Mennonite Culture

Here is a short excerpt from a paper that I recently wrote on Mennonite culture and community. (I'd love to hear your comments)

The Individual
Community must be composed of alive and very real people who experience life in very alive and real ways. If community is composed of "real living" and very "real experience," the individual’s experience of community is of vital importance to this topic. We may ask, “what has our culture done for the poor and oppressed individual?” How does Mennonite culture differ from a worldly culture? According to my study, it would be quite safe to say that all the cultures of the world are ruled by a powerful minority, who are sure to shape culture to the benefit of their own power. It is this very same question that plagues us. How are we different from the cultures of the world in this aspect? How have we also fallen into this power conservation program that most assuredly foretells failure of community from the outset. Political, social, and economic inequality is experienced as an inequality of culture, a prime example of the un-community; however, before I am labeled socialistic, may we unpack and examine such a statement?

The Masses
To our shame as Anabaptist people, Science and technology have shaped our culture more than the humanities. The impact of cell phones and the internet has had a revamping effect on our culture while those suffering individuals swarming around us have had only marginal impact on how we actively participate in community. Social and political structures within our communities have been revamped by the internet and evolved methods of communication. All the while our political and social structures have remained unfazed by the base needs of the masses that pass within mere feet of us every day.
Unfortunately this is where the very problem is sourced. It is our view of the masses that has allowed us to discard the shared social project of healing the broken hearted, binding up the wounded, and giving to the poor. Of course this shared social project is the shared creative response to a creation gone wrong that should be at the core of our strongest communities. If this shared response is not present, we have done one of two things. Either we are back at building a wall without bricks, or we have adopted the worlds art and are building a strong wall that must be destroyed before the Kingdom can be built.
Who are the masses? In every case, for every individual, the masses are “other people.” To someone, we are the masses; to us, they are the masses. There are no masses. The term “masses” is simply a way of seeing the people around us. Sadly our Anabaptist culture has been shaped heavily by science and technology, and consequently we now live in a culture that sees people as masses. This view dehumanizes the individual. We gain much from this view. This view allows cultural and political exploitation, for the individual is dehumanized and our consciences are cleared.