Running from our heritage

I saw the words, through the fog from my breath, crisply etched into the gray stone: "Looking for that blessed hope. John L. Stauffer, 1888-1959." What was I doing walking through a church cemetery on this cold December night? I was listening. Listening for the rolling over of this former church leader and EMC president in his grave, distraught that the school he loved and labored for so much had become what he had hoped it never would.

Never have I seen people so frantically fleeing from their heritage, people so embarrassed by their past. In our desperate attempts to rid ourselves of any vestige of our forefathers, we have made ourselves void of any clear identity. In rejecting the identity of our predecessors, we have come to prefer the identity of secularism over the identity of our heritage. What is the end toward which we are running? Is it the long sought-after community of believers who humbly submit to the will and instruction of God? No, it is a militant agnosticism that shrugs its shoulders at the existence of biblical truth while spitefully heralding its triumph over the splintered remnants of conservatism.

As a school, we need not be bound by the regulations laid out by our predecessors. But we should seek to find inspiration from their legacy. When we view our past as an obstacle that must be overcome rather than a foundation on which to build, we have become prideful and arrogant, forgetting that we, like they, do not have all the answers and that our vision for this institution and for the church is an imperfect one.

Though in doing so I stand with but a small remnant of believers, I desire to take hold of the inheritance that John Stauffer desired to pass on to his family. The following statement was found in his will:

"I bequeath to my beloved children and to their families that faith in the Holy Trinity, that confidence in the full inspiration, integrity, and authority of the Holy Scriptures and that hope in the promise of the return of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, all of which have sustained me through life as a child of God, as a father, as a minister of the Gospel, and as a bishop in the Mennonite Church. May all of you live in harmony with the conservative and evangelical faith of the Mennonite Church, and only follow me as I have followed the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen."