wfn.org | British Anabaptists reflect on mission couple’s legacy

[BethAH <BethAH@mbm.org>]

May 2, 2001
Beth Hawn
Mennonite Board of Missions
(219) 294-7523
<NEWS@MBM.org>

May 2, 2001

British Anabaptists reflect on mission couple’s legacy

MIDDLEBURY, Ind. (MBM) – In 1575, officials in London, England,
arrested 26 Anabaptist refugees from Flanders.  Three of those
prisoners died either in prison or at the stake, and the rest
were deported, ridding the British Isles of the Anabaptist
movement.

That absence lasted nearly 400 years, until Alan and Eleanor
Kreider arrived in England on assignment with Mennonite Board of
Missions in 1974.  Since then, the Kreiders’ witnessing through
their steady presence has laid the groundwork for current ripples
of Anabaptist thought shimmering on the surface of the British
religious waters.

According to Sian and Stuart Murray Williams, who spoke April 19
to more than 150 people at the annual Northern Indiana
Hand-in-Hand banquet to celebrate the Kreiders’ quarter-century
of ministry, Anabaptism has become a quietly growing inter-church
movement.  All this accomplished without traditional
church-planting evangelism; there is but one Mennonite church –
Wood Green – in Britain.

Stuart Murray Williams, who edits the British journal Anabaptism
Today and co-edited the new book Coming Home, Stories of
Anabaptists in Britain and Ireland with Alan Kreider, called
Christianity in Great Britain a “choir of many voices.”

“What has happened in the last 30 years or so is that the
Anabaptist voice has begun to sing again,” Williams said.  “For
us, Anabaptism is about mission.  It is about engaging a
post-Christian culture in prophetic issues.  … It is a movement
of renewal.”

Sian Murray Williams, pastor of Littlemore Baptist Church in
Oxford, England, and personnel director for the Baptist
Missionary Society, called Anabaptism “a non-threatening but
deeply subversive presence in all traditions.”  The Kreiders’
leadership and the way they lived their faith allowed a broad
body of believers to learn about Mennonite beliefs.

The Kreiders arrived at the London Mennonite Centre in 1974.
They eventually led the Centre’s transformation from a guest
house for students to “thinking of a much broader ministry of the
leavening possibilities of Anabaptist witness for Jesus across
the British Isles,” said J. Nelson Kraybill, president of
Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary.

Kraybill, who spent several years in London with MBM, said, “That
ministry took root in astounding ways.  … It’s not an
exaggeration today to say that there are thousands of people in
the British Isles whose lives have been touched by their
ministry.”

In his tribute, Kraybill said the Kreiders taught him several
important aspects of ministry and discipleship, including the
overflowing joy of mission work, the passion needed for preaching
and teaching, the importance of emphasizing peacemaking, prayer
and evangelism together, and the fact that Anabaptism continues
to be a forward-looking movement.

“For them, Anabaptism is a living stream of church renewal.  It’s
a Jesus-centered spoken and lived faith that is rooted in peace
and rooted in justice and most of all rooted in articulating the
faith,” Kraybill said.  “Like leaven in a lump of dough, [the
Kreiders] brought witness and radical discipleship into Britain.”

Stuart Murray Williams said the Kreiders brought with them
influential texts like John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus
and The More-With-Less Cookbook, the latter of which especially
made accessible the ethos and lifestyle of Anabaptism.

The tenets of peace, community and group leadership appeal to
Britains in a subversive way that lends itself to healing and
hope, Stuart Murray Williams said.  While pacifism itself is a
minority position in Britain, Christians are starting to take
Christ’s peace teachings seriously.  The Anabaptist Network,
formed in 1992 and now consisting of about 600 people from across
Britain, provides support for believers from other denominations
seeking to follow Anabaptist ideals.

The Kreiders said Mennonite Board of Missions gave them the
freedom to find their own way in the islands that lacked
Anabaptist influence.  That autonomy allowed them to make
mistakes, but also to develop relationships that in themselves
promoted the gospel.

“We were not sent to do a job that was already prescribed, but
sent to find our vocation in the church,” Eleanor Kreider said.

“Our hearts are very full tonight.  Full of gratitude and full of
joy,” she continued, speaking both of their experiences in
England and their current work as itinerant missionary educators
with MBM in North America.  “Our friends (in Britain) said to us,
‘It’s time. It is right.  You should go.’  And they sent us with
their blessing back here, back to you, back to our churches.”

Stuart Murray Williams added, “We really do feel it is time to
test out the legacy.”

The British couple said Anabaptism is not the Kreiders’ only
legacy on the islands.  On one of Stuart’s visits, there was no
room at the Kreiders’ “inn,” so Alan and Eleanor sent him to the
house of a friend for the night – Sian.

“(They said) ‘She’ll look after you well,” Stuart said.  “She
has.”  The Murray Williamses were married last year.

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Ryan Miller for MBM News         PHOTOS AVAILABLE