In 1952, my grandfather helped open a Bible school at a missionary-run hospital in Nazareth and in 1959 opened what was called the Bible Academy. Over the next two decades he and other Mennonite missionaries, including our very own Calvin Shenk, taught Ethiopian students a new way of understanding the world.

In those early years, newly baptized Ethiopian believers chose to call their branch of the Mennonite Church "Meserete Kristos" which in the Amharic language means "Christ Foundation Church." Today, the Meserete Kristos Church, a church that was forced underground and suffered persecution in the 80s under Ethiopia’s communist government, now comprises close to one-tenth of Mennonites worldwide.

Thirty-one years after my missionary grandparents stepped onto a ship headed to Ethiopia, I was born into the colorful mixture of Washington, D.C. From the very first day of kindergarten, I learned to celebrate diversity and to never impose my way of thinking on students raised in families different from mine.

I still remember sitting in the auditorium in seventh grade and looking up at our towering principal: "At Deal Junior High School we do not preach or teach love, but we demand respect." So I learned to respect and appreciate students of all colors and beliefs and backgrounds and, for the most part, I made no efforts to make my classmates Christians. While my own family and church taught distinctly Anabaptist Christian beliefs and values, my favorite teacher in tenth grade was a Buddhist, and that same year I learned Modern World History from a Nation-of-Islam perspective.

Today I sit in classes wrestling with relativism and do my best to avoid altar calls. I argue with friends about whether it is really possible to believe you are universally right about anything. The discussion leads me in frustrating and sometimes meaningless circles and yet it continues unresolved. Do we have grounds from which to teach someone else a "better" way of understanding the world? Is it ethical to wish others were more like me? While some on this campus are strongly committed to sharing the good news of their faith both now and in the future, others of us speak of mission and evangelism with a bitter taste swimming in our mouths.

I wonder, though, if anyone who believes in anything isn’t an evangelist of sorts. Better said, aren’t we all, in some way, message-bearers? In November, a blue minivan carried me and six friends to Fort Benning, Georgia, where we and more than 5,000 others expressed our belief that the School of the Americas (now called Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) should be closed. On the radio, musicians express their thoughts, beliefs and values through song lyrics, and in classrooms, students and teachers argue over differences in opinion. Christian evangelists call us to follow Jesus, Greenpeace calls us to recycle, EMU calls us to peace-building, and DARE calls us to say no to drugs. As we go through our days interacting with our environment, we have no choice but to shape and influence the people around us. This is delicate work.