Discussion Jumpstarter
Study leader reference - not a definitive answer
Question 1
The speaker insists that “memory is a conscious work of interpretation marked as much by deletion as by selection” and that a community’s future is shaped by what it remembers or forgets; where do you see “blessed forgetfulness” operating in your own church story (what gets deleted, what gets highlighted), and what future does that forgetting create?
Another way to ask: In your church’s story, what parts get left out and what parts get emphasized? How does that “forgetting” shape what kind of future your church is building?
Discussion Jumpstarter
Direct Answer
Based on the speaker’s teaching, “blessed forgetfulness” shows up when a church highlights the comforting parts of its story while deleting the compromises and sins that should warn it; that kind of forgetting quietly prepares the same failures to repeat.
- The speaker frames memory as selective: “memory is a conscious work of interpretation marked as much by deletion as by selection,” and says how a community remembers “is the single most important element in determining its future.”
- He quotes “blessed forgetfulness” as the reason generations “repeat the fatal mistakes of a previous generation with hardly a pang of remorse or fear.”
- He says German Mennonites knew the *Martyr’s Mirror* but chose to believe “the past did not apply to the present,” treating martyr stories as “good for that day.”
- He notes it took “50 years for the Mennonites to even acknowledge this,” and the first official confession came only in 1995: “We recognize that we did wrong… God forgive us.”
- He adds that “probably most Mennonites never repented,” implying ongoing selective memory.