The Communal Ethos of the MennoniteCentral Committee: Testing the Bounds ofCommunity in Kenya

My analysis is based on eight years of studying MCC and includes ethnographic fieldwork in Kenya in 2008-2009, 2015, and 2016, as well as more than one hundred interviews with MCC staff, partners, and bene ficiaries.My own social location as both an insider to the Mennonite community and an outsider to MCC provided a rich basis from which to consider the bounds of community for a faith-based organization. Background on Mennonites and the Mennonite Central CommitteeThe earliest roots of Anabaptism are traced to January 21, 1525, when Conrad Grebel and fourteen other followers of Ulrich Zwingli baptized one another in Zurich, Switzerland. 2 This group became part of the Radical Reformation movement and were persecuted for heresy.The emergent message of Anabaptism spread across Switzerland until the persecution forced many Anabaptists to flee to Germany.Menno Simons, a theologian and the namesake of the Mennonite church, joined the Anabaptist movement as it reached the Netherlands.Menno's series of pamphlets recounting the story of his own conversion and beliefs helped cement the early identity of the Dutch Anabaptist movement.Menno's followers called themselves "Menists" or "Mennoists" and later, "Mennonites."After ongoing persecution in Europe, the first group of Mennonites arrived in America in the mid-1600s, followed by subsequent waves of migration in the early 1700s, throughout the 1800s, and in the 1920s. 3 As they arrived in the United States, Mennonites primarily pursued an agrarian lifestyle in relatively rural areas. 4 The Mennonite Central Committee was first organized as mutual aid to suffering Russian Mennonites in the wake of World War I. 5 The founding mission statement announced "a Mennonite Central Committee, whose duty shall be to function with and for the relief committees of the Mennonites in taking charge of all gifts for S. Russia, to make all pur-2 For more on Anabaptist and Mennonite history, see Cornelius Dyck,