Life Together in the Spirit: A Radical Spirituality for the Twenty-First Century
By John Driver
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About this ebook
This edition, revised and expanded with responses and reflections from church leaders and scholars around the world, is the seventh publication in the “Global Anabaptist-Mennonite Shelf of Literature,” an initiative of Mennonite World Conference. Contributors include Mvwala C. Katshinga (Democratic Republic of Congo), Christina Asheervadam (India), Rafael Zaracho (Paraguay), Hermann Woelke (Uruguay), Paulus Pan (Taiwan), Patricia Urueña (Colombia), and Nellie Mlotshwa (Zimbabwe).
John Driver
John Driver, M.S. is an award-winning writer and collaborator of more than twenty-five books. A former teacher with a history degree from the University of Tennessee, he lives near Nashville with his wife, Laura, and their daughter, Sadie. He serves as the executive and teaching pastor at The Church at Pleasant Grove and hosts the weekly podcast Talk About That.
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Reviews for Life Together in the Spirit
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Book preview
Life Together in the Spirit - John Driver
Life Together in the Spirit
A Radical Spirituality for the
Twenty-First Century
John Driver
Edited by John D. Roth
This book is the 2015 selection for the
Global Anabaptist-Mennonite Shelf of Literature
of the Mennonite World Conference.
Published by Plough Publishing House
Walden, New York
Robertsbridge, England
Elsmore, Australia
www.plough.com
Copyright © 2015 Mennonite World Conference
All rights reserved.
Front cover image: Das Mahl
(The Meal
) from the Misereor Lenten veil titled Hoffnung den Ausgegrenzten by Sieger Köder © MVG Medienproduktion, 1996.
Print ISBN: 978-087486-696-4
Epub ISBN: 978-0-87486-697-1
Mobi ISBN: 978-0-87486-698-8
Pdf ISBN: 978-0-87486-699-5
Translated from Convivencia radical: espiritualidad para el siglo 21 with permission from Kairós Ediciones. First English edition published in 2011 by the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism.
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue
Life Together in the Spirit is the seventh publication in the Global Anabaptist-Mennonite Shelf of Literature,
an initiative of Mennonite World Conference that seeks to promote shared theological conversation across the global Anabaptist-Mennonite fellowship. For many years, Good Books, under the gifted leadership of Merle and Phyllis Good, served as the primary organizers and promoters of the series. We are grateful now for the support of Plough in helping to move the series forward.
This text began as a series of workshops led by John Driver for pastors and church leaders in Latin America, a context deeply shaped by Pentecostalism. The book that emerged from those workshops, Convivencia radical: espiritualidad para el siglo 21 (Kairos, 2007), reflected a deep respect for the gifts of the Pentecostal movement while offering a distinctive voice regarding the work of the Holy Spirit shaped by an Anabaptist theological perspective. In 2014, the secretaries of the MWC Commissions proposed that the English translation of the book – published in a limited edition in 2011 – be revised for inclusion in the Global Anabaptist-Mennonite Shelf of Literature.
Since then, we have simplified the text in some places, added study questions, and invited responses to the text from various leaders in the global Anabaptist-Mennonite church. We are pleased to offer it now to a wider readership in this revised form.
John Driver’s name is well-known in Spanish-speaking contexts for the depth and clarity of his teaching. Even more importantly, Driver is widely recognized as a person whose very life – in his generosity, simplicity, gracious spirit, and evident love for all God’s people – embodies the message of his teachings. In this sense, Driver reflects in his personal life what he yearns for in the church. That is, a witness to the living presence of the Spirit made known not because the church has a message, but because the church, in the quality of its life together, is a message. If the Spirit of the living God does not find tangible expression in the Body of Christ – if the good news of the gospel is not evident in transformed relations – the church is likely building on a foundation of sand.
In addition to expressing our deep thanks to Driver, it is a pleasure to recognize the important role that Steve Slagel, Greencroft Communities (Goshen, IN) and the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism (Goshen College) played in the initial translation and publication of the book. We are also grateful to Timothy J. Keiderling for his assistance with the study questions. Tim and Suzanne Lind translated the essay by Mvwala C. Katshinga; Elizabeth Miller translated the texts by César García, Hermann Woelke, and Patricia Urueña Barbosa; and Elizabeth Miller and Phyllis Good assisted with editing.
May this text encourage Christians of all backgrounds, in every part of the world, to embrace a fresh understanding of the Spirit in all of its fullness, so that the Body of Christ may indeed be made visible in the world today. And may all who encounter that Spirit be transformed in every aspect of their life.
John D. Roth
Secretary, Mennonite World Conference
Faith and Life Commission
Foreword
One of my first memories of a Christian worship service is of a Pentecostal evangelistic campaign one night in Bogotá. My mother, who had come to know Christ through a church of the same tradition, trusted that this meeting – advertising healings and miracles – would be an opportunity for my flat foot to obtain a normal shape, so that I could finally walk without orthopedic shoes.
That night, at a young age – I would have been six years old at this time – I looked at my mother with tears in my eyes and told her that I believed that God had healed me. From that moment on, I never needed orthopedic shoes again. God had worked in me the first of three healing miracles that I have experienced in my life thus far! Although the final two miracles occurred as an adult in contexts of Anabaptist services, the influence of Pentecostal spirituality left an indelible impact on me, from the early years of my faith. Many are the memories that testify to that period of intimacy with the Spirit.
In other settings I have identified certain dangers that I find in Pentecostal approaches that I do not consider to be healthy – a tendency toward excessive individualism, for example, or the materialism found in the so-called prosperity gospel. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that Pentecostal spirituality has had a positive impact on many Anabaptist congregations in the present day.¹
But Pentecostal spirituality is not the only type that has intersected with Anabaptism in the twenty-first century. The spirituality of the ecumenical Taizé Community and others from the Roman Catholic tradition are also valued by Anabaptist communities in different places around the world today. We need only cite as examples the impact authors such as Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen have had on many of us.
As Dorothee Soelle has explained,² spirituality involves personal experiences, both individual and communal, that, grounded in faith, encompass human emotions and are therefore inherently subjective. Among the many varieties of modern spirituality how do we discern what elements are in harmony with or support our understanding of a life in the Spirit from our Anabaptist tradition?
Mennonite World Conference is not called to judge the validity of personal experiences in the field of spirituality. But one of the purposes of MWC is to strengthen our Anabaptist identity in such a way that it rests on the shoulders of our ancestors in faith while also being global, multicultural, and interchurch in nature. For this reason MWC has opened dialogue spaces where our member churches can experience communion, interdependence, solidarity, and accountability with one another. One of these spaces is the Global Anabaptist-Mennonite Shelf of Literature,
where MWC periodically selects and prepares a book meant to strengthen member churches in their common Christian faith.
It is within this framework that we present Life Together in the Spirit: A Radical Spirituality for the Twenty-First Century by John Driver. In this book the author invites us to bear witness to a spirituality that encompasses all aspects of our lives – a spirituality based on following Christ and adopting a distinctive set of attitudes, values, and actions before the world. This form of spirituality is not measured by material riches. Nor is it individualistic. Rather the spirituality described by Driver is experienced primarily in community and involves the sanctification of interpersonal relationships. Grounding himself in Scripture and in sixteenth-century Anabaptism, Driver reminds us that our ancestors demonstrated the truth of regeneration received by grace and expressed in the integration of faith and works, service and testimony, the personal and the communal.
In this sense, Driver does not look down on other spiritualities that can serve to enrich us in the present. Instead he invites us to value the richness of our own Anabaptist tradition with the hope that, even as we engage in conversation with other traditions, we may continue to drink from our own well.
By offering this text to our global family – enriched by the study questions and the responses contributed by conversation partners from different cultures and Anabaptist traditions – MWC hopes that an Anabaptist spirituality will continue to develop in our time in a form consistent with our theological tradition and with profound respect and admiration for what other traditions contribute to our own.
Nearly five hundred years ago Menno Simons affirmed:
True evangelical faith is of such a nature it cannot lie dormant, but spreads itself out in all kinds of righteousness and fruits of love . . . it clothes the naked; it feeds the hungry; it comforts the sorrowful; it shelters the destitute; it aids and consoles the sad; it seeks those who are lost; it binds up what is wounded; it heals the sick.
May