Salvation or Love - Anabaptism, Evangelicalism, and a Slogan

I just read an excerpt in Two Kingdom, Two Loyalties by Perry Bush.

The part that struck me is the response of the Mennonites after World War II. During World War II, many Mennonites compromised the Mennonite conviction of nonresistance. (At the risk of oversimplifying - when they talk about nonresistance, they mean love that turns the other cheek.) This falling away fromt he church teaching was an issue that the leadership in the Mennonites denomenation worked hard to fix. One of the ideas they came up with was to create Peace Teams. These teams would be comprised of young men who had served in Civilian Public Service camps rather than fight in the war during WWII. These Peace Teams went out to the churches and taught them the way of nonresistance. Perry Bush explains the situation well in the following paragraph:

In their tour of the local communities, the Peace Teams uncovered a number of matters for concern by the wider church. Several congregations illustrated the degree to which tensions from the war still registered marked strains. In Fisher, Illinois, reported one of the teams in 1948, local toughs warned them to lay low on their message to avoid offending several military veterans who "have just become re-adjusted." Another factor eroding nonresistance that the Peace Teams ran into time and time again was fundamentalism. More than once the teams uncovered the prevailing attitude that "salvation is the most important thing, not nonresistance. Therefore our real buisness as a church is to do mission work and save souls; nonresistance is a minor part of the Bible." They found such attitudes particularly in regions such as Illinois, where the influence from Bible institues such as Moody in Chicago had penetrated deeply. In other places, the Peace Teams found that too great an openness to an outside culture resulted in an uncongenial climate for their message. As one team member summarized, an historical approach worked well "in a communtity that wants to be 'Mennonite,' but not too effective in one that wants to get away from the 'old way.'"

I think I find myself somewhere between the Anabaptist tradition and Evangelicalism (I would actually that was what was encountered by the Peace Teams rather than Fundamentalism, but the lines are rather blurred where they meet). As this excerpt shows, the Anabaptist tradition (Mennonites and Amish) is focused on Christians being the people God has laid out for them to be. Bush seems to state that nonresistance is more important than evangelism. An evangelical would disagree; they are focused on winning the lost around them. I lean more toward the Anabaptist stream of Christianity because I believe that people see the Lord by the people of God being the being they were designed to be. Evangelism happens through faithfulness rather than tricks of language and logic that persuade an individual that they need the Lord.

It is important that we do not compromise our faith in order to satisfy our government or any other earthly institution, including the institutionalized church. A repeating theme in my posts lately is that is not easy to define what compromising our faith actually entails. How far is too far or how far is not far enough? We see this in the Mennonite struggle after WWII. The leadership in the church said military service was a compromise while many of the local ministers and parishioners saw nothing wrong with it. To those who are nonresistant, the teaching seems clear in Scripture; however, that which seems clear to some does not appear as clearly to others.

Christian Churchers like myself fall back on the slogan: "In essentials, unity. In opinions, liberty. In all things, love." By its very nature, that slogan is anti-anabaptism and pro-evangelicalism because we define essentials as to those things that are essential for salvation. That might not be the right approach.