Lois Gunden et le Secours mennonite aux enfants (France, 1941-1943)

Le Mennonite Central Committee a commémoré en 2020 les 100 ans de son existence. Peu connu en France, le principal organisme « de secours » mennonite a pourtant œuvré sur le territoire dès la fin de la Guerre d’Espagne, en ouvrant, notamment, des maisons de convalescence pour enfants pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. En dirigeant la Villa Saint-Christophe, à Canet-en-Roussillon, de 1941 à 1943, une jeune volontaire mennonite a ainsi participé au sauvetage de plusieurs enfants Juifs. Lois Gunden, reconnue « Juste parmi les nations », incarne le rapport privilégié des activités de « care » avec le sauvetage des juifs persécutés, ainsi que l’évolution du statut des femmes dans les églises mennonites américaines par le biais de l’humanitaire.

To Minister or Administer

Across the Global South, missionary and religious organizations served as state proxies in “secular” modernization projects. In Bolivia, Protestants flocked to new colonization zones at the invitation of the MNR. This chapter explores the Methodist Mission Board and the Mennonite Central Committee (a North American relief agency). Each made Bolivia a center of its global operations and joined with several Maryknoll nuns in an improvised United Church Committee (CIU) in the wake of a devastating 1968 flood. The CIU would go on to administer the San Julián Project, the largest colonization program in Bolivian history during a period of authoritarian rule ushered in by General Hugo Banzer’s 1971 coup. Faith-based development practitioners worked on the ground with colonists, gained the confidence of Banzer, and channeled international funding. During that time, San Julián attracted a range of academics and planners who were drawn to its unique orientation program and spatial design. The chapter follows the trajectories of these mobile actors who leveraged their work in Bolivia into new roles with international agencies and NGOs across the Global South. These “go-betweens” crossed boundaries separating the revolutionary and the authoritarian, the secular and the sacred, and the frontier and the academy.

A Reflexive View of Refugee Integration and Inclusion: A Case Study of the Mennonite Central Committee and the Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program

Through a qualitative case study with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) sponsorship groups and former refugee newcomers, we adopt a reflexive, relational, and systemic lens (Bourdieu) to analyze the institutional and interpersonal relationships in the Private Sponsorship of Refugees (PSR) Program, and more specifically, the ways in which MCC Ontario’s sponsorship program invigorates or frustrates dynamics of social inclusion. We situate the institutional relations of the PSR Program as nested social fields and sub-fields, revealing complementary and competing systems of capital that direct explicit and implicit visions for “success” in MCC sponsorships. A peculiar Mennonite/MCC social field and structure of capital generates institutional and social tensions, yet an ambivalent disposition or divided habitus presents possibilities for seeing, understanding, and challenging dynamics of social exclusion.

“There’s some colonial in my postcolonial”: Community Development Workers’ Perspectives on Faith-based Service Learning in a Guatemalan Context

Faith-based relief and development organization Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) has been involved in the country of Guatemala since 1976 when they responded to relief needs in light of the devastating earthquake at the time. Since then MCC has invested in a number of communities throughout Guatemala in various capacities, one of which has been the development of service and learning opportunities aimed at exposing and connecting students/participants in the global north with the people and issues within the global south. As researchers of service learning, who are also committed to a faith tradition and have participated in or have been in relationship with MCC in some capacity, we are interested in evaluating how their faith tradition has helped to both construct their practice as well as critique it. One of the aims of our research is to collaborate with MCC practitioners in assessing and examining their current practice of service/learning in Guatemala in an effort to discover ways in which they are creating opportunities for positive societal change – both in the lives of the student/ participants and the communities in Guatemala, while critiquing the traditional colonial and neocolonial approaches to development.

Creedal Monologism and Theological Articulation in the Mennonite Central Committee

This chapter presents an ethnography of Christian theology. It does so by examining theological articulation in and through the creedal form. Creeds may be taken as an archetypal monologic mode of expression due to their monovocal presentation of standardized, non-debatable claims. Through close attention to how and why creeds are created it is possible to examination the contours and operations of the monological imagination. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research, this chapter explores the creedal articulation, as well as instances of disarticulation, within two North American Anabaptist service organizations, namely the Mennonite Central Committee and Christian Aid Ministries. Their differing strategies of theological articulation illuminate the uses and limits of monological discourse.