Josh wrote: ↑Wed Apr 17, 2024 9:50 am
To quote Matthew Milioni at KFW (from my memory);
“Plain people, Amish and Mennonites are so close to the truth, yet almost none of them are saved [referring to baptism by pouring]. If we are able to get more church plants going, perhaps we could save a few of them.”
FotW’s founders see themselves as delivering salvation (notable is that they term their evangelists “apostles”) to plain Anabaptists.
It's delightful that this longstanding exercise in creative reframing has now been upgraded to a direct quote without the faintest resemblance to Matthew's phrasing or vocabulary. How long, I wonder, until it loses the square brackets too?
What's even stranger is that those of us who have been privy to Matthew's non-public unfiltered personal views for years have heard him consistently say just the opposite: that their preferred targets for evangelism are urbanites and university students, and that conservative Anabaptists, in general, tend to be a poor fit for this type of church.
Note that if Josh's oft-repeated claim is true, these two visionaries decided to launch an outreach to the famously agrarian Plain People by planting a series of house churches
in major cities.
That's about as plausible as trying to reach mommy bloggers by erecting a booth inside a pesticide vat.
Which is more likely, I wonder: that the founders of an ambitious church planting effort have chosen to work exclusively in the specific areas their targets most studiously avoid; or that one man's recollection of a single remark heard years ago has suffered the erosion all memories experience over long timespans and many retellings?
Having grown up in conservative Anabaptist culture, I remember what it was like to assume that any group that wears head coverings and talks about the Sermon on the Mount must be either seeking to learn from us or actively trying to poach our people.
It was humbling to realize that the Christian landscape is littered with little movements about as serious and committed as ours, who really aren't thinking about us much at all.
(Note: For several years under Dean Taylor's presidency, Sattler College's recruiting did focus, rightly or wrongly, almost exclusively on Anabaptist students. This difference of focus from the intent of the founder was one—though far from the only—contributing factor to the turmoil at the school that originally launched this thread. Supporting this is the fact that since Taylor's departure and the board reshuffle Sattler's recruiting appears to have pivoted back to the more diverse range of Christian groups they had marketed to during their first year or two.)