Walter Sawatsky

Professor of Church History and Mission; Director, Mission Studies Center

• B.A., Goshen College, 1967
• M.A., University of Minnesota, 1970
• Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 1976

Email: wsawatsky@aol.com
Phone: 574 296-6209
Curriculum Vitae

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Seeing the church from a global perspective is important to Walter Sawatsky. In his classes he brings this passion to see God at work throughout the world. Before coming to AMBS in 1990, Walter served with Mennonite Central Committee in Europe for 12 years. He travels regularly to eastern Europe and Russia as a consultant and to teach. A member of the Global Mennonite History Project Committee since its beginning, he writes about Mennonite history and mission and participates in ecumenical committees in the areas of theology, history, and missiology. As administrator for a Bible Commentary series (31 volumes) translated into Russian (1978–1993), then coordinator of an oral history project for Slavic evangelicals, he is active in encouraging the emergence of new historians and missiologists from the region of the former Soviet Union.

“Christian leaders must ask questions of all of Christian history, to seek to understand a past that is never fully past. Tracing the movement of the Holy Spirit among God’s people more often reveals tones of sorrow, suffering, and tragedy than success and victory since so often God’s power is manifested in human weakness. To see from a global perspective requires taking very seriously the deep vulnerability and the surprises of how the Gospel has been translated into so many cultures. As students encounter those lesser heroes of the faith, they learn to love the church, sharing in both the glorious and shameful parts of its history.”

Scholarship

• Mission Focus: Annual Review, editor
• Religion in Eastern Europe, co-editor
• Prophetic and Renewal Movements: The Prague Consultations, (Proceedings of the Prague VI and Prague VII Multilateral Ecumenical Consultations, Geneva, 2009), editor
• “Teaching about the Other: Interchurch Dialogue for Russian/Ukrainian Christianity,” in Quo Vadis Eastern Europe? Religion, State Society after the Fall of Communism (University of Bologna Press, 2008)
• “The Many Faces of Anabaptism and Mission Since 1860,” in Anabaptism and Mission (Neufeld Verlag, 2007)
• Evangelical, Ecumenical and Anabaptist Missiologies in Conversation (Orbis Books, 2006), co-editor
• Mission in the Former Soviet Union (Neufeld Verlag, 2005), co-editor

Speakers Bureau Presentations

• Mennonites face Kairos moment: the coming together of three interchurch dialogues that beg a Mennonite response
• Why the East/West tug of war over mission in Russia
• Global mission forum and the elusive road to mission accountability
• Training pastors and missionaries: a new world has opened in Russia & Eastern Europe
• What's different about the global Mennonite story?