Thank you for becoming a member of Anabaptist Communicators!

We are excited to announce we have over 30 "official" members for 2019 representing over 10 organizations. Welcome to Anabaptist Communicators – a network of professionals working in a broad spectrum of communications with the opportunity to connect with like-minded people of faith.

As your board, we are here to help draw us together. Keith Lyndaker is the editor of PeaceSigns, the magazine for the Peace & Justice Support Network of Mennonite Church USA. Micah Brickner is at Eastern Mennonite Missions as Communications Director. Joel Nofziger is Communications Director at Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society. Diana Williams is the East Coast Communications Coordinator for Mennonite Central Committee and Lisa Williams is the Director of Communications at Mennonite Church Eastern Canada. We are working hard to implement our new membership model. We continue to look for new members for the board and invite you to contact one of us if you are interested.

 

Spread the word to your colleagues and friends that Anabaptist Communicators is the place to be for connections, support, and ideas!

 

Lisa Williams

On behalf of the Board – Micah, Keith, Joel and Diana

By Joel Nofziger (Part 1 of 3)

Within my first week at the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society, a board member arranged to meet with me to talk about the style we used in our publicity materials. A former art teacher, she advised me, “Make sure that everything you use and create is Mennonite art.” When I asked what that meant, she just replied, “You’ll figure it out.”

It is one of the distinctives of Anabaptist thought and practice to say that our faith needs to inform all we do. If we take this to be true, than it necessarily follows that there must be a distinctively Anabaptist way of communicating, since we must embody our faith while working. The following is an attempt to lay out what some of those distinctives might be, admittedly working for a historically-inclined Swiss-German originating, Pennsylvania Mennonite perspective, heavily influenced by my wife’s membership with Conservative Friends (Quakers).

First, to be consistent with Christian faith and practice, communication in an Anabaptist perspective needs to be honest and told with integrity. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “But let your words be yes, yes, and no, no; for anything which adds to these is a deception” (Lamsa, Matthew 5:37).

I want to be clear that I am not espousing the line taken by some conservative Mennonites (and even some early Quakers) who argue that the requirement to speak only truth excludes the possibility of using literary or artistic fiction; sometimes fiction can be more true than nonfiction.

Let me share with you a brand story that has origins in this Anabaptist-adjacent group...

Read more here!

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