Mennofolk Festivals

For twenty years, I organized a music festival called Mennofolk. This event took many forms, in many locations, and involved hundreds of musicians, collaborators, visionaries, financial supporters, church institutions and charities. Here are some pictures of highlights and memories. I remember with great gratitude…

Thanks Wendy Chappell-Dick. As someone who started and ran an arts network with some of the best energy of my twenties and thirties I think I can relate to a bit of the grief and pride and dislocation you must be experiencing. Stepping back for me also meant seeing and facing the “could have been” monsters that regularly appeared in my doorway. May you have strength for that and be preserved from the worst of them.I remember one of the earliest Mennofolks. I went on stage with Bemis when he was still pretty early in developing his craft. Seeing his work mature over the years, mainly through interactions with him at Mennofolk events is to me a picture of what Mennofolk did — it created a space for Artists with some connection to “Mennonite” (be it historical, cultural, philosophical, spiritual — whether marked primarily by gratefulness or pain) to share their creating in a wider way. This was important in the larger Mennonite world — a space created for creatives that kept some kind of interaction with the larger Mennonite world going. I suspect for much of the Mennonite church life would be easier without some of the artists voices stirring up trouble — and many of the artists can easily mistake their view of the cosmos as a standalone answer that replaces the slow churning movement of our spiritual/religious/cultural tradition.There is room at the table. Mennofolk embodied that best when it made space for the songs to be sung that needed sung.May the gates between the artists and the Mennonites stand ever open.Thanks for shoving them for 18 years. -Jonathan Reuel

Nayla Jamenez