AMBS honors trio

Sep. 21—ELKHART — Three people were chosen as recipients of the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary's Alumni Ministry and Service Recognition.

The 2023 winners were: Martha Smith Good, of Kitchener, Ontario, Canada; Peter Stucky, of Bogotá, Colombia; and J. Denny Weaver, of Madison, Wisconsin.

The annual award of the Elkhart seminary honors alumni with an outstanding record of faithful ministry and service.

According to a statement from AMBS, this year's recipients have served in a variety of roles in education, pastoral ministry and public witness. Each of them earned a Master of Divinity from one of the seminaries that later joined to become AMBS — Smith Good and Weaver from Goshen Biblical Seminary (GBS) in 1977 and 1970, respectively, and Stucky from Mennonite Biblical Seminary (MBS) in 1971.

"Martha, Peter and Denny have dedicated themselves to their ministry for many decades," said Alumni Director Janeen Bertsche Johnson. "They have been trailblazers, influencers and mentors of so many others. We are delighted to recognize them for their accomplishments and their deep commitment to God's reconciling mission in the world."

Smith Good, Stucky and Weaver will be honored during a Zoom reception on Oct. 30 from 7 — 8 p.m. (Alumni and friends are invited to join; the link can be obtained by emailing jbjohnson@ambs.edu.)

MARTHA SMITH GOOD

Smith Good was born and raised on a farm in Markham, Ontario, Canada, where she attended a conservative Mennonite church. At age 21, she joined a congregation in a more progressive Mennonite conference.

She initially trained as a Registered Nursing Assistant and worked in the field for eight years. In the 1960s, she also attended the Ontario Mennonite Bible Institute, a winter Bible school held annually in Kitchener.

Smith Good graduated from Goshen College in 1971 with a Bachelor of Arts in Bible and Religion. She said the call to church ministry began in her last year of college, when Old Testament professor Millard Lind encouraged her to consider attending seminary. Despite her reservations about pursuing graduate studies, she enrolled at GBS in 1971.

At that time, relatively few women were enrolled at the seminary, and Smith Good recalled that a role model for them was Gertrude Roten, who taught Greek.

"She was extremely helpful, empathetic and encouraging," Smith Good said. She quoted Roten: "When God calls us, God does not close doors."

"Some of the most important experiences at seminary were the establishing of lasting friendships," Smith Good noted, recalling her experience as a single student in the early 1970s, when she joined a small group of women who met weekly to discuss articles in the church press about women in theological education. "It was the beginning of me moving in the direction of ministry as I began to be able to affirm my feminine identity and embrace it."

Smith Good completed her Master of Divinity in 1977. In 1982, she became the first woman to be ordained as a pastor in Mennonite Conference of Ontario and Quebec (now Mennonite Church Eastern Canada). She went on to earn a Doctor of Ministry from the University of Toronto in 1988.

In her 30-plus years of pastoral ministry, she served in campus ministry (Goshen College); chaplaincy; and congregations in Ohio, Indiana, Colorado, Illinois and Ontario. She documented her journey into ministry in her self-published autobiography, "Breaking Ground: One Woman's Journey into Pastoral Ministry" (2012).

In 1979, Smith Good married Gerald Good, a widower with four young daughters. Although he was also a pastor, they served together for only two years — in Lombard, Illinois.

In the early 1990s, Smith Good helped organize a group of women who had experienced sexual misconduct by John Howard Yoder, a scholar, author and longtime professor of theology at GBS and MBS. She later helped plan a Service of Lament, Confession and Commitment — held in March 2015 at AMBS — in which the seminary and the wider church community acknowledged and lamented the sexual abuse Yoder had perpetrated against women in the church. The event included a commitment by the seminary's board to make AMBS a safe place for all.

Smith Good said that as a young person, she "kept searching for God." For her, the seminary environment was a place of growth and discovery.

"AMBS helped me to put a foundation under my feet," she said. "At AMBS, I really was able to finally feel like I had a faith that was important to me because it had become my faith, and not [just] what the church had told me to believe. I discovered who I was, what I believed and what I wanted to do."

"I'm still learning," she concluded.

The Goods are members of Wilmot Mennonite Church in New Hamburg, Ontario.

PETER WOOD STUCKY

Stucky was born in Colombia, where his parents, Gerald Stucky and Mary Hope Wood, served as mission workers with the General Conference Mennonite Church.

He attended a Mennonite boarding school in Cachipay, Colombia, and was baptized in the Cachipay Mennonite Church. He came to the United States for high school and higher education, studying at Goshen College and completing a Bachelor of Arts in History and Latin American Studies at Indiana University Bloomington in 1967.

"From the time I was young I felt a commitment to serve in God's work, although I wasn't clear in what capacity," he reflected. "When I finished college, it seemed natural to study at the seminary. Seminary was also a viable option to avoid being drafted or moving to Canada in exile."

While studying at MBS from 1967 to 1971, Stucky also took courses at the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1973, he returned to Colombia, where he has contributed significantly to Mennonite witness — combining pastoral ministry with peace and justice efforts in a country wracked by conflict.

For 28 years, Stucky has served as pastor of Teusaquillo Mennonite Church, a church his parents founded in Bogotá. In the past, he lent his skills to the Mennonite Church of Colombia, serving as Executive Secretary and President. He has also been involved with other Mennonite-related ministries in the country, including Seminario Bíblico Menonita de Colombia; MENCOLDES, a social service agency; Justapaz, a center for justice, peace and nonviolent action; CLARA, the Latin American Center for Anabaptist Resources; and various ecumenical peacebuilding efforts. In the 1980s, he spent time at Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem.

Stucky has also served with international organizations — as a member of the Executive Committee of Mennonite World Conference and of the international steering group of the Decade to Overcome Violence of the World Council of Churches (WCC). He participated in writing the declaration, "An Ecumenical Call to Just Peace," which was adopted by WCC members in 2011 and recommended as a document for reflection, collaboration and action for the worldwide Christian community.

In 2022, the Department of Peace Church Theology at the University of Hamburg in Germany awarded the Menno Simons Sermon Prize to Stucky for a sermon based on 1 Peter 1:9 that he preached in his congregation.

Reflecting on his time at seminary, Stucky said, "My time at AMBS was filled with enriching experiences that in part had to do with studies but also in part with extracurricular activities encouraged by seminary professors."

"The professors were more than academics," he added. "They were also friends and, at times, hosts. The knowledge, experience and rigor of the teaching staff gave me valuable training for my work during the more than 50 years since then."

One memory that stood out to Stucky was a silent vigil that students and employees organized against the Vietnam War. Held at the U.S. Post Office in Elkhart, it had a large turnout and was met with a lot of community opposition. He also remembered the involvement of seminary professor Leland Harder in creating the Partly Dave Coffee House, an ecumenical ministry in Elkhart. Stucky was one of the students who served as managers there.

Stucky's seminary studies anchored both his pastoral ministry and his peacemaking efforts: "My theological formation was pretty much there at AMBS."

Stucky and his spouse, Leticia Rodríguez, have three sons and three grandsons.

J. DENNY WEAVER

Weaver grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, and attended Argentine Mennonite Church there. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from Goshen College in 1963 and said that continuing studies at AMBS was "the obvious choice."

After two years in seminary, Weaver and his wife, Mary Lois Weaver, served a term with Mennonite Central Committee. They spent a year learning French in Belgium and France and then went to Algeria, where Weaver taught English for two years in an Algerian high school. Before they returned to the U.S., Weaver studied in Germany for a year.

After completing his Master of Divinity in 1970, Weaver earned a Doctor of Philosophy from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, in 1975. He had teaching assignments in several Mennonite schools of higher education and is Professor Emeritus of Religion at Bluffton (Ohio) University, where he taught theology, religion and ethics for 31 years.

Over the years, he undertook numerous preaching and lecturing assignments in church settings and served on peace and justice committees for both Mennonite and ecumenical organizations. He led workshops for Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT, now Community Peacemaker Teams) and participated in three CPT delegations to Haiti. He also taught in Kenya and lectured on atonement theology in Germany and the Congo.

In his writing and teaching, Weaver has called attention to the way that traditional Christology and atonement formulas have accommodated violence and racism. Using the New Testament's narrative of Jesus as the beginning point, he articulated an intrinsically nonviolent alternative, which incorporates the views of Black, feminist and womanist theologians. Since Weaver's formulation begins with Jesus and is intrinsically nonviolent, he described it as "a Mennonite theology without that name." His views are most fully expressed in The Nonviolent Atonement (Eerdmans, 2nd edition, 2011), The Nonviolent God (Eerdmans, 2013) and the lay-oriented God Without Violence (Cascade Books, 2nd edition, 2020).

Weaver has written or edited more than two dozen books and numerous scholarly articles on topics such as peace theology, Christology, the atonement and Anabaptist theology. His newest book, New Moves: A Theological Odyssey, will be published by Cascadia Publishing House in 2023.

As a single seminary student in the 1960s, Weaver lived in the dormitory at Goshen College. He drove a small school bus from there to the seminary in Elkhart, providing transportation for a handful of other students. In addition to classes, he recalled games of ping-pong and touch football during the lunch hour, and chats over tea and coffee.

Reflecting on his seminary studies, Weaver said, "In my epoch, we thought that AMBS faculty members were the intellectual giants of the Mennonite world. I loved studying Old Testament with Millard Lind — [which gave me] a body of material that I have used throughout my career. John Howard Yoder's Preface to Theology: Christology and Theological Method taught me to relativize all theology, to see its context and to realize that, in other contexts, theology could change. In addition, J.C. Wenger and C.J. Dyck oriented me in church history and Anabaptist history."

Weaver has seen the development of his theology as a lifelong endeavor.

"AMBS was the beginning that oriented me," he said. While he lived outside Mennonite circles during his years abroad and in graduate school, beginning his theological education in a Mennonite setting was important. "[The AMBS experience] very clearly confirmed for me that I wanted a career in the Mennonite world."

The Weavers attend Madison Mennonite Church, where Weaver preaches on occasion. They have three daughters and six grandchildren.