NEWTON, Kansas (Mennonite Mission Network) — In 2008, years before she was a pastor in San Francisco, California, Joanna Lawrence Shenk was waist-deep in her seminary studies at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, in Elkhart, Indiana. She was a 20-something full-time student, living with her parents, and she had just come to the realization that most 20-somethings living with their parents reach.
She really needed to move out.
Unlike most other 20-somethings, however, Joanna did not look for her own apartment or house to move into. Instead, she joined the Elkhart Mennonite Voluntary Service (MVS) unit, as an associate. While she didn’t have a service placement, she engaged in the community life that the unit was built around: house chores, activities and a cooking rotation.
“It was really an opportunity to start forming my adult self,” she said.
As Lawrence Shenk integrated into the household, she became inspired by the collective vision she encountered.
“We were really committed to being in relationship with our neighbors and our neighborhood,” Lawrence Shenk recalled. “[We had] both this commitment to each other in the household, and also [asked] what does it mean to be in this neighborhood at this time?”
This commitment was put to the test during the Great Recession. Brought on by the 2007-08 global financial crisis, the recession brought widespread unemployment and home foreclosures to communities across the country, including Elkhart.
“People were really struggling,” Lawrence Shenk said.
One of Lawrence Shenk’s housemates, who was a community organizer through his MVS placement, used his connections and experience to help create “neighborhood project Saturdays.” Each Saturday, MVSers and community members helped a neighbor with a home project — sometimes for pay, other times as volunteers. For Lawrence Shenk, “[It] was a real example of what it means to be community outside of one’s little, individual home.”
Following the Great Recession, homes in the surrounding neighborhood stood empty, foreclosed due to owners defaulting on their mortgages. These homes were being sold through tax sales — auctions that sold houses to recoup the back taxes that were owed, often well below the property value. The MVSers and community members discovered that, by pooling their individually meager resources, they could become joint homeowners.
As the MVSers completed their service terms, they decided not only to purchase housing for themselves in the community but to help neighbors who were struggling to afford rent or who had previously lost homes. They assisted their neighbors in navigating the complexities of the tax sales to purchase housing and remain in the neighborhood.
In the following years, Lawrence Shenk and other AMBS and MVS alumni continued to work with community members on initiatives that focused on the neighborhood they shared: an organic community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm, a community arts initiative, and a land history and storytelling project.
The commitment that Lawrence Shenk shared with her housemates, to live in intentional community, pushed her to work with people across race and class divides and gave her a broader perspective of the place where she lived and the people with whom she shared that space.
“MVS was really foundational to my continued work in the world and commitment to community in a lot of different forms,” she said.
Today, Lawrence Shenk’s community is in San Francisco, where she’s arguably even more connected to MVS than when she was living in a unit. She’s now the coordinator for the San Francisco MVS unit, working with placement organizations, managing the house, leading orientations and handling financial details, to keep the unit running smoothly. And as a member of the pastoral staff of First Mennonite Church of San Francisco (FMCSF), the unit’s supporting congregation, she sees MVS participants almost every week.
FMCSF and the San Francisco MVS unit were both formed in the mid-1970s — the church was formed from an intentional community/church plant, and the MVS unit relocated to San Francisco from Stockton, California. Since then, the two have grown and blossomed together, each becoming inseparable from the other. When FMCSF had a choice to either purchase the unit house to continue MVS, or purchase a place of worship for the congregation, they chose to buy the unit house. Each year, unit participants join the congregation in worship, on church committees and at retreats. Some even continue to live in the city after their service term concludes, joining the local community and the church, not unlike Lawrence Shenk and the Elkhart MVSers a decade and a half prior.
For Lawrence Shenk, one important aspect of her MVS experience was how the older community members and mentors walked alongside the unit participants, giving wisdom, grace and trust to idealistic young adults, who were “really motivated and eager to be doing transformative work in the world” but needed guidance and support.
“[It] was empowering, as a 20-something, to have those relationships with older adults, where they were really encouraging us to keep going deeper with what we were doing,” she recalled.
Now, Lawrence Shenk draws on those experiences to help model how she and the FMCSF community can nurture a unit to “support [participants], accompany them, and empower them to discover who they want to be in the world and how to continue to grow into themselves, while also being in accountable relationships in community.”
Through this experience, Lawrence Shenk said, the FMCSF community is shaped by the MVSers, as well. “It’s a lot of work,” she admitted. “But I think, like most things that are meaningful in our lives, there can be a big return on that, as well, and that’s what we’re seeing.”
“So we want to keep putting in the time, energy and care, because we think this is a really important program for young adults,” she said.
The importance of MVS, Lawrence Shenk explained, is twofold. For participants, the program is a chance to “wrestle with what it means to be committed to the way of Jesus,” as they venture into a world outside of school and living with their parents. For the FMCSF congregation, MVS adds to “the life of our community, as we continue to be impacted by these young people coming through and the questions, skills and curiosity that they bring, which also shapes who we are.”
Mennonite Voluntary Service is a one-year volunteer service experience for individuals age 20+, with the opportunity for a placement extension for an additional one to two years. For more information and to apply, click here. This article was first published in Beyond, Mission Network’s annual print magazine.
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