Where the People Go: Community, Generosity, and the Story of Everence

by John D. Roth

A barn raising. A quilting bee. A credit union. A socially responsible investment. Where the People Go tells the story of Anabaptist-Mennonite efforts to enable communal forms of sharing. Mutual aid, stewardship, and generosity are deeply embedded in the Christian faith and have been actively nurtured among Anabaptist-Mennonite groups. Spontaneous forms of assistance—a barn raising, a quilting bee, shared meals—are the best-known expressions of such compassion and generosity, but the commitment to “sharing one another’s burdens” has also found expression in more formal structures. Seventy-five years ago, Mennonite Mutual Aid emerged to organize the principle of sharing within a growing Mennonite denomination. A dynamic organization from the beginning, MMA moved quickly from a burial and survivor’s aid plan to include health, property, and automobile insurance. In coming decades, the organization shifted its focus from mutual aid to stewardship and generosity, symbolized by a growing emphasis on socially responsible investment programs, wholistic health, financial planning, and services associated with its member-owned credit union. Always an agency of the Mennonite church, MMA, now known as Everence, has balanced its spiritual commitments with an increasingly complex regulatory environment, the national strains associated with the health-care debate, the shifting sensibilities of its customers, and the organizational complexities of a major corporation. This story of Everence captures the stresses and idealism of a church-related institution committed to mutual aid, stewardship, and generosity during its seventy-five-year history.  

423 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 30, 2020

About the author

Department chair, Professor of History, Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana
Director, Mennonite Historical Library
Editor, Mennonite Quarterly Review

Education:
BA, Goshen College, 1981
MA, University of Chicago, 1983
PHD, University of Chicago, 1989

Reviews

[April Yamasaki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was published as part of the 75th anniversary celebration of Everence, a faith-based financial institution that includes a credit union, insurance plans, financial planning, etc. Author John D. Roth offers an engaging account of the organization's history, rooted in the Anabaptist-Mennonite understanding of mutual aid and responsive over the years to people's needs and changing circumstances.

[Jim Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

John D Roth provides a comprehensive history of Everence (formerly Mennonite Mutual Aid). He describes the faith-based foundations that created the need for this organization and outlines the challenges it faced and growth it achieved from 1945 through 75 years of serving Anabaptists. As a board director of Everence, a member of the Mennonite Church, and a business leader myself, I appreciate the tensions between mission and the bottom line, and the organizational and leadership challenges that Roth describes throughout the book.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where People Go is fine institutional history. Roth does not avoid some of the difficult issues faced by Mennonite Mutual Aid, as it was known for most of its life. The final chapter glowing look forward does sound more like a book authorized and financed by the subject. But he does address issues related to various CEOs and programs that did not survive.

The book is thoroughly researched, and Roth's gift for popular writing, even in an institutional history, is on display.

[Annette Ridenour · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting deep-dive into this specific niche. It’s fascinating to hear how this kind of set apart organization that’s somewhere between financial institution, ministry, and for-profit. Also interesting to hear the historical perspective of the anabaptist institutions and organizations wrapped up in all of this.