Mennonite World Conference

Mennonite World Conference is the reason I came to Paraguay this summer. I came for many other and more important reasons, but my trip has largely been scheduled around the conference and it deserves a blog entry.

The global Mennonite church congregates once every six years. Ostensibly, it's the time that the leaders from different continents converge to make statements and decisions and talk about the direction of the church. But it's also an excuse for Mennonites from all over to do some world-traveling, learn some new songs, and add some Facebook friends. The conference this year was held in Asuncion, mere kilometers from where I had been staying (having family in the same city as Conference was too good an opportunity to pass up) and was hosted in an almost completed mega-church building.

Paraguay has a sizable and visible Mennonite population. Immigrating largely from Germany and Russia, they are known mostly by their light complexions and tendency to speak low-German. If, in the U.S., Mennonites are identified by their ethnicity, it's all the more common here in Paraguay. Being of light skin and hair, I'm automatically assumed to be Mennonite, but it's confusing to people that I don't speak German. This is even more problematic for darker skinned Paraguayans who claim Mennonite values and practices, but lack the genetic heritage that most Paraguayans equate with the denomination. One of the hopes of the conference was to make Paraguayans aware that being Mennonite is not a matter of pigment. I heard not a few stories of locals who were amazed to find that their extremely dark-skinned African visitors had come for the Mennonite conference.

The majority of Mennonite World Conference is spent sitting. In both the morning and evening are services with singing, sermons, and presentations from any number of presidents and secretaries general of other denominations. Then you get up and stand in line for twenty minutes before sitting down with a plate of rice and sauce in a dining room built for 5000. Afternoons (between the eating and singing) are spent attending workshops or concerts. For my part, I helped out each afternoon with the Alto Refugio workshop, a small part, but I met dozens of people later who recognized me as “one of the people working with AIDS”.

In the end, I decided that the value of Mennonite World Conference might be the same for me as for the Paraguayans: to personally encounter a larger picture of the church – one that doesn't only look and think like I do. While it's no news that the church holds a broad spectrum of beliefs, practices, and worship styles, there's no substitute for witnessing that in person.

Seating area number 1


And 2