for forging grassroots responses to global problems would seem to make him a perfect fit to lead MCC. But Davis said he was not equipped to navigate MCC’s interior culture or to fully understand the relationship the agency has with its constituent churches.

“I’m very high on MCC,” Davis said. “I don’t see another [agency] that’s positioned to do what MCC does. What I said to staff when I was there was that if MCC didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. . . . MCC should be risk-loving and risk-taking. I just wanted MCC to do more.”

Central to MCC, Davis said, is its role as a prophetic voice among Anabaptist churches, which Davis believes have lost some of their theological bearings, especially when it comes to issues such as the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

“The church needs that fundamental call to return to who we are as a people,” Davis said. “MCC can nurture the church [and help it] gain a bigger vision. That to me is where MCC’s greatest challenge lies – speaking prophetically but nurturing the questions of ‘How do we live at this time; how do we live as global Christians in a globalized economy?’ ”

One of Davis’ assignments at MCC was to help the agency redesign its governance and leadership model – a process that continues and was affirmed by MCC’s binational board on June 9.

Davis said he found MCC’s diverse – some would say fragmented – structure of regional offices and headquarters hard to work with. “This whole reality of not only being binational but having 12 parts . . . the relationship between those parts has to be constantly clarified,” Davis said. “It can’t just act like a family but like a large, complex organization.”

Davis said he hopes MCC’s binational board, in choosing his successor, will signal that “this is the time for risk-taking.”

“Leaders in the Mennonite world have a hard time,” he said. “I don’t think they’re encouraged to take risks. There’s a sense of fear to stick your neck out too far. . . . I think there’s a shift going on in MCC where boards are taking their roles a lot more seriously and taking more active leadership.”

Since returning to California – where he had worked before joining MCC – Davis has been doing some consulting work and curriculum development. He said someday he would welcome another leadership challenge, especially with a group that helps the oppressed and impoverished.

For now, “I spend a lot of time alone, just thinking, taking long bike rides,” Davis said. “There have been some really wonderful people who have helped me.”

—Robert Rhodes for Meetinghouse