My pilgrimage in mission.

Shank, David A.

I come from a marginal Christian people. At least as far back as the 1560s, my ancestors were a part of a Taufer (Anabaptist) community of faith that had taken refuge at Eggiwil in the mountainous Langnau district of Switzerland. In 1717 Christian Shank, son Michael, and their families migrated to William Penn's Pennsylvania. In 1816 my mother's great-grandfather John Neuhauser, an Alsatian Amish miller, immigrated to Canada to avoid conscription into Napoleon's army. I was born to Charles and Crissie (Yoder) Shank on October 7, 1924.

Preparation

At age eleven I was baptized in the Orrville (Ohio) Mennonite Church. I knew nothing of other churches except that they were said not to practice the "all things" that Jesus told his apostles to teach to all nations (Matt. 28:20). I was the only Mennonite in my class in school in North Canton, Ohio. We remained a marginal people.

While at Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana, my parents had been deeply influenced by the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions and subsequently, from 1915 to 1919, had served as missionaries in Dhamtari, Central Province, India. My father taught industrial arts to male youths who had been orphaned by the great famine of 1896-99, and my mother worked with Bible women engaged in grassroots colportage and evangelism. My parents buried their first child "under the mango tree," and their mission was cut short when their second child developed life-threatening rheumatic fever. Thereafter my father lived under the burden of having abandoned the call because he was unwilling to pay the price of staying.

In 1929, when I was five years old, my mother died giving birth to her eighth child. From the early 1920s until her death, she had been the literature secretary for the Mennonite Women's Missionary Association, and she was the first American Mennonite woman author. (1) She often spoke about missions and India from the pulpit, at a time when Mennonite women did not speak in worship services. Her book with its pictures and my parents' India photograph album and "India trunk" of exotic mementos never ceased to provoke my wonder and curiosity. Former colleagues from India who visited our family seemed to be another breed of Mennonite.

My father lost his job as research engineer for the Hoover vacuum company because he could not in good conscience work on its contracts related to war materiel. He moved our family to Goshen so we children could attend Goshen College from home. Mission, peace, and education were intimately tied together in our family. During my first year of college I met my future spouse, Wilma Hollopeter. World War II interrupted college, and I served in Civilian Public Service (CPS) units during three years of "public service of national importance." Here I met other varieties of Mennonites, as well as Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Baptists, Pentecostals, and Catholics who were Christian conscientious objectors. This was grassroots ecumenicity.

In 1945 I was invited to transfer to Mennonite Central Committee's headquarters, at Akron, Pennsylvania, to edit the C.P.S. Bulletin for Mennonite CPS units. In mid-1946 Harold S. Bender organized a conference on Anabaptism at which Franklin Littell presented a chapter of his Yale doctoral dissertation on the missionary dynamics of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, adding a missional dimension to Bender's earlier threefold "essence of Anabaptism." (2) For Littell the church was (1) disciples of Jesus responding to the Good News of God's reign, (2) in a community of mutual support, (3) committed to God's service through nonviolent love, and (4) engaged in the mission of sharing the Good News. I discussed my future with Bender, and he explained that, following relief ministries in Europe, the Mennonite Church would need church workers with an Anabaptist vision who were well trained in Bible and theology. I returned to Goshen College to earn a B.A. in sociology and then enrolled in Goshen College Biblical Seminary.

Between college and seminary, Wilma Hollopeter and I were married. Wilma has been the mother and co-educator of our four children, as well as my collaborator. With independent personal calls to India, we easily decided to go there to work in my parents' unfinished mission. J. D. Graber of the Mennonite Board of Missions, however, told us that because of the postcolonial climate in India, Western missionaries were no longer welcome. He asked if we would be open to postwar relief service in Belgium, serving as missionaries to Europe, the historic heartland of Christianity. American Mennonites had entered Belgium immediately after World War II, aiding German prisoners of war and refugees from eastern Europe. Our assignment would be to build on those contacts to reestablish an Anabaptist witness among Belgians.

Mission I: Belgium, 1950-73

In September 1950, Wilma, nine-month-old Michael, and I sailed for Belgium. A year later, in October 1951, we were joined by Orley and Jane Swartzentruber. We saw ourselves as servants of Jesus Christ, to whom we wished to introduce others.

A Mennonite center. The relief team Bender had mentioned soon left for the United States, and we were on our own. We continued their assistance to Pastor Charles Grikman in his ministry to scattered refugee and immigrant Slavic congregations in Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Trieste, Italy, but in Belgium his refugee work served foreigners. We needed to orient ourselves more directly to the Belgian context.

Belgium's postwar recovery was slow. A dense and industrialized population of 9 million people was undergoing rapid dechristianization and secularization. Class consciousness and permanent cultural/linguistic conflict between the Catholic Flemish and socialist Walloons roiled relations. Belgium was still a colonial power, and mission was understood as work among the various tribes in the Belgian Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi, not as work among the Belgian people themselves.

Orley Swartzentruber and I studied Belgian history and literature at the Free University, in Brussels. Observing that there was no Protestant student ministry, we proposed to the Protestant Federation that a student center be established. The proposal fell flat when it received the response, "Why would this federation of proper and respectable churches want Belgian Protestantism to be represented at the Free University by a sect such as the Mennonites--and American Mennonites at that?" We were pushed to the margins.

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In January 1952, seven American Mennonite men living in Europe--former relief workers, missionaries, and university students--met in Amsterdam. I made a presentation to them entitled "A Missionary Approach to a Dechristianized Society." (3) Our conversation turned on the relevance of Bender's Anabaptist vision for European Christianity in the postwar ecclesiastical and spiritual context, as well as for American Mennonitism. Between 1954 and 1971 the group published a series of pamphlets under the title Concern. (4)

Clearly, the fruits of our work in Europe would not resemble the sending Mennonite denomination in North America. Our ministry would be shaped by the four Anabaptist accents--discipleship, fellowship, the service of nonviolent love, and mission--but a local expression would emerge out of a grassroots understanding that the Spirit works with people in their own contexts, wherever Christ is present with two or three gathered in his name (Matt. 18:20).

The Brussels East congregation. Jules and Madeleine Lambotte became our first members. Jules, a Flemish evangelist of the national Protestant Union, had been converted during the street-preaching ministry of the Belgian Gospel Mission, renounced Nazism, and embraced pacifist convictions. He wanted a spiritual home that recognized his pacifism. Andre Vandermensbrugghe, who came from traditional bourgeois Catholicism and was determined to refuse military service, also joined. We located our congregation in East Brussels, creating the Foyer Fraternel and ordaining Jules Lambotte as evangelist. Following the public installation of Lambotte, Pierre Widmer, an influential French Mennonite leader, gave a series of Good News lectures.

Observing the one-by-one character of congregational growth, I was impressed that the singular Christ event, variously seized, trusted, appropriated, and believed, is like a diamond approached by individuals with their different personalities, experiences, gifts, and needs. The light reflected by one facet of that diamond can serve as an entry point to faith in Christ and enable a beginning appropriation of the fullness reflected by all the facets. The challenge is to recognize and honor this diversity of entry points to faith and personal itineraries in the Spirit toward faith-fullness. (5)

The Bourgeois-Rixensart congregation. For some years we administered a children's home at Ohain. A board member had been holding a Bible study in the nearby home of the Debroux family, who had Catholic origins but who during the war had become deeply involved in the Resistance through the Communist Party's underground. I visited and then began participating and was invited, as a pastor, to lead the studies. As others joined, the group grew. On Easter Sunday 1955 a second grassroots congregation began with eight baptisms. The flavor of the group was seasoned by Brethren piety and informality, with the Lord's Supper celebrated every Sunday. The members eventually erected a temple, and the Eglise Evangelique de Rixensart, as they called themselves, attracted Christians of many denominations living within a ten-kilometer radius. Ursmer Lefebvre was ordained for the Bourgeois congregation while studying at the Protestant Theological Faculty in Brussels, but later, when Ursmer and Suzanne Lefebvre followed a missionary call to Burundi, I again assumed pastoral responsibilities for the congregation. A biblical theology reflecting the fourfold Anabaptist thrust described above held the group together. Overt Anabaptist or Mennonite references were exceptional. for we were perceived locally to be the Protestant church. My own preoccupation no longer turned on being the true church of Christ, but rather on truly being the church of Christ in this place.

As an addition to our existing French Mennonite affiliation, we asked for an associate relationship with the Belgian Reformed Church. An Anabaptist/Reformed congregation was an ecclesiastical novelty, but the Reformed Church's latest liturgy provided for an option for a service of presentation of a newborn and a service of baptism on confession of faith. I was invited to participate in the Reformed synod and held renewal meetings for Reformed consistories. Despite all the renewal, I felt I was getting involved in "churchianity" all over again.

During those years I discovered Jacques Ellul's False Presence of the Kingdom, which led me to his earlier work The Presence of the Kingdom and ultimately to a shelf of some fifty of his books dealing with Christ, church, and world. These writings were pivotal in maintaining my bearings.

Congo missions, Congolese, and Kimbanguists. We had not foreseen our interaction with Mennonite missionaries from two North American agencies who were going to and coming from the Belgian Congo. Workers came to Belgium to study French, take courses in the Belgian colonial school, and study at the School of Tropical Medicine, in Antwerp. This relationship took on new importance following Congolese independence in 1960 and the increased presence of Congolese people in Belgium.

In 1966 Jean Van Lierde of the Mouvement de Reconciliation contacted us about two Kimbanguist leaders who were returning from a world gathering of pacifists in Copenhagen. Belgian Protestant pastors would not receive them, and Van Lierde asked us to give them hospitality. During dinner in our home we heard their story--with its echoes of the sixteenth-century Anabaptist story. Although I was aware of Edwin and Irene Weaver's experiences in Nigeria, this was my first contact with African Initiated Churches (AICs). (6) This encounter led the Mennonite Central Committee and Eirene, a Mennonite program for European conscientious objectors, to place teachers and agriculturalists in Kimbanguist institutions. In 1971 the head of the church, Kuntima Diangienda, invited me to the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth by his father, the Prophet Simon Kimbangu. Some 400,000 Kimbanguists gathered at the holy city of Nkamba, but missionaries and agencies in Kinshasa were largely unaware of the event and its significance. I was impressed with what I heard and saw, and a new dimension of mission opened up for us. (7)

Transition. In 1973 Wilbert Shenk, director for overseas ministries for the Mennonite Board of Missions, invited Wilma and me to accompany Marlin Miller, later to become president of Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana, across West Africa. (At the time Miller was director of the Mennonite Student Center in Paris where he was involved especially in assisting African students, who experienced much racism.) We would explore whether we were open to a ministry among AICs like that of the Weavers in southeastern Nigeria and Ghana, where they emphasized reading and studying the Scriptures with emerging AIC leaders and accessing the resources of the mainline Protestant seminaries.

During this trip we received two direct and poignant calls. The first came from a dozen leaders of diverse AICs in Cotonou, Benin, to develop a Bible-training program for their ministers. We heard the second at Petit Bassam, near Abidjan, C6te d'Ivoire, when John Ahui, aged spiritual head of the Harrist Church in that country, asked us, "Help me water the tree," a responsibility he had received from the Prophet Harris in 1928. At an earlier formal dinner, Harrist Head Preacher Cyril Abueya of Abobo-te had explained that "God is white [in West Africa, the color of spirit] and you are white, so you are the older brother, and you have received from our Father the patrimony to share with your younger brothers. Not to do so would be a betrayal of our Father." A politically prominent Ivorian Methodist told us that this Harrist overture was not only unique but scarcely believable; he urged us to respond. Without internal renewal, he argued, the largely coastal Harrists, simple monotheists, would in time be absorbed into Islam, which was descending from the north.

We were in transition, but at neither West African location was the local context ready for us. We decided to use this time for further preparation in anticipation of accepting this compelling invitation. We would not arrive in Abidjan until April 1979. (8)

Mission II: United States and Scotland, 1973-79

We returned to the United States in 1973. I taught at Goshen College and then served as campus pastor for two years. Although I was asked to stay on as campus minister, Wilma and I were committed to the openings in Africa represented by those earlier calls.

In August 1976 we left for the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland. There Andrew Walls had established his Institute for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World, and Harold W. Turner had launched his New Religious Movements research and documentation program. In light of the invitation from John Ahui, I began an in-depth study of the Prophet Harris himself and discovered texts and manuscripts from his time that opened up new perspectives and enlarged appreciation for his self-understanding. In 19821 completed a three-volume doctoral thesis that documented and reflected on these understandings, their roots, their expressions, and their interrelationships. Walls generously referred to the published version of my thesis, Prophet Harris, the "Black Elijah" of West Africa, as a landmark volume. (9)

The Harrist Church was the fruit of a messianic movement, which led me to a study of the phenomenon of messianism, nearly universally dependent on the Judeo-Christian scriptures. My own Mennonite/Anabaptist story was one type of messianic resurgence. There had been many similar movements before the sixteenth century, and the Kimbanguists, Harrists, and some other AICs were also similar, existing in non-Western contexts four centuries later. I shared these insights with my colleague Wilbert Shenk, who was committed to working on a messianic missiology. A collaborative volume to which I contributed two chapters was published later, in 1993. (10)

Mission III: French West Africa, 1979-89

We left for Abidjan in April 1979, anticipating a last decade of service under the Mennonite Board of Missions before retirement from ministry. I had a vision of what God was doing--and wanted to do--for humanity and creation, but I still had a lot to learn. In Cote d'Ivoire we joined our younger American colleagues James and Jeanette Krabill. Unlike in Belgium thirty years earlier, we were committed not to introduce another denomination. When asked, we explained that we were Mennonite Christians sent to learn about African Christian life and understandings and to share--through Bible study and making available the resources we had gathered on the Prophet Harris--and so to enable African churches in their various itineraries. We were disponibles (i.e., available) through conversation, dialogue, hospitality, or pastoral ministry--or, as requested, by teaching Bible, Christian history, or theology. Our special concern was to respond to the calls of the Harrist Church and the dozen AIC leaders in Cotonou.

With the Krabills, we lived in the burgeoning Ebrie village of Blokosso-Abidjan, a popular quarter of the city surrounded by urban sprawl. For almost three years we shared space on the second floor of the residence of the village schoolmaster with the Krabills, with whom we ate our daily noon and evening meals. Then Head Preacher N'Guessan Legre Benoit of the Dida Harrists requested that the Krabills move to the interior Dida village of Yocoboue to establish a Bible-study program for the church's preachers and youth. In Blokosso we set up a documentation and research center related to African religious phenomena, change, and history, which Wilma managed. Word got around that we had valuable resources. Visitors came steadily, including many Harrists, who were particularly interested in the material I had collected about their prophet.

From the beginning, Harrist Church Spiritual Head John Ahui welcomed us, and he blessed and supported the Krabills' biblical work among the Dida. However, some among the older, largely illiterate Ebries who controlled the Harrist National Committee disagreed with Ahui's openness, although the Union of Harrist Youth was receptive. In time, the conflict became more than intergenerational.

Within the larger Harrist community, two parallel interpretations of the Prophet Harris were in competition. One tradition stemmed from the first Harrist catechism, published in 1956 and based on oral tradition, which proclaimed that God loves all peoples of the earth. When a people in distress cry out, God sends them a prophet: Moses for the Jews, Jesus Christ for the whites, Muhammad for the Arabs, William Wade Harris for the blacks. God sent the Prophet Harris to deliver black Africans from their idols and fetishes and to teach them to live in peace with one another. The other tradition affirmed that God loves all peoples of the world, and when they cried out in their distress, God sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to deliver them. But the whites killed him before he could reach Africa. Yet God did not give up on Africa. He sent the Prophet Harris to tell people about Christ and do Christ's work among Africans. Harris delivered from fetishes and idols, taught God's law, and made peace between tribes.

The Krabills learned that the Dida people largely followed the second tradition and were eager for biblical instruction, but the Ebrie and Attie peoples, to whom we related, followed the first. Harris was their prophet, and Christ was the white man's prophet. While the Krabills were able to carry out a program of biblical teaching among the Dida people, our mission in Ebrie and Attie territory was to share what we had learned about the Prophet Harris and his thought--a ministry of the Gospel through the work and understandings of the Prophet Harris himself.

The documentation told us that the prophet had sought a universal, Christ-centered movement that would bring all the churches and missions under Christ's reign. We shared this basic understanding through conversations in Harrist homes and in our own home, at meals following our visits to Harrist churches, to youth congresses, to preachers and other leaders who came to our sun shelter up on the roof, and through Sunday afternoon lectures for whole villages, organized by Harrist leaders under thatch-roofed apatams. In addition, I wrote a pamphlet that was essentially a resume of Harris's Christian thought. (11) More than 6,000 copies were sold--largely to Harrists--through local Christian bookstores, and the work was reprinted repeatedly. The pamphlet instructed thousands of Harrists in the newly literate generations, who reported that Christ-oriented apostles and preachers within the church were freed to proclaim Christian accents more boldly. The pamphlet may well be the most efficacious piece I ever wrote, unwittingly contributing to the possibility that the Harrist movement would embrace more fully the vision of its founder. In 1998, less than ten years after our departure from Cote d'Ivoire, the Harrist church formally affirmed that it was a Christ-confessing church and was accepted as a member of the World Council of Churches.

During our decade of ministry we visited some forty Harrist congregations (always at their invitation) in ten different ethnic groups. Not once during that time was I asked to speak in a Harrist church. We always dressed in white, as do the Harrists, to attend their churches. We accepted invitations to festivals, where we would be received as honored guests and would dance through the village streets behind singing "honor women" as we were shown off to the village. We celebrated events with Harrists, visited occasionally in their homes, invited their leaders for meals, all the while aware of behind-the-scenes resistance to our presence. We observed and listened, asked questions, checked and rechecked answers, listened to stories, heard their understandings of problems, and listened to interpretations of their sermons and their life, generally valuing their experiences. As participant observers, we took copious notes.

The Harrist movement saw itself involved in a spiritual contest with "fetish," like that of Elijah and the priests of Baal, or the spiritual conflicts that Harris himself had confronted during his ministry. Nevertheless, in contrast to the dynamic, eschatological, kingdom-of-Christ orientation of Harris during his original impact, the Harrist movement had become ritualized and hardened into an institution seeking recognition. Yet it was still winning people out of their traditional religions into a fetish-free, law-restrained (i.e., it's "sin" only if caught) monotheistic faith, experienced as a break with and major advance over paganisme.

Cote d'Ivoire's mission-planted churches--Roman Catholic, various Baptist, Methodist, Christian and Missionary Alliance, Adventist, various independent evangelical, Assemblies of God, and several Pentecostal--had all profited, largely unconsciously, from the remarkable and unique spiritual breakthrough of the Prophet Harris in 1913-14. In providing a foundation for the mission-planted churches, the Harrist Church is unique among AICs, which typically form by splitting off from mission-planted churches in reaction to their Western character. Yet the missionary churches have viewed the Harrists as an illiterate, fetish-enspirited, marginal African sect, from which people need to be converted.

Interactions with Harrists. Although we were aware of their reservations about any religious input from us, we remained available to the Harrists--present as Christian whites, open to learning about them, sympathetic to their situation, appreciative of certain dimensions of their religion. We were students of their prophet with documentation they had never seen, ready to share in discussion and study of the Bible. This posture gave us a wide variety of opportunities for building relationships. In several of the secondary schools of the capital, Harrist youth came together at the same time as Methodist and Catholic youth met for free-time religious study. At the request of the Harrist youth and with the full approval of Pierre Anin, then president of the Harrist National Committee, I gave a series of biblical and historical studies. During a typical week in Blokosso, there was always a trickle of Harrists interested in the materials in the Documentation and Resource Center.

We asked ourselves about the appropriateness of our open availability to the Harrists. Indeed, on one occasion Wilma and I met the new president of the National Committee, accompanied by his secretary, and asked them frankly whether we should remain in Cote d'Ivoire for the Harrists. The secretary immediately stated, "I see absolutely no reason whatsoever for you to remain; you are entirely free to leave at any time." The president, however, without missing a beat, responded, "It's just like my secretary says, we need a historian; you can be very helpful to me, particularly in these times when we lack clarity among us. You should indeed stay, and I will be grateful to you." The president encouraged our work with the Harrist youth meetings. When the youth, however, ultimately joined the National Committee, to gain the elders' approval they had to make a clean break with us, even formally opposing the Krabills' work that had been thoroughly accepted by Dida Harrism and blessed by Ahui. (12)

When we left Cote d'Ivoire in 1989, we went to the national offices at Bingerville to officially turn over to the church a full copy of our collected documentation about the Prophet Harris. An erstwhile friend, now National Committee president, prevented us from giving farewell greetings to Spiritual Head John Ahui. It was the ultimate affront, a necessary political stance that enabled the president to maintain his authority. After we had lived for ten years in Cote d'Ivoire for and among the Harrist Church, it was a peculiar au revoir for us. Yet we understood.

An African itinerary to New Testament faith. Through rich contacts and relationships with the entire Christian community, I was able to get a feel for what was going on, not only among the Harrists, but also among the mission-planted churches. It was clear there were many Harrists whose personal itineraries had led them to a vital faith in Christ, and there were many in the mission-planted churches who were struggling with faith issues, even though they had learned all the proper language and practices of faith as members of recognized churches. These Christians did not yet have, in the words of Catholic missionary Jean-Paul Eschlimann, "the same confidence in Jesus that their brothers have in the customs of their ancestors and the Koran." (13)

The study of many African Christian faith pilgrimages led me to understand that, just as there were religious movements all across Africa that ranged from traditional religion to Western mission churches, so also individual African Christians had their itineraries. These spiritual journeys moved progressively toward fuller understandings of God, Christ, and the life of faith, as the Spirit gave more and more clarity to understandings of the Gospel and the New Testament writings. (14)

Call from Cotonou. Contacts with AIC leaders in Benin were renewed in 1983. The Inter-Confessional Protestant Council invited me to conduct a one-week Bible seminar entitled "The Shepherd and His Flock." At that first seminar we were told in the open discussion that the leaders perceived their main problem to be "sheep-stealing" among them. We were also told that we fulfilled two conditions necessary for the seminar's success: we were from outside that context, and we personally had no denominational ambitions for Benin. We were committed only to building up the churches that were already there, recognizing the kingdom of God, in some sense, as already present in their midst. Over time this goal evolved into the Institut Biblique de Benin, in Cotonou, which became the shared enterprise of four unions of churches with their many and various congregations.

Wilma and I settled in Blokosso-Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, but during these years we were informed and enriched by various visits, exchanges, and ministries in Liberia, Ghana, Benin, Zaire, Kenya, Central African Republic, South Africa, Transkei, Lesotho, and Botswana.

In Retirement (1989-)

Back in the United States in 1989, though officially retired, I taught two semesters at Bluffton University, Bluffton, Ohio, and we served the Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference both as mobile ministers and overseers of three congregations in Elkhart, Indiana, and by participating for several years on its Commission for Spiritual Deliverance. We have been available to share about our ministry, lecturing, teaching, preaching, and speaking wherever invited. Now, since 2003, in Greencroft Retirement Community, Goshen, we keep in touch with what is going on in the world, for which we pray, even as we pray for different dimensions of the missio Dei in the world.

In 1992 we visited Cotonou again. To our surprise, the president of the National Committee of the Harris Church, who three years earlier had rudely spurned us at the time of our departure from Cote d'Ivoire, came to our door. Now he was on an evangelistic mission, accompanied by a choir and church officials, including John Ahui, by then about 100 years of age. The president was warm and friendly. It was the week before Easter, and we accompanied the dancing chorus through the streets of Cotonou, attending the president's lectures and evening meetings, as well as the Easter Sunday service. For the worship service, the president's protocol placed Wilma with his own wife on the left front bench of the church and placed me with several preachers on the right front row. Toward the end of the service, the president gave a special word of recognition, thanking us profusely for our presence with them during the week of witness and on the occasion of the Easter celebration and the meal to come, which he spoke of as a sort of communion meal.

The president concluded with reference to "the Shank family, who has given us unconditional support for twenty years." At the meal, he had us seated at the table of honor with Spiritual Head John Ahui, with the president and me on the right, and the official with the title "first head preacher and cross carrier" on the left with Wilma. During the solemn meal, conversation was typically absent, and it concluded with the aged Ahui's ceremonial exit. Wilma approached him, extended her hand, and greeted him with "Bonjour, Papa." He stopped and held her hand very warmly, and at length he smiled and repeated several times, "Ahh, Madame, Madame!" just as he had done on previous occasions when we visited him at his home in Petit Bassam. We were utterly astonished. From the beginning of our African decade, we lived with the fundamental messianic hope that all things will eventually be reconciled in Jesus Christ; but the way that happens, and is yet to happen, has not been fully disclosed.

In 2000 Wilma and I were invited to Belgium for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of our work in there, and the twentieth anniversary of the current Brussels Mennonite Center. Catholic and Protestant representatives affirmed the importance of the ongoing Mennonite presence and witness in Belgium. Father Thadde Barnas of the Catholic National Office for Ecumenism delivered a written apology for Roman Catholic actions against Anabaptist-Mennonites carried out four hundred years earlier.

Conclusion

The Good News of God's word is fulfilling its purpose as people meet Jesus Christ. The One Spirit-Creator of all things--by the covenant of grace and peace fulfilled through the life and teachings of Israel's Messiah and his cross, resurrection, ascension, and reign--is reconciling alienated humans to their unique source, to various others, and to creation. I take this perception to be biblical, apostolic, Anabaptist, Mennonite, holistic, charismatic, ecumenical, catholic, missionary--and still marginal.

Notes

(1.) Crissie Y. Shank, Letters from Mar)/(Scottdale, Pa.: Mennonite Publishing House, 1924).

(2.) See Harold S. Bender, "The Anabaptist Vision," Church History 13 (March 1944): 3-24 and Mennonite Quarterly Review 18 (April 1944): 67-88, www.mcusa-archives.org/library/anabaptistvision/anabap tistvision.html.

(3.) Published in Mennonite Quarterly Review 28 (January 1954): 39-55.

(4.) See J. Lawrence Burkholder, "Concern Pamphlets Movement," in Mennonite Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1990), 177-80.

(5.) See David A. Shank, "Toward an Understanding of Christian Conversion," Mission Focus 5 (November 1976): 1-7.

(6.) See Edwin and Irene Weaver, The Uyo Story (Elkhart, Ind.: Mennonite Board of Missions, 1970).

(7.) See David A. Shank, "An Indigenous Church Comes of Age: Kimbanguism," Mennonite Life 27 (June 1972): 53-55.

(8.) At the Harrists' request, Weaver and Miller arranged translation of Gordon Halliburton's important historical volume The Prophet Harris, abridged ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973; French ed., Le Prophete Harris, trans. Marie-Noelle Faure [Abidjan: Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1984]).

(9.) David A. Shank, Prophet Harris, the "Black Elijah" of West Africa, abridged by Jocelyn Murray (Leiden: Brill, 1994).

(10.) Wilbert R. Shenk, ed., The Transfiguration of Mission: Biblical, Theological, and Historical Foundations (Scottdale, Pa: Herald Press, 1993); my chapters are "Jesus the Messiah: Messianic Foundations of Mission," 37-82, and "Consummation of Messiah's Mission," 220-41.

(11.) David A. Shank, "Bref resume de la pensee du prophete William Wade Harris," Perspectives missionnaires 5 (1983): 34-54.

(12.) In addition to Bible instruction in six village centers, James Krabill was also helping to save a rich heritage of Dida hymnody; see James R. Krabill, The Hymnody of the Harrist Church among the Dida of South Central Ivory Coast, 1915-1949 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995).

(13.) Jean-Paul Eschlimann made this assessment of the more than 11,500 Catholics in his parish among the Agni people, as reported in Afrique et Parole, Letter no. 10, ed. Rene Luneau (1984).

(14.) See, for example, David A. Shank, "African Christian Religious Itinerary: Toward an Understanding of the Religious Itinerary from the Faith of African Traditional Religion(s) to That of the New Testament," in Exploring New Religious Movements: Essays in Honour of Harold W. Turner, ed. A. F. Walls and Wilbert R. Shenk (Elkhart, Ind.: Mission Focus Publications, 1990), 143-62; published in French as "Itineraire religieux d'un chretien africain," Perspectives missionnaires 31 (1996): 30-52.

David A. Shank's 2007 account of his pilgrimage was longer than the IBMR can accept. The full version appeared in a volume of his missiological writings, Mission from the Margins, ed. James R. Krabill (Elkhart, Ind.: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 2010), published three weeks before his death, in October 2010. His colleague Wilbert R. Shenk, a contributing editor, with the assistance of Wilma Shank, prepared this version of Shank's account of his pilgrimage in mission.