A “Once upon a Time” Story about Hope Fellowship

by David Janzen of Reba Place Fellowship

Shared in the fall of 2014 on Hope Fellowship’s 20th anniversary

I bring greetings from everyone at Reba who love you, pray for you, and celebrate your history of God’s faithfulness over these twenty years.

Some of my best experiences as a parent, and as a grandparent, have been in telling bedtime stories, preferably around a campfire. The story might go something like this: “Once upon a time there was a grandpa and two grandsons who decided to go on a canoe outing to the Chain of Lakes State Park. . . .”  And then I would tell about our day. They were fascinated to realize that the day they had lived with me was actually a story, which made everything seem more important and worthy of serious reflection. Often in the telling I’d make mistakes in how I’d remembered the story and they’d correct me. “No, no, grandpa, it wasn’t like that,” they’d object. I’d counter, “But it’s just a story.”  They’d correct me, “No, it’s not just a story.  It’s a real story. It actually happened.”  So let me tell you a story, and if I make a mistake, it’s your job to correct me. Ready?

Once upon a time there was a handsome, energetic, and intelligent young couple named Joe and Nancy who worshipped God, were crazy about Jesus, and in love with the Hispanic culture because Nancy had grown up as a missionary kid in Uruguay.  They belonged to an intentional Christian community in Chicago where Joe and Nancy had tasted some of Jesus Good News in neighborhood called “North of Howard.”  They were eager to share the good news of Jesus with many other poor and struggling folk.

But after a few years in Chicago, as they began to raise a family, they felt called to return to Waco where their parents lived. So in Waco they pursued community with a group called Reconciler’s Fellowship. But that church, where Joe and Nancy invested several years, ran into serious difficulties, and broke up. At that point, Joe and Nancy gave up on their dream of community because it was too hard. The end! Time to go to bed now. 

No?  Ok. Instead, in that painful time, Joe and Nancy with their little girls, Gabriela and Anali, along with the Arterburn family, formed a common-purse household at 1700 Morrow called Hope Community. They wondered, should they be an intentional community, a church, or a neighborhood outreach ministry? They had already begun to relate to the Shalom Mission Communities in the hope of getting some guidance from more mature communities and their elders.  Virgil Vogt and Hilda Carper came out several times from Reba Place Fellowship in Evanston IL, to help them discern their calling. One important visit included John and Ruth who were serving with the Mennonite Central Committee in Nicaragua at the time. They were testing whether Hope Community was where they should land on their return to the States. Virgil and Hilda said, “God is doing something very important with you in bringing together folks who really know how to love and share Jesus with your Hispanic neighbors. You should start a church in your living room.” With this encouragement they became a bilingual church/ community called Hope Fellowship with worship meetings conducted in both languages where everything was translated.

The women in Nancy’s Spanish language Bible study were invited but never came to the church services.  So one time, on Virgil Vogt’s suggestion, they went to the Bible study and worshipped with the women. Then the Spanish-speaking women began to attend Hope Fellowship. Christina has shared her gifts of prayer and enthusiasm for the things of God from the beginning until this day. John and Ruth’s return from Nicaragua marked the first family to intentionally join the Fellowship from outside of Waco. They eagerly made the immediate neighborhood a focus of church attention. Then Barbara and Philip came adding another person fluent in Spanish. Hope Fellowship’s identity as a Spanish-English church community was established.  And they all lived happily ever after.

No?  Ok.  In those days Hope Fellowship began an informal partnership with some folks out in the country running a training center for sustainable agriculture with US and overseas interns.  It was called World Hunger Relief Farm. Hope Fellowship was blessed by many lively interns who became friends, sharing in community life and worship. Hope Fellowship folks volunteered and even joined the staff at WHRF.  But Joe also remembers this as a season of heavy struggle as Lee Piche, director of the Farm, saw his marriage unravel. At that time, many of the men in Hope Fellowship battled against a spirit of cynicism and despair. The women were generally strong in faith and carried the Fellowship in many ways during this season of community life. But after a while the women too got burned out and everything ground to a halt. (Just checking to see if you are paying attention.)

In 1999 John and Nancy went to Church of the Sojourners' "Nature and Purpose of the Church Retreat" in San Francisco, and connected well with them.  That following summer the SOJO youth group came out to Waco for an intense week of service, worship, and Bible study. By the end of the week they discovered they were fast friends forever. Soon after, Sojourners gave Hope Fellowship the money that enabled them to purchase the Meeting House!  So after five years of meeting in the Gatlin’s home, they were able to expand into the wider spaces of the Meeting House. 

At that time Hope Community (the common purse household) was the main expression of community and neighborhood commitment. Eventually, however, the household of Gatlins with John and Ruth dissolved and the common purse came to an end.  After that community fizzled out, things returned to the normal American way of doing things. Joe and Nancy got better jobs and made lots of money. We don’t know what happened to the other folks.       

Well, actually, when the communal household dissolved, Ruth and John got a house next door and the whole church embraced the focus on the local neighborhood. They also agreed to a vision of mutual care where, in the words of Acts 2, “No one said that anything they had was their own,” and “There was not a needy person among them.”

God was ready to do a new thing and sent a wave of families and young adults to Hope Fellowship -- the Arroyos, the Porters, the Rowe-Miller family, and others. In the mean time some folks were finding more maturity and faith in their struggles, so that growth in numbers and in faith seemed to happen simultaneously. During this time God was adding many gifted musicians, writers, and teachers to bless the community and its common life.

However, most of the folks in this newer generation were native English speakers attracted to a more communal life of discipleship that they’d learned about in their reading and academic studies. The result was that all these native English-speakers swamped out the Spanish-speakers and the meetings reverted to English only.

Well, not really.  The commitment to bi-lingual meetings has continued faithfully to this day.

About 12 years ago the relationship with Hope’s Salvadoran sister community, Valle Nuevo, intensified dramatically. Salome, Tomasa, and Margarita visited a SMC conference hosted in Waco by Hope Fellowship.  Salome plead with the Shalom communities, “Could you help our poorest families, whose houses are falling down, to get permanent homes. Nancy replied, “These people are our family. When someone in our family is going to be homeless we have to do something.” Several Hope Fellowship members worked for Habitat for Humanity and already knew how to organize such a response.  From that point on Nancy, Joe and others at Hope Fellowship gave persistent leadership to SMC’s relationship with Valle Nuevo. That revived international connection has born abundant fruit -- more than 60 Habitat houses have been built in Valle Nuevo/ Santa Marta; a collaboration grew up between World Hunger Relief Farm and the Valle Nuevo youth and their campesinos farmers; SMC sponsored a most amazing visit by the artist Fernando Llort and his family; and Hope Fellowship folks are partnering with their sister community to write a book about the history of this relationship with Shalom Mission Communities.

Hope Fellowship had a tumultuous relationship of blessings and tensions with the family of Luis and Ramona Mathias-Ryan. Luis was a constant prophetic reminder of the way racism and capitalism were distorting relationships -- something Hope Fellowship needed to hear. But it was often uncertain whether alienation or love would have the last word. Then as Ramona was dying of cancer, her needs and the needs of the family called forth an immense outpouring of care from the community.  Somehow, by God’s grace, love did have the last word. And now Luis has been blessed to found something like a Hope Fellowship outpost, a Christian center that is sharing the good news of non-violence and discipleship community in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Then about four years ago Hope Fellowship grew to the point that everyone could no longer meet and eat together in the Meeting House. So, in one meeting the leadership team decided to divide the church into three clusters and everyone was happy again.

Well, actually, the process of dealing with growth while retaining the intimacy of face-to-face relationships was a hugely challenging transition in community life. The Fellowship worked on this topic for more than two years, listening carefully to one another, working on several proposals, and reminding each other to keep love in first place whatever the outcome.  Eventually a consensus was reached to form four, and then later three clusters. This has allowed for some diversity to flourish in worship styles, using many more gifts in shared life even while a unified leadership provides common worship themes and overall direction.   

In the coming days you will celebrate this common story along with many other important details which I have left out. I could have talked about J.B.’s music, about the big role that you have played in Habitat for Humanity, about the way young people are mentored in discipleship and friendship, and much more.  These stories are your story, whether you’ve been here for two months or twenty years. We become the stories we tell. So like the children of Israel, all the descendants of those who came out of Egypt remember God’s deliverance that made them a people.

As my way of telling and mis-telling the story demonstrates, there are many ways this Hope Fellowship train could have gone off the rails or rolled to a halt. But it did not because God was with you all the way. What does this story reveal?  What does it mean?

  There are three kinds of wisdom that each Christian community needs to grow in.  The first kind of wisdom we learn as children is practical wisdom -- how to do things and how to do things better. Each community gains a body of practical wisdom, its own way of hosting meals together, reconciling differences, serving each other in the details of life. With the help of some of you, I wrote The Intentional Christian Community Handbook which is full of practical wisdom about how communities can grow up strong and healthy.

The second kind of wisdom is the wisdom of the world -- conventional wisdom. This is the common sense that everyone knows and helps us understand how the world operates. We need to know this kind of wisdom to pay our bills, to finish law school, to know how governments work. Many of the proverbs are this kind of wisdom.  “Fear the king because he can do you harm.” Or, “The rich man does wrong and brags about it, while the poor man is wronged and must apologize.”  That’s the way the world works and we have to reckon with it.

The third kind of wisdom is what the Apostle Paul calls “The wisdom of the cross.” Who could have imagined that Jesus -- the goodness and love of God personified, suffering abuse and torture, and even death on a cross -- who could have imagined that this path proved to be the salvation of the world?  This is the wisdom we are called to embody in Christian community, even if the world thinks it is utter foolishness. Jesus said, “You have heard that it is said (which is conventional wisdom) love your friends and hate your enemies. But I say to you, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who despitefully use you. . .”  This is the way God loves and it is the way we practice in community so that the world can see God’s love in action.

In telling the story of Hope Fellowship the way I did, I tried to contrast the directions you did not take as conventional wisdom with the wisdom of the cross -- which is the directions that you generally did take. That is why God has raised you from the dead again and again, like he did with Jesus. Thanks be to God for that history of faithfulness -- God’s faithfulness mirrored by your faithfulness.   

A couple of weeks ago I sat with Virgil Vogt and asked him what he might have shared with you had he been able to come.  He answered by simply quoting by memory from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, chapter 1:15 and following.

“I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, and for this reason I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may come to know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe. . .” (Eph. 1:15-19)

“This is who you are,” Virgil said concerning Hope Fellowship.  “You have been given a spirit of wisdom and revelation that has allowed you to make good discernments and adjustments of the plans every step of the way.”

“ The eyes of your heart have been enlightened. You have come to know the hope to which he has called you. The stories we have heard about you tell about your glorious inheritance among the saints. The power of the resurrected Christ is yours along with all who believe. “

Thanks be to God.

--David Janzen