Earlier this week my husband and I and many of our friends took part in a Mennonite day of action to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to US support of that war. Nearly 2,000 Mennonite demonstrators in the US and Canada converged on some 40 local offices of national representatives, in demonstrations instigated and coordinated by a couple of Young Turks who call this effort Mennonite Action.

Locally, 150 of us met at our congressman’s office, sang, prayed, listened to witnesses, and took our concerns to the congressman. He was not in but he got the message and no, he is not going to support a ceasefire. But it felt like something to have done this. It felt like the start of something.

I had a role in planning our local event but it really pushed my envelope. I did it partly for my husband’s sake. He’s been grieving Gaza for weeks, trying to get others to pay attention.  Suddenly there seemed to be many of our fellow Mennonites who were also ready to go public about this in a rather big way. But I know I was not alone in facing a lot of fears—fear of failure, fear of making a spectacle of ourselves, fear that no one would come or that things would get out of hand, fear of sending the wrong message or being misinterpreted as anti-Semitic.

Perhaps the deepest unease for me was around taking church public, giving a public Mennonite witness that might violate an instinct for privacy around my faith. Why not just take part in the broader ceasefire movement? Why should we identify as Mennonites?

I believe faith is private and personal but it is also communal. This was a communal expression of faith that lined up precisely with my own beliefs and practices and understanding. I am Mennonite in the way of those who gathered at our congressman’s local office and across the continent. We sing like this and worship and pray, and in this way we work ourselves up to following Jesus, as we sang, everywhere we go.

One participant in last Tuesday’s actions reported that a member of the media asked him how you can have a demonstration without violence. The implication was that “peaceful demonstration” is an oxymoron. That’s naïve and simply wrong but it is true that any demonstration involves confrontation and opposition and is fueled by outrage. What we tried to do in Tuesday’s action was to bathe that outrage in Spirit-filled faith and expression—not only words but hymns and prayers and quilts and pies. Our local session included a children’s story, just like we do in church. We had a worship service right there on the cold parking lot in front of Cong. Yakym’s office. It felt vulnerable and joyful and intense. Was it effective? It was an act of conscience. Effects TBD.

It was something, being reminded in this setting of how much I share with my brothers and sisters in the faith. It was something, going public with this peculiar but deeply authentic Christian “brand.”

The Mennonite brand, our public face, used to be stamped on our appearance—especially women’s appearance. That changed for most of us when I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s. Our church has taken on other public faces through our pacifism and culture of service both at home (Mennonite Disaster Service) and internationally (Mennonite Central Committee). But we have tended to express our faith publicly in deeds more than words and certainly not by taking our worship services to the halls and parking lots of power, as we did last Tuesday.

I wonder if Mennonite Action—this popup movement, sparked by unspeakable events in a part of the world many of us know well–has the potential to become a prime locus of Mennonite faith expression in the political arena. It’s tricky, being the activist arm of the church in polarized and polarizing times, with many of the splits running right through our own congregations. Not all Mennonites are ready for this. But some are—we are driven by conscience to be ready—and the beauty of this movement, if it is one, is that it is not asking for permission. It is spontaneous, unsanctioned by authorities or even consensus, even while being fully Mennonite. We bring our Mennonite faith to it, not least the cultural expressions of it that bind us as community and family.

The message was pretty simple. Ceasefire now. Stop the killing. Stop sending the weapons. The methods were also the message. Check the Mennonite Action website for how that looked and sounded across the land.