Integrating Faith and Finance

Where the People Go: Community, Generosity, and the Story of Everence, by John D. Roth (Herald Press, 2020 275pp, $19.99 US)

By April Yamasaki

This year Everence celebrates “75 years of stewardship" in the US.

It started in 1945 as Mennonite Mutual Aid providing loans for returning Civilian Public Service workers, to its current range of financial services that include a credit union, disability, and life insurance, employer retirement plans, financial planning, and more.

As part of the year-long anniversary celebration, Where the People Go by historian John D. Roth tells the story of Everence, illustrating both its roots in the Anabaptist theology of mutual aid and how Everence has expressed that core value in different ways over the years.

Roth begins with an introduction that gives a brief overview of the book, then devotes his first chapter to mutual aid in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition. “Although significant differences soon emerged among the Anabaptists,” he writes, “all groups regarded economic sharing as a core conviction, as central to their Christian identity as adult baptism.”

From that core conviction, he then outlines some of its diverse expressions: the Hutterite community of goods, Swiss Brethren voluntary sharing, Dutch Mennonite generosity, and the growth of church-related mutual aid institutions in North America.

For the rest of the book, Roth offers an engaging account of the 75-year history of Everence. I appreciate the way he relates it to the larger story of the church and the world.

In 1935 when the US Congress passed the Social Security Act, Mennonite leaders wrestled with creating an alternative plan so that needy church members would not have to turn to the government for assistance.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Mennonites generally opposed insurance, especially life insurance which seemed to put a price tag on human life. Again, there was talk of an alternative in the form of a burial aid plan. Out of these and other concerns, Mennonite Mutual Aid was formed in 1945. Since then it has continued to respond to the needs of the church amid changing circumstances.

As Mennonite Mutual Aid added new programs and staff, it took the name Everence in 2010. The organization has faced many challenges along the way: being an agency of the church while also operating in a secular environment subject to government regulation; wanting to offer support for health care, yet faced with spiraling costs; dealing with different personalities and sometimes competing visions, and with increasing organizational, technological, and legal complexities. Roth also touches on gender balance, and reaching out beyond the traditional Mennonite community to more ethnically and racially diverse urban areas.

In the 1990s, Stewardship Minister and staff member Lynn Miller taught that

“Stewardship is the act of organizing your life so that God can spend you.”

With Where the People Go, author John Roth tells the story of Everence as one example of that kind of stewardship — organizing and re-organizing itself to be spent in serving the people, to be “the best of business and the best of church.”

The book is an inspiring and instructive account of the ongoing challenge of integrating faith and finance — a challenge that Everence continues to face today and that all people of faith need to live out.

April Yamasaki is resident author with a liturgical worship community and often speaks in other churches and venues. She blogs regularly at AprilYamasaki.com, WhenYouWorkfortheChurch.com, and is the author of Four Gifts, Sacred Pauses, and other books on Christian living.