Bumping Into The State

"The preaching of the Gospel is the church's primary task," Mennonite Church leader Guy F. Hershberger wrote at mid-century in The Mennonite Church in the Second World War. "For it to become or to maintain a lobbyist organization, for the shaping of the nation's foreign policy, would be a perversion of its purpose and function."[2] Ironically, less than two decades later Hershberger supported Mennonite Central Committee's plans to establish a Washington, D.C. outpost for monitoring legislative, judicial and administrative actions. In a February 1968 article for Gospel Herald Hershberger said Mennonites "ought to have an office in Washington to keep in closer touch with the working of the federal government than is possible under present circumstances." Among the reasons he listed was the fact that Mennonites' domestic and foreign relief and service programs, educational institutions and hospitals "are daily affected, for good or ill, by a host of government agencies."[3]

In the seventeen years between the publication of Hershberger's 1951 book and his 1968 article, Mennonites' relationship to American politics had changed dramatically. American Mennonites had experienced two major wars, the second of which directly affected their service work. A few had participated actively in the Civil Rights movement, marching alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and inviting him to speak on their college campuses. Mennonite young people were becoming increasingly vocal about their opposition to the U.S. military presence in Vietnam. Congress had nearly accepted a proposal which would have inducted conscientious objectors into military service before assigning them to civilian units supervised by the military. Denominational and academic leaders were hosting study conferences to re-examine the relationship of the church and state. Mennonites also were changing demographically: more people in the churches were getting advanced degrees and settling into professional occupations. Slowly but surely they were moving from their rural enclaves into the suburbs and the city.

All of these transformations--but especially the experience of Mennonites in Vietnam and the trauma of the proposed Selective Service System revisions in 1967--made the notion of a permanent Mennonite "presence" on Capitol Hill more palatable to MCC's still-reluctant constituency. The MCC Washington office, under consideration for nearly fourteen years, officially opened in July 1968. For nearly three decades since, MCC's Washington branch has listened, observed, informed and advocated in the U.S. capital.[4]

Creating MCC Peace Section

When the Mennonite Central Committee was founded on July 27, 1920, few could have anticipated its institutional permanence or growth into an organization with nearly 1000 workers in some 50 countries around the world. No one would have expected that someday it could include programs not only for disaster relief but for international mediation and reconciliation, prison ministries, mental health services, agricultural development, international visitor exchanges, Self Help Crafts and--perhaps most remarkably--advocacy or lobbying in the nation's capital.

MCC was born out of a specific situation and a particular need: Mennonites who had migrated to Russia and lived comfortably under the Russian czarist state were now suffering as a result of the revolution and civil war. The internal war resulted not only in direct casualties but contributed to widespread famine and the spread of various epidemics. By the time of the crisis in Russia, American Mennonites were primed to serve in some way, motivated partly by their guilt of not suffering--even prospering economically--during World War I, while others in their country had lost their spouses, children or livelihoods while in military service.[5] After the war President Woodrow Wilson had written a brief memo which concluded, "It will now be our fortunate duty to assist by example, by sober, friendly counsel, and by material aid in the establishment of just democracy throughout the world." Mennonites realized that by giving material aid they could again be perceived as patriotic.[6]

Between December 1921 and 1925 MCC had distributed $1.3 million worth of resources, saving perhaps as many as 9000 Mennonites--and many others--from starvation.[7] During the 1930s most of MCC's limited energies were devoted to Russian Mennonite resettlement projects in Paraguay. However, in the late 1930s and early 1940s the organization's programs expanded exponentially, in response to the devastation of World War II.[8] Beginning in 1940, observed MCC relief worker and administrator Robert Kreider, "house was added to house" in Akron, Pennsylvania to accommodate the growing administrative headquarters, and scores of Civilian Public Service workers were sent to Akron to administer the burgeoning programs. "The MCC archives bear witness to a paper explosion in the files," he said. "As opportunities opened for sending workers and supplies abroad, bridgeheads of relief and refugee programs were established overseas."[9] While the war still raged, MCC gained permission from the U.S. and other national governments--including Germany, which allowed MCC to work in some of the countries it had overrun--to provide food, clothing and medical supplies to war-torn Poland, France and England. During and after the war years MCC also expanded its relief efforts into Puerto Rico, the Middle East, India, China, the Philippines, Japan, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere. In addition to giving food and clothing to those devastated by the war, MCC service workers helped refugees find temporary shelter and more permanent homes; such work necessitated frequent contacts with government officials.

Back in the U.S. thousands of Mennonites and other religious objectors to war had special assignments in Civilian Public Service (CPS), which was administered in part by Mennonite Central Committee. CPS was the mechanism that Mennonites, Friends and the Church of the Brethren worked out with Selective Service between 1940 and 1942 to avoid reliving the unfortunate experiences of World War I. In CPS, conscientious objectors could provide humanitarian service in programs funded by and orchestrated by the churches rather than serve in noncombatant roles under the U.S. military, as was the case in the earlier war. MCC administered 73 base camps, units and special projects, nearly half of the 152 total units supervised by agencies of the various denominations. MCC's special projects included 26 mental hospital units which contributed to the revolutionizing of mental health care in the U.S. following the war. MCC also carried responsibility for units which worked in dairying, soil conservation, forestry, public health, national parks and agriculture and with the Bureau of Reclamation. About half of the total 12,000 CPSers served under MCC during the nearly six-year life span of CPS.[10]

In the process of developing Civilian Public Service, Mennonites formed a Mennonite Central Peace Committee (MCPC) to oversee their part in negotiations with administrative and military officials. As originally planned, MCC and the MCPC would work together to administer the CPS program. However, before the first CPS workers were assigned, the peace committee merged with Mennonite Central Committee, birthing another branch of MCC: the MCC Peace Section. The Peace Section sought "to keep the lines clear and distinct in the matter of Christian witness to the nonresistant way of life," "to keep the peace concerns of the churches before the proper persons at the proper time," and "to interpret the attitude of government officials and the general public toward the peace position of the churches."[11] In conjunction with the earlier formed National Service Board for Religious Objectors, a cooperative project of the Friends, Church of the Brethren and Mennonites, the Peace Section was responsible for monitoring changes in Selective Service.[12] In addition, it was charged with educating MCC's multi-denominational constituency, parts of which had lost sight of the pacifism or nonresistance of their heritage. Peace Section's initial mandate also included serving as the government contact agency for Mennonites and Brethren in Christ on matters of war and the draft. Another focus of the Peace Section which evolved over the years was "the expansion of peacemaking or reconciliation into conflict situations or the promotion of peace concerns among Christians who are not of this persuasion."[13]

During the 1950s and 1960s, while MCC's relief and development projects continued to increase dramatically, the Peace Section sponsored several significant conferences to reflect on issues which had emerged in the context of broadening experiences of the Brethren in Christ and the Mennonites.[14] Especially important during the Peace Section's early years was a November 9-12, 1950 meeting at Winona Lake, Indiana. Representatives from most of MCC's constituent bodies attended the meeting, seeking to come to consensus on a unified statement of the essence of Mennonite and Brethren in Christ faith, especially as it related to issues of peace. Out of the conference came the inter-Mennonite statement "Declaration of Christian Faith and Commitment," which provided a theological backdrop for MCC's work for the next four decades.[15]

MCC Peace Section also sponsored Mennonite participation in a series of theological discussions known as the Puidoux conferences, which took place in Europe over more than a decade beginning in 1955. The conferences grew out of cooperative efforts between Mennonites and other denominations and organizations to present a unified peace position in ecumenical settings. Some people with prior experience with MCC, or people who went on to become visionary leaders of MCC, participated in the Puidoux conferences.[16] In addition to the Puidoux meetings, many other inter-Mennonite or more ecumenical peace-related conferences--some sponsored by MCC--took place during the 1950s and 1960s.[17] Generally, these theological and ethical discussions were responses to the situations encountered in Mennonites' broadening mission and service experiences. Robert Kreider has suggested that MCC allowed Mennonites to confront afresh issues which Christians have wrestled with for centuries. "Persons of relatively sheltered experience have been thrust into situations in MCC work where there is no escape from responding to these issues." Among the many questions MCC volunteers and administrators encounter, notes Kreider, are the following:

How does one relate positively to government officials or church administrators for whom one has little affection, even aversion? . . . Service in the inner city in America presents a whole new set of issues. Workers in the inner city who are committed to nonresistance may feel increasingly that the plight of the poor can only be relieved with the threat of force . . . There is a prickly cluster of church-state issues. Whose gifts may be laid on the altar? Shall we limit our program to that which we can do with our own funds and our own workers? . . . If one chooses to make use of government funds in MCC programs, another question arises. Does one have a right, a responsibility to speak out in criticism against actions of one's benefactor--the government? When you know so much more than you once did about the inner city of Cincinnati or the refugees of Jordan or the corruption in Saigon or the brutality in Hue--dare you keep silence? Dare the peaceable Mennonites become the outspoken Mennonites? . . . One senses in MCC work a progressive unfolding of awareness of the deep-rooted causative factors in social evils--evils which cannot be touched with temporary first aid.[18]

The study conferences which MCC and MCC Peace Section planned or supported sought to respond to these and other questions. In most cases, the theological sorting which Mennonites were doing was epiphenomenal--an attempt to understand and articulate the tensions and dilemmas they had encountered in the field. The limits of traditional, withdrawn nonresistance were clear: the task was to find new ways of making peace.

While Mennonite graduate students, theologians and ethicists--many of them also MCC personnel--wrestled with issues of peace and war on paper, MCC continued its work in the U.S., Canada and in units scattered around the world, now also including parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America.[19] Gradually, the organization shifted its primary emphasis away from providing emergency relief in crisis situations. Delton Franz, long-time director of MCC Washington's lobbying office, sometimes characterized this shift as the "passages" of MCC: from emergency relief in the 1920s; to service projects, including refugee resettlement and house reconstruction, in the 1940s in Europe; to Two-Thirds World development projects in the 1950s; to justice issues in the 1970s and following years. While at MCC Washington, Franz often cited the well-worn adage which says, "If you give a family a fish, the family will eat for a day. If you teach a family to fish, they'll know how to fish for a lifetime. If you provide access to the fish pond, they'll truly be able to feed themselves forever." Certainly MCC still distributes fish and teaches people to fish, but its present emphases are on job creation, the environment and peacemaking. The transitions MCC has made are largely related to its cumulative experience, which has evidenced multiple causal factors for hunger, violence and other forms of oppression. One of those factors, and the most relevant one in this discussion, is the role of various governments--in particular, the United States.

The Developing Nation-State

Many recent theorists have called attention to the growth and expansion of the activities and programs of twentieth-century nation-states, including the United States government. John Boli-Bennett, who studied the ideological extension of nation-state authority over the course of a century, claims--a bit hypercritically--that we have witnessed the rise of the "universal, omnivorous state."[20] State expansion can be measured in a variety of ways, including budgetary and personnel changes. Researcher David Harrington Watt notes that total U.S. government expenditures (federal, state and local) have increased dramatically in this century. Total combined expenditures were $20 billion in 1940, $70 billion in 1950, $151 billion in 1960, $333 billion in 1970, $959 billion in 1980, and $1696 billion in 1986. Harrington Watt observes that, at the turn of the century, the federal government employed under 240,000 civilians. In 1940 the figure was 1,000,000, and by 1988, 3,100,000 civilians received paychecks from the federal government. Active-duty military personnel went from 140,000 in 1900 to about 460,000 in 1940 to 2,200,000 in 1988. Allowing for inflation does not make the trend disappear: expressed in constant dollars (based on fiscal year 1982), federal budget outlays increased from $83 billion in 1940 to $699 billion in 1980 and an estimated $870 billion in 1988.[21]

During these developmental years, Harrington Watt argues, expenditures were concentrated in two areas: social welfare, which by 1984 had risen to $671 billion, 52% of total government outlays and 18% of the Gross National Product; and military spending. At times during the postwar era, he claims, military outlays accounted for as much as 62% of total federal expenditures. The U.S. spent more of its GNP on the military than did France, Japan, West Germany or the United Kingdom, allowing the country to develop "a military arsenal that far outstripped those of its allies and rivals and that was without precedent in world history."[22] Today nation-states have become the only imaginable way of organizing and rationalizing international order. "States are no longer seen as `night-watchmen'--even in the United States. Current world culture defines them as important problem-solvers," David H. Kamens and Tormod K. Lunde observe. "As a consequence, states have acquired a new range of activities that they are expected to carry out."[23] These activities include national planning and international development as well as problem-solving in conflicts between and within other countries.

Bumping into Each Other "On the Ground"

The extending interests and involvements of the American government have frequently overlapped with the mission, relief and development work of nongovernmental organizations, including MCC. At times government policies and programs, especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, furthered Protestant and Catholic churches' mission work. John A. Lapp, executive secretary of MCC, has noted that churches' missions developed at the same time as the colonial empires expanded. "Missions and missionaries are very much a part of the historical situations in which we find ourselves," said Lapp in a 1976 presentation to the General Conference Mennonite Church Committee on Overseas Ministries. "There is a macro political situation that we cannot escape." While the cultural and political alliances which fueled both imperialism and missions are now widely discredited, mission agencies must acknowledge their past interconnection with the cultural forms and empires of the West.[24]

Much of the church-state experience in this century, and especially in recent decades, has contrasted sharply with that of earlier eras when nation-states were building their empires. Rather than riding the wave of their nation's efforts, U.S. church organizations now sometimes find themselves in opposition to the domestic and overseas initiatives of their government. On occasion NGO volunteers find themselves supporting the revolutionary claims of disempowered nationals who clamor for peace and justice, while their government provides funding for the regimes which oppress those with whom they work. In such cases and in many other settings, the programs and policies of the U.S. government contradict and constrain those of NGOs, adding to the suffering the service agencies seek to relieve. "During the Korean War in the `50s, the expanded exposure of our people to suffering from Appalachia to Africa became the bridges that allowed us to move back and forth from the tranquillity of rural America to the revolution in the Congo," wrote MCC Washington workers years later. "The governmental connections to warmaking and peacemaking were taking on new reality."[25]

It was in Vietnam where MCC workers most frequently found the U.S. government at cross-purposes with their relief aid.[26] MCC began assisting with medical, nutritional and other human needs in South Vietnam in 1954, years before U.S. troops were sent to the country. In time they questioned their efforts to mop up after destruction by their government. At a 1966 meeting of relief workers in South Vietnam, one Vietnamese national said, "If any of you are not ashamed for what your country is doing here, you might as well go home right now. You will never do my people any good."[27] For many years MCC workers in Vietnam wrote back to Akron headquarters that as soon as they bound up wounds, there were more American bombs, more deaths and more destruction.[28] In May 1965 fifty representatives of religious groups, including five Mennonites, visited Washington to discuss Vietnam with administration officials and members of Congress. The Washington visitation coincided with President Lyndon Johnson's request for a special appropriation of $700 million for continuing the Vietnam conflict through June 1965.[29] The following year, members of the Vietnam Mennonite Mission Council wrote to their supporting constituent bodies that they were "troubled by the great suffering the Vietnamese people have had to endure due to acts of terrorism, fighting, bombings, and shellings." The Council noted that thousands were being killed or maimed, the "social fabric is being torn and the morality of the people adversely affected . . . . We are concerned because the justification for our country's heavy military involvement here is open to question. The issue is not so clear-cut as those who defend United States military actions would have us believe."[30]

Later that summer MCC Board Chair C. N. Hostetter, Jr. and Executive Secretary William T. Snyder wrote to President Johnson, calling attention to the organization's twelve years of service work in South Vietnam. After specifying their disagreements with U.S. policy, they wrote that out of the context of Vietnam "we have felt increasingly . . . a contradiction and paradox in our efforts, trying to help the people on the one hand while at the same time our government was engaged in an escalating war that was devastating the countryside and creating enormous tragic suffering for the civilian population." Snyder and Hostetter contended that "the time has come when we can no longer maintain faith with the homeless, the hungry, the orphaned and the wounded to whom we minister unless we speak out as clearly as we can against the savage war in which our country is engaged."[31] Hostetter and Snyder then quoted a Mennonite worker in Vietnam who questioned the American means and ends of eliminating communism. They also stated that MCC workers were willing to suffer with their Vietnamese brethren, "but we do not want our efforts to be a palliative on the conscience of a nation seeking to do good on one hand while spreading destruction on the other." In clear terms they expressed their opposition to the escalating military efforts which "increase the dimensions of human suffering."

In 1967 Hostetter, Snyder and three others went to the White House to present another letter to President Johnson. The letter echoed many of the concerns expressed in the 1966 correspondence. Hostetter and other MCC representatives said Mennonites were not abandoning their tradition of responding to conflict by serving the victims rather than participating in the conflict. However, the letter said, "Our consciences protest against providing clothing and food and medical care for refugees while remaining silent about a policy which generates new refugees each day."[32] The correspondence to the president, both in 1966 and 1967, was based on the firsthand observations of Mennonite workers living through the devastation of the war.

Perhaps more than any other single event or experience, this involvement in Vietnam led Mennonites--via MCC--toward recognizing the political impact of their service work. John K. Stoner, then executive secretary of MCC U.S. Peace Section, stated in 1977 that although none of MCC's actions--such as providing relief to war sufferers in Vietnam or aiding the families of political prisoners or visiting Christians in pre-perestroika Russia--was political in the popular sense of the word, they all have had their political impact. "MCC and its constituency will have grown in our understanding when we recognize this fact and outgrow the ignorance or naiveté which seeks to ignore it," claimed Stoner.[33] Vietnam also made MCC keenly aware of the impossibility of serving authentically without speaking to the governments contributing to human suffering. In the years following the Vietnam War and after the founding of MCC Washington, MCC workers in the nation's capital frequently mentioned sociologist Peter Berger's observation that in the twentieth century, for the first time in human history, the tide has turned whereby more human suffering is caused by the policies and actions of governments than by natural disasters. "The only political commitments worth making are those that seek to reduce the amount of human suffering in the world," said Berger.[34] Berger's words have become part of the rationale that MCC Washington workers use as they justify their lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill.

Moving into Washington

For many years before MCC Washington opened in 1968, Mennonites had the semblance of an office in the capital. Because MCC Peace Section's mandate included keeping abreast of legislative and policy action on Capitol Hill, especially on conscription issues, Akron employees often traveled to Washington for legislative visits or congressional testimony.[35] During the development of Civilian Public Service in 1940 they had joined with other peace churches to form the National Service Board for Religious Objectors (NSBRO), which is still based in Washington.[36] From at least 1945 until the early 1960s Mennonites had one person on the staff at NSBRO, often serving as director of the organization, who regularly reported to the Peace Section.[37] NSBRO's work, like that of Peace Section's own occasional Washington work in the 1940s and 1950s, generally was confined to issues of draft legislation, although at times staffers tracked legislation on immigration laws and U.S. policies on world hunger.

While the NSBRO connections gave MCC a toehold in Washington, some within the organization and its constituent denominations continued to push for a more sustained presence in the capital. By the mid-1960s many religious bodies already had Washington offices: among them were various Baptist denominations, Catholics, Church of the Brethren, Methodists, Seventh Day Adventists, Lutherans, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Presbyterians, Jewish groups, Unitarian-Universalists, the United Church of Christ, the National Council of Churches and the National Association of Evangelicals.[38]

In 1955 MCC Peace Section commissioned Irvin B. Horst to study the "Washington and New York scenes"--to make note of Mennonites' present involvements there and determine whether there would be additional areas "where our witness may be given consistently with what we believe to be the Biblical standards for Christian life and work in this world."[39] Two years later Peace Section's Executive Committee reviewed Horst's brief report and agreed to plan a two-day conference on "Christian Responsibility to the State," which took place in November 1957.[40] In 1961, at the prompting of the General Conference Mennonite Church's Board of Christian Service, Peace Section agreed to sponsor an inter-Mennonite Washington study seminar.[41] In the meantime the Institute of Mennonite Studies, located at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries in Elkhart, Indiana, commissioned John H. Yoder to undertake a "Study Program on the Mennonite Witness to the Social Order." Yoder's study resulted in the publication of his significant text The Christian Witness to the State.⁴²

In 1962 MCC Peace Section's new executive secretary Edgar Metzler reopened the discussion about an increased voice in Washington, hoping to keep alive the idea of a permanent office. In a 1963 projection of Peace Section's future, Metzler and other administrators suggested that within five years a full-time staff person would be located in Washington to help Mennonites "move beyond the limited witness of the past."[43] At the time Peace Section made its five-year projection, graduate student John D. Unruh was serving in a one-month "Washington Witness to Government" assignment under the Section's direction. The assignment was geared to the civil rights crisis and the limited nuclear test-ban treaty, partly in response to "the feelings of guilt among some Mennonites that we have only witnessed to government on matters pertaining to our own immediate interests and needs--such as the conscientious objector provisions on draft legislation."[44] In his report Unruh argued that Mennonites should be more courageous in presenting their testimony to busy members of Congress and spend less time engaging in "delightful banter," story-telling and discussing mutual acquaintances. Unruh recommended that similar summer programs be implemented in New York and again in Washington and that an Akron-based person be more responsible for monitoring legislation. However, he stopped short of recommending establishing a permanent Washington office, "for I think we need to be clearer than we now are about what we would be seeking to accomplish in Washington, and why." But Unruh concluded with a pointed question: "In the legislative arena some of the questions starkly facing modern [people] are being debated--must not the church be there to give its witness and its testimony?"[45]

In 1964-65 MCC Peace Section sponsored an extensive church-state study, surveying 150 churches across the U.S. and Canada. The study prompted another major conference on church-state issues in October 1965. Then at its June 8, 1966 meeting, Peace Section's Executive Committee dealt with the issue of a Washington witness once again. The committee's minutes record these statements:

Our traditional willingness to testify when our own interests were involved in relation to conscientious objection have led to suggestions that we should also be willing to testify when the rights of others are involved. Various study conferences of Peace Section constituent groups have expressed a growing concern that witness to the state should be a dimension of our service of Christian compassion.

The executive committee's remarks were prompted by actions taken November 6, 1965 by the Peace and Social Concerns committees of the Mennonite Church and General Conference Mennonite Church. It was these denominational peace committees, especially that of the General Conference, which put pressure on MCC to establish an office. The Mennonite Church action read, in part: "In view of the discussions of a Washington Office on an inter-Mennonite basis over the years, we urge [that the] General Council of Mennonite General Conference and Mennonite Central Committee seriously consider the establishment of such an office."[46]

Feeling encouraged by their two largest constituent denominations, Peace Section commissioned yet another study of witness possibilities in Washington. This time Dwight Y. King, a Harvard Divinity School student, was asked to speak with Mennonites and others in Washington, especially representatives of other religious organizations, and to make specific recommendations for action. King's resulting 32-page, heavily footnoted, theologically sensitive document is a goldmine for those interested in the history of religious lobbying.[47] King quoted some of the fifteen denominational and ecumenical leaders he interviewed in Washington, as well as Mennonites who lived and worked in the capital. He argued in favor of a distinctively Mennonite peace witness in Washington: "Most moralists speaking to public issues are operating under models identical to those which political scientists and policy makers are using," such as just war theory. "A Washington office would provide us a platform for articulating other models to government officials and to the various denominational groups."[48] However, King cautioned that the office should function primarily as a "listening post." Helpful concepts to guide MCC Peace Section's thinking, he suggested, might be: to see it as an enabling agency for constituents seeking to be more effective servants; to view it as preventive maintenance, to anticipate change and propose solutions to problems; and to understand interest in public affairs and social action "as a legitimate spiritual gift in the church."

King, ever attuned to the concerns of MCC's constituent denominations, argued that the office would need to be careful in selecting the issues "we might be more prophetic about." He assumed that church members would be comfortable with the usual issues of nonresistance, conscription and peace but suggested that, based on their relief work, Mennonites have sufficient experience in other areas to make their Capitol Hill witness viable. He recommended looking at other examples, such as migrant worker problems, "where urgency and experience would coalesce, allowing `legitimate' witness." King also readily admitted that, whatever the issues, "the decision to open an office in Washington will have effects on the future and identity of the Mennonite denomination." He mentioned that the Washington agencies which most clearly understand "what they are about in Washington, both in terms of government and in terms of their denomination, are the ones operating most effectively, and with least frustration." Denominations have found, the report continued, that establishing Washington offices has "definite repercussion" on the sponsoring groups and that understandings of "mission to the 'state' will be closely related to a group's understandings of its mission to the world and its concept of the church."[49] Although it was two years before the MCC Washington office opened, King's report was taken seriously. His astute observations provided much of the material for the documents which would guide MCC Washington's work.

At the January 19, 1967 annual meeting of MCC Peace Section the board adopted a motion "that we favor in principle increased representation in Washington and that the Peace Section Executive Committee be instructed to work out a recommendation for implementation."[50] Shortly after the decision was made public, some more theologically and politically conservative Mennonite constituents who learned of Peace Section's intentions communicated their concerns to MCC leaders.[51] In March the plans for the Capitol Hill office, now near fruition, were nearly sidetracked when the Peace Section Executive Committee discussed the possibility of holding seminars for lay people, youth and pastors in governmental centers such as the United Nations, Ottawa and Washington. The seminars would be an alternative to the establishment of an office. The committee made no decision on the proposal.[52] Throughout these months MCC administrators continued to hear from their Vietnam service workers, who called attention to the U.S. government's contributions to the bombing and destruction they were witnessing. In April they also received a commitment of support of $2000 a year, increasing to at least $4000 in several years, from the General Conference Mennonite Church's Peace and Social Concerns Committee, which had continued to push for a Washington office.[53]

In May 1967 the U.S. Congress provided the final impetus that Mennonites needed to actually establish the office they had been planning for more than a decade. Unaware of draft legislation making its way through Congress, Mennonites almost "missed the boat," as one leader described it.[54] That spring Congress had considered a variety of alterations to Selective Service guidelines, since the Selective Service Act was scheduled to expire on June 30. During the congressional proceedings in April and early May, MCC leaders William Keeney and John E. Lapp testified before the Senate and House Armed Services Committees. The Senate passed a bill which left the conscientious objector provision relatively unchanged. What caught Mennonites by surprise was the House Armed Services Committee's bill, proposed on May 18. While the bill still provided exemptions for conscientious objectors, the provision took religious objectors back to the days of World War I: It required COs, like other young men of age, to be inducted into the military service and then furloughed out into alternative service. However, the alternative service still would be under military supervision, an arrangement which the peace churches had rejected in their 1940 discussions with Selective Service. Mennonites learned of the bill from the National Service Board for Religious Objectors, which became aware of it only after it had passed the House and gone through the Senate Armed Services Committee. A week later, after a burst of Capitol Hill activity from peace church leaders, a second bill maintaining the earlier provisions was passed by the House and then the Senate.[55] The incident made Mennonite leaders realize the difficulty of monitoring legislation from outside Washington. They also discovered that many in Congress did not know them as well as they had hoped. In his justification for opening a Mennonite office in the capital Guy F. Hershberger wrote: "If they didn't know our views on induction, how can they know what we think on scores of other questions? And if we didn't know what was going on in Washington affecting us on the conscription issue, what do we know about what is going on in scores of other areas affecting our concerns and interests?"[56]

In June the Peace Section Executive Committee instructed its executive secretary Ivan J. Kauffman to explore the possibility of opening a Washington office and to seek out possible office space in the capital.[57] Finally, at its January 18, 1968 meeting, the committee approved a "Report and Recommendation Concerning a Washington Office." [58] The approval was the final formal step necessary for opening MCC Washington, the Mennonite and Brethren in Christ "bridge" between their service commitments and the American state. In the following months, the Peace Section was busy making plans for its Washington "listening post," interviewing candidates for the director's position, raising funding for the venture and talking with constituents.[59] That July the opening of the office marked a significant turning point in Anabaptist-Mennonite history. After more than a quarter-century of painstaking gestation, MCC Washington was born in an 8' by 10' third-floor cubicle at the headquarters of the Friends Committee on National Legislation.[60]

Leading the Washington Effort

Chosen to direct the activities of MCC's new Capitol Hill office was Delton Franz, a thirty-six year old General Conference Mennonite Church pastor. In March 1968 Franz was in serious conversations with MCC about directing the organization's programs in the Congo. He learned of the Washington opening while on a year-long sabbatical at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he was taking courses in social and political science and practical theology. "I have felt increasingly the need for the church to be in communication with our federal government," he wrote to MCC that spring. "Such an assignment would receive my greatest efforts."[61] In April 1968 MCC Peace Section's chair William Keeney invited Franz to become director of the office. Three months later Franz and his wife Marian moved with their two children to the capital. When they arrived in Washington several city blocks were still smoldering from the riots following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, the tents of Resurrection City were just beginning to come down, the Vietnam War dominated American consciousness, and capital activists were planning civil rights marches. Franz and his family settled in northwest Washington, where they remained throughout Franz's nearly 26 years of leadership at MCC Washington until his retirement from the director's position in December 1993.[62]

Over the years Franz became intimately identified with MCC's work on Capitol Hill, serving as the primary speaker and image-bearer for Mennonites and Brethren in Christ in the city. For most of MCC Washington's years, Franz's personality and style--soft-spoken yet passionate--embodied the tenor of the mission itself. Franz's personal passage from the rural, sheltering wheatfields of Kansas to one of the world's power centers paralleled the transformations within MCC and the denominations he represented. He was born in 1932 during the early years of the Depression to parents of Russian-Mennonite heritage. During his elementary years he moved with his family from his birthplace in Hutchinson, Kansas--a Mennonite and Republican stronghold--to nearby Buhler.[63] Later Franz was educated in Mennonite institutions, first at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas and then, following two brief interim pastorates in Kansas, at Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Chicago. The move to Chicago was a "baptism by fire" for the 23-year-old. Seminary students lived on the city's south side, an African-American community with nearly 1800 persons per square block--triple the population before the neighborhood's racial transition and twice the number in the entire town where Franz grew up. Families in multi-story tenement buildings were squeezed into cramped apartments drastically downsized by slum landlords. Infant mortality and crime rates were high and 40% of Franz's neighbors were on welfare. The Franz children were among only six whites out of the 2600 students at the neighborhood school, Shakespeare Elementary.

A year after moving to Chicago Franz was asked to be student pastor at Woodlawn Mennonite Church, and after finishing seminary in 1958 he became a full-time minister there. Under his leadership and that of pastor Elmer Neufeld and associate pastor Vincent Harding, an African-American Seventh Day Adventist-turned Mennonite, the formerly white church became interracial and intercultural. Among its members were white Mennonite doctoral students at the University of Chicago, former sharecroppers from the South, African-American case workers employed by the Department of Social Welfare, and welfare recipients. As a pastor and community worker Franz participated in nonviolence workshops, boycotts, pickets and sit-ins with Jesse Jackson. He became active in Jackson's Operation Breadbasket (later Operation Push), which sought to upgrade the job status of African-American employees. He marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the segregated Chicago neighborhood of Gage Park and later visited with him in his home, where King was recovering from a stabbing wound. Franz also provided leadership in the Hyde Park-Kenwood Council of Churches and Synagogues, meeting with state and city politicians to discuss employment, education, housing and the public welfare needs of the poor. He contends that his work with the Council and with Kenwood-Oakdale Community Organization helped him learn firsthand what it means to address structures and systems--to question the economic underpinnings of the whole welfare system--instead of only providing humanitarian assistance. Working for social justice while studying theology and preaching in an urban congregation left an indelible impact on Franz and his understandings of an active faith rooted both in the biblical texts and in concrete experience.

Franz has suggested that his move from Chicago to Washington was as incongruous as his earlier move from the prairies of Kansas to the inner-city: "Making the pastoral rounds down glass-strewn streets, knocking on endless doors in dimly lit apartment hallways seemed a strange preparation for the assignment in the marble corridors of Capitol Hill."[64] Later, Franz recognized that his Chicago immersion in the lives of society's powerless, victimized people was an essential part of his formation for the director's role in Washington: "Faithfulness in my Washington assignment, more than anything else, means not to forget the disinherited of the earth while finding ways to sensitize the powerful to the impact of their actions on the world's powerless. To seek out witnesses to accomplish this is a crucial part of this ministry."

Growth and Change

Franz was the office's sole employee when it opened on July 1, 1968 with a first-year budget of $15,000.[65] Within the first several months his wife Marian began working part-time as a secretary and research assistant. Gradually other paid staffers and volunteers were added as MCC Washington broadened its areas of coverage.[66] In the mid-1970s Franz and two other people, one of whom was an MCC service worker, tracked legislation for MCC Peace Section. By 1995 the office's staff included two and one-half salaried employees, two full-time service workers and two part-time volunteers.[67] Over the years, with expanding space needs, MCC Washington moved twice, first into a two-room office and then in 1978 to the present 900-square-foot space. Throughout most of the 1980s the office subleased one of its four rooms to an MCC-sponsored, Washington-based immigration office.

While the capital office was evolving into its present form, MCC Peace Section in Akron also was experiencing structural change. In 1974 the Section began a split into two distinct national committees, by 1979 becoming the MCC U.S. Peace Section and the MCC Canada Peace and Social Concerns Committee. The Washington office then fell under the umbrella of the U.S. branch. At the same time a binational International Peace Section, now known as the Peace Office/International Conciliation Program, was added as a resource for MCC's overseas programs. The committees or boards which oversee the work of the various MCC branches also underwent some transformation, shifting from major denominational leaders to lay leadership. Representatives from women's groups, minority caucuses and MCC's regional boards also were added to the supervisory groups. Another significant change occurred in 1979. Until that time, MCC's constituent bodies funded the Peace Section's work directly. Alternatively, they could choose to support MCC without providing any financial or representational support to the Peace Section.[68] In 1979 the Section was fully integrated into MCC's budget and did not need to solicit its own contributions. Over the years MCC U.S. Peace Section has also added several "desks" or programs related to specific peace and justice issues. In addition to MCC Washington and the part-time office at the United Nations, other MCC U.S. Peace Section programs and their dates of origin include Mennonite Conciliation Services (1979), Peace Education (early 1980s), and Women's Concerns (1982). In 1992 the Section and its board were dissolved, with its programs being subsumed directly under MCC U.S. All of the Section's programs were continued under the unwieldy designation of MCC U.S. Peace and Justice Ministries Cluster. After the dissolution of MCC U.S. Peace Section, the Office on Crime and Justice became a part of the Cluster, and a Racism Awareness Office was added in 1993.

Many board members, administrators, staffers and constituents had ambivalent feelings about the dissolution or absorption of MCC U.S. Peace Section. For many years the Section was considered the radical wing of MCC, capable of being on the cutting edge without threatening constituent support of the larger service and relief organization. When the change was first proposed, representatives of the more conservative constituent bodies argued that MCC "can probably best maintain strong support by keeping its relief and service ministries under a separate part of its organization than the peace and social action ministries." On the other hand, progressive supporters questioned whether Section staff "will not find themselves under great pressure to abandon prophetic stances and initiatives for justice and peace, and whether MCC U.S. can indeed be counted on to support the hard choices that need to be made for the peace and justice agenda."[69] Too few years have passed to provide empirical data on the effects of the absorption. Whatever its outcome, the move embedded MCC U.S. Peace Section's programs, including the Washington office, even more deeply into the Akron-based organization.

A Concluding Postscript

From their beginnings as a Reformation movement, Mennonites have assisted others in need, prompted partly by their desire to follow in the way of Christ and by their strict obedience to the biblical injunctions to feed and clothe the strangers among them. As MCC broadened its programs and added locations around the world, Mennonites encountered more strangers--and more dilemmas--than ever before in their rural, relatively withdrawn communities in Europe, Russia and North America. While their relief outreach spread dramatically after World War II, so did the involvements of the American state. Ever more frequently, as Mennonites sought to relieve the pain of the hungry and naked, they experienced the effects of the U.S. government's programs and policies. Although at times these programs headed in the same direction as their own work, just as often the government constrained their service involvements, further complicating their efforts.

During the turbulent 1960s, guided by encounters with the state on issues related to the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, Mennonites slowly moved toward establishing a Washington office as a kind of bridging mechanism. From the office, they hoped to follow more closely legislation related to conscription and other issues about which they were concerned, and to bring their international perspective to bear on the nation's policy-makers. In 1985, John R. Burkholder rightly observed that Mennonites, in an effort to be faithful to the Great Commission,

have been forced into painful awareness of just how pervasive and determinative are the actions (or neglects) of government in affecting the lives of people we care about, next door or across town or around the world . . . . It's not a partisan political act when overseas missionaries or service workers seek hearings with Congresspersons to testify about human rights or African famine, but an expression of justice and mercy . . . . It's simply been the result of efforts to respond faithfully to the needs of suffering human beings whom we have encountered in the amazing expansion of our mission and service activity.[70]

When MCC moved into Washington, it became one among many Protestant, Catholic and Jewish "lobbies" communicating its message on Capitol Hill. Although originally envisioned as simply a "listening post"--not the mouth but the politically attuned eyes and ears of U.S. Mennonites--the office gradually has taken on a more active role in speaking to the government or orchestrating appointments for Mennonite service workers to meet with political officials. Regardless of what other directions the office may take in the future, it is clear that it is essential for Mennonites to continue to view Washington--and to speak to it--on the basis of on-the-ground service experiences. It is those experiences which prompted MCC's movement toward establishing an office in Washington, and reports based on those national and international involvements continue to make a distinctive contribution on Capitol Hill.

In many ways MCC Washington has served as a testing ground for faithful political praxis--where Mennonites' peace theology has encountered the possibilities and constraints of the political sphere. Political scientists, sociologists, theologians and ethicists will have the ongoing task of proposing alternative models--other than clear delineations between ideal, separated kingdoms on the one hand or a wholly unified kingdom on the other--which accurately describe present Mennonite experiences with the state.

Comments about this article may be e mailed to:
Keith GraberMiller, keithgm@goshen.edu