This post is from a series of responses to our “Mission and Peace in Ethiopia” issue that were first published on Facebook.

I picked up my copy of the special issue of Anabaptist Witness, “Mission and Peace in Ethiopia” during a trip to the US in June (unfortunately, it was not possible to purchase it via Amazon in the Netherlands). During my travels, I also had the pleasure of conversation in person with guest editor Henok Mekonin about his experience putting together the issue, and this also informs my comments.

This journal issue is a rare and impressive example of deep collaboration between scholars in Ethiopia and in North America that deepens our understanding of what “global Anabaptist theology” means. Henok has ensured that the voices of Ethiopian contributors remained front and center in this collaboration by paying attention to highly practical questions about symbolism, language and idiom, publication rights, and images, while also framing the volume with his own profound reflections about power and intellectual capital in Anabaptist scholarship.

In conversation, Henok shared how the Anabaptist Witness print designer Sarah Peters worked with images that Ethiopian contributors had provided, as well as Amharic text, to craft several cover options. He expressed his delight about the collaborative and consultative process that led to the choice of the current cover—which features a dove, a moon spattered with blood, an Ethiopian landscape, and Amharic text “Mission and Peace in Ethiopia” in the background. These images and texts resonate deeply in an Ethiopian context, yet the cover also remains in continuity with past journal issues. Thus the cover appropriately reflects what is inside: work that is grounded in an Ethiopian context, yet with relevance that shines far beyond Africa.

In both the scholarly articles as well as the more reflective pieces, contributors address a wide range of topics. They reflect on the history of the MKC and of Christianity in Ethiopia more generally; they share moving stories of restorative justice efforts in the context of MKC prison and peacebuilding ministries; they offer proposals for publications to promote ecumenical dialogue, and they bring key biblical or scholarly texts about peace and atonement into dialogue with specific Ethiopian challenges.

In the editorial, where Henok presents these essays as being of interest to Mennonites of both Ethiopian and non-Ethiopian origin, he offers a pointed invitation to North American and European readers to “set aside some of [their] English-language expectations” and accept that the style and idiom used by Ethiopian contributors who use English as a third or fourth language might differ in some ways from the norms of Western scholarly discourse. The essays have been edited “with a lighter touch” in order to give space and dignity to the writing styles of Ethiopians—yet without, in my opinion, sacrificing quality or readability. Attentiveness to these nuances continues in the publication strategy, with the special issue being offered for sale until November in order to raise funds for MKC ministries.

In order to successfully draw Ethiopians to an Anabaptist conversational table as participants in an academic discourse that continues to be dominated by the powerful North American centers of Mennonite “intellectual capital,” editors had to seek a delicate balance between affirming and making space for contributors’ distinctive voices while also editing these voices to make them intelligible to the brokers of “the intellectual capital in North America” who remain too often oblivious to how their power “overwhelms and shuts down all the other parts of the conversation within the global church” (172–173). The editors and contributors have taken a significant step toward redressing that balance, and this is one of the main sources of delight for me as I peruse the volume.

Henok shares his frustration with the ongoing tendency for the term “global Anabaptist theology” to be used as a code for non-Western theologies while obscuring the overwhelming dominance of North American and European voices within intellectual discourse (170–173). He touches on a tricky balance that scholars of World Christianity have also been seeking over the last several decades: it is essential to compensate for centuries of Euro-dominant narratives by paying attention to stories from the Global South (and taking affirmative action to help those stories be published and disseminated), yet without falling into the trap of subtly labeling the church as anything other than catholic—ecumenical—universal.

In this volume, the ways that contributors and editors worked with themes of mission, peace, and the Holy Spirit helps to exemplify what a truly “global Anabaptist theology”—one that crosses intellectual and geographical boundaries—can look like. I offer two examples.

First, the boundaries between mission and peace are blurred and sometimes feel nonexistent. Many contributions brought together themes of mission and peace—consistently separated by many Western Anabaptist scholars—overcoming the dichotomy between them while also paying attention to the ways in which that dichotomy has historically functioned in theological discourse. Several offered analysis of the holistic approach of MKC to peacebuilding and evangelism, and grounded this historically in the church’s experiences of persecution in the Derg era. Brent Kipfer calls it “cruciform logic” and highlights the “love and passion for God” that shaped the choices of Ethiopian Mennonites to seek the good of their enemies and to work for the peace of their fellow citizens while relying deeply on prayer, miraculous manifestations of the Spirit, and the disciplines of discipleship in a context of suffering and oppression (139). Henok Mekonin argues that the church’s experience of marginalization in the Derg era shaped its choice in more recent years to continue to prioritize humanitarian and aid work among suffering populations, regardless of their ethnicity or religious backgrounds (165). In all cases, it is impossible to understand the church’s approach to peacebuilding and humanitarian work apart from its practices of discipleship, evangelism, and prayer—and apart from its specific history. Yet this specific history and these specific practices are being shared in a global conversation in order to deepen a global dialogue.

Second, the contributors to this volume welcome the Holy Spirit in their analysis of both mission and peace. Henok offers some profound reflections—unfortunately partly buried in footnotes—about the ways in which prominent North American Mennonite theologians have marginalized the Holy Spirit within their proposed Anabaptist theological frameworks (170–171). By contrast, the theme of the Holy Spirit emerged repeatedly in this volume. For example, in Mekonnen Gemeda’s analysis of an MKC peacebuilding project in the Benishangul-Gumuz region, he points out that reliance on the Holy Spirit can offer guidance for “the most difficult situations” and illustrates this with a powerful story of footwashing that led to transformation of a protracted community conflict in 2022. At the same time, he analyzes the importance for peacebuilding of relying on local knowledge and culture—ploughing “with the local oxen” (155). This willingness to integrate theological reflections about the role of the Spirit’s promptings, local contextual analysis, and engagement with peacebuilding literature that rarely refers to spiritual phenomena exemplifies the way that mission and peace are intertwined both in the content of the case studies and in the scholarly frameworks that these contributors are constructing.

The question of what constitutes “global theology” is not unique to Anabaptists. The field of World Christianity, which began to flourish as an area of scholarly enquiry in the early 1990s, has also gone through similar self-questioning. Over time, the term “World Christianity” has  shifted away from its early connotations as a veiled reference to non-Western forms of the faith (reflected in early textbooks that tended to omit Europe and North America), toward a term that encompasses the study of Christianity on all continents. Henok suggests that a similar shift is needed for Anabaptists. In my opinion, this issue takes a remarkable step forward toward putting such a shift in motion—if Anabaptist scholars from around the world are willing to engage deeply with its contents.