Week in a Tipi!

Northern Cheyenne Reservation - Lame Deer, Montana. The local Mennonite pastor, Willis ---Busenitz and his wife, Nadine, have been bringing their congregation out to the Crazy Head Springs public land area for years. Here they set up tipis, government tents, and pull out a few port-a-potties and trailers – one set up as a kitchen, a few as staff houses. Each summer they host a week of family camp and a week of youth camp, then other groups rent out their camp for their own programs.
This year our marauding band of young adults helped out during Family Camp by leading worship in the evenings and a teaching session each of the 4 mornings. Our daily themes were as follows: The Big Picture of Shalom – peace with God, self, other, all creation; Old and New Testament Shalom – looking at texts in Micah and Isaiah for visions of what God wants for us and looking to stories of Jesus life for insights on how to act to get to where God wants us to be; Remembering our Stories – looking at what made the 16th century Anabaptists radical as they tried to follow the “Jesus Way;” Demolition and Cleaning Up the Mess – using a construction site analogy we looked at the work that can begin now that Christ has broken down the barriers that challenge the realization of a Shalom community.

This week, for me, was a run for the money. Having been busy working with Sermon on the Mount Mennonite in Sioux Falls last weekend and traveling most of the week to Montana, I felt less prepared for the busy week than I’d have liked. Four consecutive days of presentations later, I seem to have survived and have been challenged quite a bit.

I was stretched to release some of my grandiose expectations of a polished production of Mennonite peace theology. The realities of a tight timeline, my own limits of articulation, and group process which always takes longer than working alone weighed in. Though frustrated at times, I’m learning to relax and give our presentations over to the Holy Spirit - knowing that our audience will come from different walks of life, that they will be needing different thoughts and will be taking from our presentations what they need – whether it’s what we intend or not. This was made obvious when some evangelical YWAMers (Youth With A Mission) arrived to experience the “Cheyenne Way” for a couple of days during our time at Crazy Head Springs. Comments following our presentations showed that they took our thoughts in a significantly different direction than our intentions, which frustrated but also called us to a higher level of articulation.

I’m glad for my communications courses in college and am reminded how important clear, concise, accurate, communication is – especially for intercultural communication. Though I expected intercultural communication to happen between the Cheyenne and myself, the Mennonite background they had made communicating peace theology to the Cheyenne much easier than with the YWAMers whose evangelical understanding of Christianity was quite a different worldview from ours.

The challenge of trying to explain ourselves to non-Mennonites was a struggle but a good exercise, one that we will continue to work at this summer. Learning to better articulate my beliefs and my background is a goal for this summer as I explore what being Mennonite means in a non-Mennonite world.

Mark