Mennonites and other Christians who value the Christian teaching on sharing material resources will welcome publication of these essays, which focus on biblical, Anabaptist, Mennonite, historical, sociological, and contemporary economic aspects of mutual aid. Willard Swartley and Donald Kraybill, veteran scholars, directed the Mutual Aid study project and co-hosted the "Building Communities of Compassion" conference in 1996 when these papers were first presented. They respectively provide the essays "Mutual Aid Based in Jesus and Early Christianity" and "The Changing Face of Mutual Aid" as bookends to this stimulating material.

Howard Brenneman, president of Mennonite Mutual Aid, closed the conference with an informative and challenging address on “A Vision for the Future of Mutual Aid.” This address was especially significant because Brenneman’s vision of mutual aid stands in fresh contrast to that of many Mennonite corporate executives (which Brenneman also was earlier) in profit-making business. In these few years of his presidency, MMA has already demonstrated the validity of a mutual aid philosophy generating practical and ethical ways of successfully providing churchwide health coverage.
To my knowledge, the conference was the first to encourage academic people––through stipends provided by MMA––to research, write, and present scholarly papers on subjects of their own choosing related to mutual aid. Presenters at the conference explored aspects of mutual aid related to their own interests and fields of study. The conference was a stimulus to their own scholarly areas of pursuit and an inspiration to others interested in mutual aid philosophy and practice.

A historical note is appropriate to set this project in the context of earlier efforts to understand and promote mutual aid in the Mennonite church. In 1955 Mennonite Central Committee invited all known local and regional Mennonite mutual aid societies to a meeting to form a single fraternal organization slated to find ways of working together. As a result of that meeting, the Association of Mennonite Aid Societies, which immediately adapted the acronym, AMAS, was created. Twenty-one societies made up the new organization.

At its 1958 annual meeting at Smithville, Ohio, AMAS drafted and approved a significant statement that could be considered its constitution. The document included the following items:

• a definition of mutual aid,
• a set of guiding principles,
• a summary of lessons from history, and
• goals and concerns for mutual aid in local congregations and the larger church.

In 1970 AMAS published The Compassionate Community, a 573-page paperback of devotional addresses given at its annual meetings 1958-1970. The book was distributed primarily among AMAS members. It has been timely after nearly thirty years to convene another conference on mutual aid and publish these essays. It is heartening to see mutual aid revived and expanded as a virtue to be honored and promoted in our individual and collective lives.

J. Winfield Fretz,
President Emeritus and
Emeritus Professor of Sociology
Conrad Grebel College

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