Awake, Our Souls!
This presidential column originally appeared in the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of The Bulletin.
By Rebecca J. Stoltzfus ’83, President of Goshen College
EDITOR’S NOTE: In January 2025, President Rebecca Stoltzfus wrote a white paper offering a contemporary vision for faith formation at Goshen College. Rooted in our commitment to Christ-centeredness and our Anabaptist-Mennonite faith tradition, the paper explores how we can faithfully navigate a changing cultural and institutional landscape while deepening our practices of faith. This is a short summary of the longer piece with reflections and recommendations. Read the full white paper here.
In the original words of Menno Simons, an early Anabaptist leader for whom Mennonites are named: “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.” After persevering through a slow and fickle spring in Northern Indiana, all manner of dormancy is awakening, the daffodils, magnolias and serviceberries bursting forth, instructing and inspiring us to “awake, our souls!”
True evangelical faith means faith in without-a-doubt, gotta-tell-you-about-it, really, really good news. This is the sort of good news that apparently struck the radical reformers of the 1500s when they read the gospels for themselves, and it transformed those early Anabaptists from farmers and townspeople into radical change-makers. The good news is that God is love in action. These people could no longer lie dormant, and they bloomed with a fierce beauty that is echoing again these 500 years later.
I wonder: What is the good news awakening in us and through us today?
When Jesus was asked: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied that the first and greatest commandment was: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
As we crafted our mission statement in 2019, this Scripture emerged as essential for us. It was distilled into the final clause of this sentence:
Shaped by Anabaptist- Mennonite tradition, we integrate academic excellence and real-world experience with active love for God and neighbor.
Including the phrase “active love for God and neighbor” resonated as a reference to Matthew 22, and expressed concisely the synthesis of inner and outer commitments of our tradition.
As we awaken from dormancy in the springtimes of our lives, we are inspired by words from another radical reformationist, Ulrich Zwingli, the “people’s priest” who began to preach the Gospel of Matthew in the local German. John D. Roth ’81, professor emeritus of history and project director of the Anabaptism at 500 initiative, highlights and expands words of Zwingli’s for our time: “For God’s sake… do something courageous — have the courage to love — actively, imaginatively, vulnerably” and, as we say at GC, “rooted in the way of Jesus.”
May we be courageous, creative and compassionate leaders, with a faith that does not lie dormant. Awake, our souls!