It was 2003 and Bridgefolk had publicly launched, the summer before, with its first annual conference. Within our founding circle we were aware of the worldwide Sant’Egidio movement based in Rome. Sant’Egidio is a lay-led, Vatican-approved, “ecclesial movement” that has been active in peacemaking and solidarity with the poor since the 1960s. It gained international attention when it helped mediate an end to a 16-year civil war in Mozambique in 1992. As Mennonites and Catholics looking for models of how to combine the best of our traditions, Bridgefolk leaders felt great affinity for Sant’Egidio.

Following the Mozambique peace agreement, the Sant’Egidio community in Rome had sent a married couple, Paola Piscitelli and Andrea Bartoli, to New York to monitor United Nations compliance with the accord, while encouraging new Sant’Egidio chapters in the United States. When I learned that Andrea would be visiting my campus in Saint Paul, Minnesota, I jumped at a chance to meet him. We shared professional and vocational interests in international peacemaking, but what I really wanted to do was pick his brain about this hybrid ecclesiological category of “ecclesial movements” – officially recognized in the Catholic Church yet grassroots and participatory like Mennonites.

“Proceed through friendship.” That was Andrea’s response. As we took a stroll around my university, I wanted to talk about canon law and historical precedents and ecclesiology. As a co-founder and then-co-chair of Bridgefolk, I hoped to map out some kind of master plan for Bridgefolk participants like me who wanted somehow to identify as both Mennonite and Catholic. Instead, simply, “Proceed through friendship.”

Andrea’s counsel reflected Sant’Egidio’s sense of its own charism or spiritual gift. The movement sees friendship as key to its own bridgebuilding through service to the poor, peace-building, and prayer (see here and here). In turn, both Andrea’s counsel and Sant’Egidio’s charism surely reflect the Italian culture in which Sant’Egidio was formed as well. Though he didn’t say so, I suspect that Andrea found my American preoccupation with planning and projects bemusing. Instead, he was gently nudging me toward a more relational – indeed a more organic – approach. As a theologian and Christian ethicist, I should have recognized this already; friends of mine have placed friendship at the very center of the Christian life.

After I shared Andrea’s counsel with other Bridgefolk leaders, “proceed through friendship” quickly became a motto of our own. We didn’t have to solve everything doctrinally or structurally. We weren’t going to anyway – that should have been obvious – but the motto helped us relax.

Theologians and practitioners of interreligious and ecumenical (or interchurch) dialogue emphasize that dialogue can and should happen in multiple ways. In the standard list of different types of interreligious dialogue, the “dialogue of theological exchange” is only one. “Dialogue of religious experience” happens as we share prayers, spiritual practices, and life stories without expectation of conversion. “Dialogue of action” happens as we work together for the common good through service, peacemaking, and mobilization for justice. And then there is the simple and basic “dialogue of everyday life” in which people of different faiths learn to know and trust one another as neighbors. And friends. The counsel to proceed through friendship has guided Bridgefolk intuitively into all four forms of dialogue.

This is not to say that Bridgefolk has achieved nothing more concrete than warm fuzzies and good vibes. Through the Mennonite-Catholic Theological Colloquium, Bridgefolk offered resources to the international bilateral dialogue between representatives of Mennonite World Conference and the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity – then helped disseminate its findings. Even while strengthen friendships, Bridgefolk’s annual conferences have explored tough issues, from obstacles to sharing Eucharist to racial injustice and land reparation. Some of these have led to real breakthroughs, as with Bridgefolk’s development of a Mennonite-Catholic liturgy of footwashing to celebrate the unity we have come to experience despite obstacles to intercommunion. A case could be made that Bridgefolk has been freer to contribute creatively both to the international dialogue between Mennonites and Catholics, and to the wider ecumenical movement, precisely because it has depended on friendship not on an official mandate.

Friendship can devolve into insularity and cliquishness, of course. As the Bridgefolk movement moves into its third decade, this is a danger that will require self-awareness to avoid. When old friends at a party greet each other with warm bear hugs, they do well to keep their eyes open for newcomers hanging back shyly in the corners and draw them into conversation too. When conversation turns to reminiscing, old friends should work backstories into their stories, in order to initiate rather than exclude.

When a “friend group” is mindful of such dangers, however, friendship can remain invitational. Indeed, in a break-out session at Bridgefolk’s most recent conference, the moderator asked how participants had gotten involved in the movement, and many said that a friend had simply invited them. So long as the accent in “proceed through friendship” is as much on invitation to interested newcomers as on old timers sharing old times, friendship can be its own antidote to insularity.

Over the years, proceeding through friendship has been a way for Bridgefolk to expand its network more through word of mouth than through marketing itself. The 20-year history of Bridgefolk has coincided with the rise of social media as a way to maintain virtual communities and friendships – insofar as any virtual friendship can really be deep and authentic. Like many movements and organizations Bridgefolk has made use of social media as a tool to stay connected. But we have not depended on social media to advertise ourselves and grow thereby. Given all the toxicity that has gotten baked into social media over the last 20 years – religious social media as much as political – that may be for the best.

Some of us in Bridgefolk still dream of a day when it might be possible to find a canonical model like “ecclesial movement” that would make it possible to formally identify simultaneously as Mennonite and Catholic. Many of us long for a day when some form of intercommunion or Eucharistic recognition becomes possible. Even if such hopes only ever find fulfillment beyond our lifetimes, we can hope to be preparing the way now.

But ecclesial movements, like religious orders, only have reason to exist if they embody and channel a charism – a spiritual gift that God has called them to share in a particular way. In friendship, Sant’Egidio was willing to share its charism of friendship with Bridgefolk. So whatever else comes from Bridgefolk’s own way of proceeding through friendship, we will hold on to our own charism in the only way that anyone holds on to God’s gifts – by sharing and them giving away.

Gerald W. Schlabach

September 2022