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Parsons, Book Review  77 

   

Book Review 

 

Service and the Ministry of Reconciliation:  

A Missiological History of Mennonite Central Committee 
by Alain Epp Weaver 

 
Reviewed by Katerina Parsons 

 
 

  
 

Newton, KS: Bethel College, 2021. $10.00 

 

My concept of international “service” was first 

shaped by Mennonite Central Committee’s (MCC) 

one-year exchange program for young adults, which 

placed me with a justice organization in Tegucigalpa, 

Honduras. I spent the next seven years with MCC and 

MCC partners, first in Honduras and then in 

Washington, D.C., wondering sometimes whether I 

was “serving” or merely “working.”  

Informed by its identity as a ministry of the global 

Anabaptist church, Mennonite Central Committee 

works for “relief, development and peace in the name 

of Christ” in countercultural ways that promote 

nonviolence and favor the slow, small, and relational 

over anything flashy, fast, or sprawling (See the MCC 

logo at www.mcc.org). MCC funds most of its projects 

through local churches or civil society organizations and 

often supports these organizations not just with money 

but with “service workers,” who may be from any 

country with an Anabaptist presence. 

It is this idea of “service” that is central to Alain 

Epp Weaver’s slim volume, Service and the Ministry of 

Reconciliation: A Missiological History of Mennonite 

Central Committee.  Developed from a series of 

lectures at Kansas’s Bethel College on the occasion of 

MCC’s centennial, the book is written primarily to 

provide people familiar with MCC “new ways of 

thinking about how [their] part of the MCC story fits 

within broader directions and tensions across MCC’s 

century-long history” (xiv). 

The questions the book raises, however, are 

relevant to anyone questioning “colonial and racialized 

assumptions about who is serving whom and where” 

(60), particularly those skeptical of models of service 

that send young North Americans to presumably be of 

some “service” in countries where they do not speak the 

language or know the culture, to carry out tasks they 

would likely be unqualified to perform in their 

hometowns.  

Epp Weaver’s rich archival research traces a 

history of tension between conceptions of service as 

Christian witness, as relief work following humanitarian 

principles, as active nonresistance against militarism 

and war or – as service worker Lydia Schlabach put it 

in 1950 – as “some glamor, some broadening of 

experience, some new learning, and a lot of dedication 

and hard work” (50).  

At the heart of this book – and MCC’s mission – is 

a challenge against service as simply “doing” (4), 

particularly when that action flows from wealthier 

countries to poorer countries. “Christian service 

certainly involves doing, lots of doing,” Epp Weaver 

writes, “but fundamentally Christian service is about 

connection to and fellowship with others, discovering 

ourselves before God in our common need” (9). This 

definition leads to MCC’s “ministries of presence” over 

modernization, and peacebuilding over prescriptivism.  

It is something MCC workers have been saying for 

decades. “Unless we learn from the people 

themselves…who they are and why they see themselves, 

the world, us and God as they do,” mused Jean Snyder, 

an MCC service worker in Jamaica in the 1980s, “We 

have little to offer them but our busyness. And our 

busyness may, in the long run, have more relevance to 

our monthly reports than to the lives we touch” (62). 

Epp Weaver comes to this view informed by his 

own history with MCC, beginning with his wife’s and his 

first placement in Palestine, where they were sent “not 

with a predetermined agenda but were instead tasked 

https://mcc.org/


Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 4(2),  Winter 2023 

Parsons, Book Review  78 

   

with building connections and forging relationships” 

(100). He writes that “Presence, solidarity, connection, 

relationship, [and] accompaniment” were the 

“keywords” shaping their orientation to MCC, an 

organization where some workers joked they should be 

evaluated by how many cups of tea they shared with 

neighbors (100). At the same time, he notes, parents of 

children in the school where they were assigned 

expected them to teach (100). 

This caused a tension, he writes, “in holding 

together the missiological imperative of being present, 

on the one hand, with the need to plan for and report 

on results, on the other,” something he argues “is a 

tension that has defined MCC more broadly” (100). 

This is a significant tension. MCC’s intentionally 

slow, relational work cannot be scaled to fully meet the 

needs of a planet facing war, displacement, hunger, and 

a changing climate that is right now destroying homes 

and livelihoods. Facing such immense need, MCC’s 

concept of service as reconciliation and mutual sharing 

makes the most sense in a context that looks ahead to 

God’s “kingdom come.” 

In Epp Weaver’s telling, the “why” of relief work 

is not just about feeding the hungry and clothing the 

naked but is instead “a living and powerful testimony to 

love at a time when it is most needed” (46). In Syria, for 

example, MCC’s relief items might have been a drop in 

the bucket, but through MCC “the church gave an 

embodied witness to what Syria might yet one day be, 

and to the coming future in which all will stand in 

fellowship before God in our shared need” (12). 

Service and the Ministry of Reconciliation is not 

the most exhaustive book about MCC’s history, nor is 

it the most accessible to someone outside the 

Anabaptist fold (or whose parlance does not include 

terms like “missiological”).
1

  As a member of the target 

audience, however, I found new ideas to challenge my 

own concepts and expectations of service. Others who 

have worked or “served” abroad could benefit from 

similarly honest storytelling about their own 

organizations and who concepts of “service” are 

understood to encompass. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
1 MCC’s history is well documented in books like In the Name of Christ: A History of the Mennonite Central 

Committee and its Services 1920-1951 by John D. Unruh and Mennonite Central Committee in Canada: A History by 

Esther Epp-Thiessen. An accessible entry point might be Pursuing Peace: The Essence of Mennonite Central 

Committee by Esther Epp-Thiessen, which is just 39 pages and free online. Those interested in thematic explorations 

through MCC’s lens might read Intersections: MCC Theory and Practice Quarterly, edited by Alain Epp Weaver. 

 

 

Katerina Parsons is a Policy Specialist at USAID’s 

Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance. A graduate of 

Calvin University and American University, she 

spent four years in Tegucigalpa, Honduras before 

moving to Washington D.C. to work on 

humanitarian assistance policy.   

 

Author email: katerinaparsons@gmail.com  
 

 

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https://mcccanada.ca/media/resources/12502
Intersections:%20MCC%20Theory%20and%20Practice%20Quarterly
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