Rural Western Rockingham County and the Politics of Jesus

Sundays cycling around Briery Branch, Ottobine, Clover Hill and western Dayton, one gets a glimpse of a unique form and expression of Christian tradition.

Rockingham County is one of the oldest permanent settlements and largest chunk of the Mennonites in Virginia with fifty-two per cent of the Global Anabaptist conference membership.  There are the prominent, locally and globally influential Mennonite USA and the smaller, Old Order Mennonites, who are known for their nonconformity to the world through their plainness practice and avoidance of technology.

The "politics of Jesus" is an illusion to the theological/ethical text of John Howard Yoder (Eerdmans 1994) and its endeavor to illuminate via Anabaptist tradition, Jesus as the radical figure and a huge chasm that exists between who Jesus was and what the church often does (social ethic).