There is a saying that we hear from time to time that goes “preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary use words”. This is attributed to Francis of Assisi from long ago. I’m not sure why we should consider him to be a wise counsellor for Christians today when it comes to sharing the gospel. Besides, it doesn’t work.

We can live a peaceful and holy Christian life and be good and compassionate to others. The people around us will take note, but if we are silent about our faith they won’t have a clue why we live like that. They will probably conclude that we’re some kind of strange little ethnic group or something like that, and these are customs that have been handed down from ancient days. But they won’t connect our way of living to the Gospel of Jesus Christ unless we tell them.

The Apostle Paul said in Romans 10:17 “so then faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God”. So if people are seeing and not hearing they’re going to be confused. We need to use words.

Maybe there is another problem? In Romans 1:16 the Apostle Paul says “for I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth”. Can we honestly say that we are not ashamed of the Gospel? Are we embarrassed or ashamed to speak the name of Jesus boldly?

Many Mennonites hold to another saying about being “the quiet in the land”. Those words can be found in Psalm 35:20, a complaint of David when he was being pursued by Saul. “For they speak not peace: but they devise deceitful matters against [them that are] quiet in the land.” it really doesn’t have anything to do with Christian life today but it was seized upon hundreds of years ago by German pietists and Mennonites as a justification for being quiet about their faith in order to avoid persecution.

The German pietists were people who belonged to the Lutheran Church, the state Church, and yet professed to be born again and to have a spiritual Christian life. In order to avoid persecution they conformed to all the rites of the Lutheran Church. This appealed to the Mennonites that went to the Ukraine; they could just hunker down, be quiet about their faith and go about living their life and still pretend to be true Christians. It didn’t work out very well; if one is ashamed to talk about their faith pretty soon they don’t have any faith to talk about. So then they talk about the traditions of their kind of people and console themselves that this is the historic Christian faith. It is not.

Perhaps people have misunderstood the verse. Martin Luther’s German translation says die Stillen im Lande and I don’t know German but I think stillen I mean silent. Perhaps Martin Luther used the wrong word? French Bibles use the words tranquille or paisible meaning the peaceful in the land. The Diodati Italian Bible says pacifici della terra. English says the quiet in the land. Quiet can mean silent or peaceful but surely what David meant is peaceful.

Menno Simons was a man of peace, but he did not believe in being silent. “The regenerated do not go to war nor fight. They are the children of peace who have beaten their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and know of no war. They give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. Their sword is the word of the Spirit which they wield with a good conscience through the Holy Ghost.” “To this end we preach as much as opportunity and possibility affords, both in daytime and by night, in houses and in fields, in forests and wildernesses, in this land and abroad, in prison and bonds, in water, fire and the scaffold, on the gallows and upon the wheel, before lords and princes, orally and by writing at the risk of possessions and life, as we have done these many years without ceasing.”

So in 1829 the ministers of the Molotschna Mennonite colony in Ukraine banned the reading and even the possession of the writings of Menno Simons. They claimed that they didn’t want those writings to fall into the hands of those that might use them against the Mennonites. Others suspected that they did not want their own members to read those writings, for fear they might discover how far off course those churches that called themselves Mennonite had become.

We are called to be the light of the world, a city set upon a hill. May we not be ashamed of letting that light shine through us, by our lives and by the spoken word and the written word.