Toward an Anabaptist-Pentecostal Vision: Exploring Ecclesial Identities in North American Mennonite Mission with Pentecostal-Type Churches in Southern Africa

by Joseph C. L. Sawatzky

Publisher:

Pickwick Publications

, 2023

Overview

What does Pentecostalism, the fastest-growing Christian expression worldwide, have to do with Anabaptism, whose Mennonite adherents have sometimes been called “the quiet in the land?” In this groundbreaking study, Joseph C. L. Sawatzky explores a mission history of North American Mennonites working with African Initiated and Pentecostal-type churches in southern Africa, illuminating points of divergence and convergence between Anabaptist and Pentecostal streams.
Placing testimonies of African and North American participants in this history within a broader biblical and theological framework, this study proposes bases for an emerging Anabaptist-Pentecostal vision, with implications for the church, its leadership, and its witness in the world. This lively, interdisciplinary study will interest students of mission, interculturality, and the Christian faith itself.

Praise for Toward an Anabaptist-Pentecostal Vision

Sawatzky presents a stimulating case for an integration of a Mennonite focus on ‘horizontal’ discipleship and a Pentecostal ‘vertical’ spirituality. His argument develops from an examination of North American Mennonite partnerships with AICs in South Africa. For Sawatzky, if North Americans are genuinely going to embrace a ‘learner-teacher’ model of mission, then they need to learn from their partners’ focus on the Holy Spirit, prayer, and worship.

——Jamie Pitts, Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary

I heartily commend this highly original work in its conception, scope, and the range of material drawn upon. It brings together mission history and praxis, Anabaptist theology and ecclesiology, African theology and ecclesiology, and New Testament exegesis in a thoughtful, coherent whole, so making an important contribution to mission history and engagement, as well as intercultural interaction, which, given the fraught legacy of mission history in the South African setting, are vital areas of discourse for the health of church and community relations.

——Gillian M. Bediako, Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture

This book provides a detailed and highly informed account of one of the most exemplary expressions of incarnational Christian mission in Africa. ‘My beloved friends’ was how George Schmidt, the natural ancestor of the Mennonite mission to Africa, greeted the Khoisan community when he arrived in Baviaanskloof in 1737. Sawatzky’s sojourn with African Pentecostals is imbued with the same sentiment and will inspire in all its readers the same vision.

——Anthony Balcomb, University of Kwazulu-Natal

Product Details

• Title: Toward an Anabaptist-Pentecostal Vision: Exploring Ecclesial Identities in North American Mennonite Mission with Pentecostal-Type Churches in Southern Africa
• Author: Joseph C. L. Sawatzky
• Series: American Society of Missiology Monograph Series
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Print Publication Date: 2023
• Logos Release Date: 2023
• Pages: 258
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Ebook
• ISBNs: 9781666739121, 9781666739114, 1666739111, 9781666739107, 1666739103, 166673912X
• Resource ID: LLS:9781666739121
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T17:26:53Z

About the Author

Joseph C. L. Sawatzky is a training and resource specialist for Mission Education for Mennonite Mission Network, and a core adjunct professor at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Indiana.