Traditions

 After church, almost like magic a green papaya appears out of nowhere. Sometimes I think they grow in the rafters of the roughly framed old houses. Within minutes I hear the thumping noise of the mortar and pestle. The papaya salad will soon be ready.

Making Papaya Salad

Meanwhile, if there are any chairs around they are stacked and set to the side. Thin mats are placed on the floor. Bowls of sticky rice are brought out along with various side dishes. The smell of fish sauce and other things familiar and unfamiliar fills the air. The bowls are placed on the mats in clusters around the room. The papaya salad is scooped onto plates to join the other fragrant dishes. Soon, people sit in circles around the clusters of bowls. There may or may not be plates and utensils for everyone.

People grab a wad of sticky rice with their left hand. With their right hand, they grab a smaller mass and massage it into a smooth ball. This is used to help grab food from the dishes in the middle. If there is some kind of soup, Asian-style spoons will be available for use. Welcome to a traditional Mennonite meal in Isaan, Thailand.

After-church Lunch in Isaan

I did not know much about Mennonites growing up—I'm not even sure I knew the term. I think the first Mennonite I met was my first girlfriend. She was normal enough, except that her last name was not one I had ever heard of before, though it turns out that it, along with many other last names that were unusual to me, were quite common in Mennonite communities (when I visited her home, I checked out the phone book and there was column after column of names that before that time had been unknown to me). 

Mennonites get their name from Menno Simons, one of the leaders of the Radical Reformation in the 16th century. There were several other leaders of these Anabaptist groups that faced much persecution. Because of this persecution, many of them fled from various places to West Prussia where a dialect of Low German became their common language. In the last half of the 18th century, Catherine the Great opened parts of Russia (now Ukraine) to European immigrants and many of the Mennonites relocated there.

Eventually, many of these Mennonites relocated, either by choice or because of further persecution, to places in the western hemisphere where they formed colonies and retained their language and culture. By this time the term Mennonite had as much, if not more, to do with their culture than their religious faith. In the late 1800's, there was a revival among some of the Mennonites in the Ukraine that gave birth to a branch of the Mennonites known as the Mennonite Brethren (MB). Many of these relocated to North America where they tended to stay together in various communities, hence the phone books packed with "Mennonite" names that were not so common elsewhere.

I broke up with that girlfriend and did not think much more about Mennonites until we moved to Fresno in 2001 and eventually ended up joining an MB church. It is there that we discovered that Mennonite was as much a culture as a religion. Fairly early on after joining Butler MB church, we were hosting a small group at our home. Some the members of the group would get to talking about who is related to who and how. They found out they had common relatives in a place called Corn, Oklahoma. Corn. Is that really a place? Later we discovered that this name game of discovering common relatives was frequent occurrence at Mennonite gatherings. This was a bit of challenge for us, as we were Mennonite by choice, not by birth.

We also learned that there are some Mennonite traditional foods. When I first heard the term Verenika, I thought it was someone's name. Turns out its a kind of stuffed dumpling, a Ukrainian ravioli, if you will (I may get ostracized for saying that, but I grew up among Italians, not Ukrainians). Verenika (or varenyky) is a Ukrainian name, but they also go by their Polish name pierogi. Like ravioli, verenika can have different kinds of stuffings. When I first had verenika, it was served with gravy and Mennonite sausage. This sausage was not a smoked sausage, but the Mennonites have that, too. If you are ever in Abbotsford, British Columbia, I recommend going by Rempel Meats to pick some up.

Verenika at a restaurant catering to Russian tourists in Phuket, Thailand

Another Mennonite food/tradition is fritters aka portzelky. These are deep fried dough akin to donuts, except they are not shaped like donuts. By tradition, they are served on New Years day hence they are also known as New Years Cookies. Even though we are not ethnic Mennonite, we rather like this tradition.

Making New Years Cookies in November in Phon Phisai, Thailand
Couldn't wait for New Years day

The third traditional food I'll mention is zwieback. I had heard of zwieback as a youth and I knew it is a crispy toasted bread. The name comes from German zwei ("two") or zwie ("twi-"), and backen, meaning "to bake", in other words, "twice-baked". After joining a Mennonite group, we heard people getting excited that zwieback was going to be served on a special occasion and we were wondering why people feel that way about overcooked toast. We learned that Russian-Mennonite zwieback is altogether different—it is neither crispy nor flat. The "two" in this zwieback comes from how they are double-buns, so to speak, with one stuck on top of the other. Getting them to stay that way during baking takes special skill, and in our own attempts at baking them, we have ended up with a significant number of einback.

Our first attempt at Zwieback (and einback)
in Kalasin, Thailand

There are other Mennonite foods and traditions, but I am getting off-topic.

One of the characteristics of the Mennonite Brethren is their desire to share the good news of Jesus with others. To this end, the North American MBs began sending missionaries to other countries not long after arriving in the US and Canada. These missionaries saw great fruit to the point that at present both DR Congo and India have more people worshiping in MB churches than North America.

One of the challenges of missionary work is not confusing our cultural forms of religious expression with that which is essential to the gospel. To put it somewhat amusingly, does one have to embrace fritters, zwieback, verenika and sausage as an essential part of being a Mennonite Christian? I have visited MB churches in both DR Congo and India and saw no "traditional" Mennonite foods. But if you consider that the MB conferences in those countries are larger than the countries of origin of Mennonites, we see that traditional Mennonite foods are, in fact, minority Mennonite foods. There are probably more Mennonites living where there is a rice-based diet than a bread and potatoes diet, but even they are not all consuming the same kind of rice. (In the Isaan region of Thailand they prefer sticky rice, while in central Thailand jasmine is the rice of choice and both of these differ from the various types of rice I ate while visiting India.)

After-Church lunch in Shamsabad, India
No zwieback for this faspa

Khanom Thian - a treat for Thai New Years day (April 15)
Made with tapioca flour

The separation of tradition and religious belief is not always straightforward and there isn't always agreement, even in one's own culture. For example, what style of music do we use? It seems like it wasn't all that long ago when guitars and drum kits came in alongside and later replaced the organ in churches. Then we see churches in Thailand that don't consider themselves a real church unless they have a building, a guitar and a drum kit. None of which are required by scripture. I remember our first trip to Thailand and we were visiting Khmu church in the North of the country. I was excited to be in a place where I could hear some ethnic church music. But all they had were translated contemporary Christian songs accompanied by drums and electric guitar. On the other hand, when worshiping with older believers in Isaan, I hear them come alive when we sing songs of traditional style and instrumentation.

Worship at a Khmu church in Northern Thailand
with electric guitar and drums

Worship Isaan style with phin and kaen
They use an 8-tone scale instead of 12-tone

Another example of religious tradition is how we serve communion. We once visited a church in Thailand where they used sticky rice instead of bread or crackers for communion. I thought that it was a nice cultural adaptation, but it turns out that they did this especially for visiting foreigners. For themselves, they normally used western style communion cups and crackers because it was associated with higher status—something that was culturally important for them.

Communion with communion cups and crackers
Phon Phisai, Thailand

While traditions are nice, there can be a problem when the traditions outlast the faith that they are supposed to represent. People end up considering themselves to right with God because they follow traditions rather than actually believing in God. Or sometimes the traditions may conflict with God's will, but we give them priority over following God's word. This was certainly a problem in Jesus' day. On one occasion, some Pharisees we complaining that Jesus and his disciples did not follow the traditional handwashing ceremony before eating. Jesus replied.

⁶ And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,

    ‘This people honors me with their lips,
  but their heart is far from me;
   “ ⁷ in vain do they worship me,
  teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’

⁸ You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”

(Mark 7:6–8 ESV)

The Pharisees were giving greater priority to following their traditions than to obeying God's word.

This is kind of behavior is not that unusual. For example, a person may consider themseleves Christian because they observe certain traditions (going to church on Sundays (or maybe just Christmas and Easter) but not really living according to the teachings of the Bible the rest of the week. Or the Buddhist who participates in some Buddhist rituals but who also regularly shows disdain for one or more of the 5 precepts. We humans have a tendency to hold onto the forms of religion long after we have forgotten the meaning behind the form, like Christmas without Christ.

So if I eat fritters on New Years, cook up a mean pot of verenika, and play the Mennonite name game at social gatherings, but refuse to forgive those who offend me or love my enemies—Biblical teachings of Jesus emphasized by Menno Simons and other Radical Reformers—am I really Mennonite?

Though it is not my heritage, I like some of the traditions that the Mennonites carried over from Russian and the Ukraine. But what attracted me to the Mennonites were those who, like Menno Simons, believed that Jesus meant what he said and felt that Jesus' life was a model of how Christians ought to live. But whether I'm seated around a table sharing borscht and zwieback or seated on the floor around a bowl of bamboo curry and sticky rice, I'm happy to be together with like-minded believers. Because if we are to try to live the kind of life that the Bible teaches us to live, we will need the help of these other believers as well as the power that comes from the Holy Spirit in order to do so.

Though I did not plan it this way, I'm publishing this blog in the same month we celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Anabaptist movement. It was on January 21, 1525 that a small group of people defied the state church by participating in a believer's baptism that marked the beginning of that movement.