I became aware of the wider Mennonite world at a very early age. Before, between, and after the sessions of the third Mennonite World Conference in 1936 I witnessed numerous lively multi-lingual discussions in my father's bookstore in Amsterdam, Holland.
     Our visitors, most of them men in their late thirties, included the American scholar Harold S. Bender; the initiator of the Mennonite World Conference idea, Christian Neff from Germany; a refugee from Stalin's Russia, Cornelius Krahn, now studying at Heidelberg; the founder of the Society of Brothers, Eberhard Arnold, and many others. The topics of Peace and Nonresistance, Discipleship, were thoroughly debated.
     The ongoing interactions among these leaders, by correspondence and in person, were interrupted by war and five years of Nazi occupation. Such contacts resumed, however, almost as soon as normal communications between theh nations were restored.
     The first postwar Mennonite World Conference, held in 1948 at Goshen, Indiana and Newton, Kansas, USA, was dominated by American and Canadian participants who had the wherewithal and the freedom to travel, while the Europeans were still digging out from the rubble.
     The fifth MWC, held in 1952 at Basel, Switzerland, became a more truly international conference as ambitious pastors and eager young people rode the trains and buses, and bicycled and hitchhiked their way to this great gathering. Most, if not all, of the participatns joined in the planned excursion from Basel to the sites of our church's origin in Zurich and Zollikon.
     The sixth MWC took place in 1957 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Providing lodging for such a mass meeting in post-war Germany was no small undertaking, but the hospitality shown the visiting Mennonites by the citizens of Karlsruhe was most admirable.
     For example, my father, my wife and I, and a brother from Pennsylvania, were given the keys to the home of a doctor and his family who had gone on vacation. They left us a note, telling us to enjoy the house, and to drop the keys in the mailbox at the end of our stay. We never met them.
     Scheduled five years apart, Karlsruhe '57 was followed by Kitchener '62, Amsterdam '67 and Curitiba '72. Each time the Conference grew larger and more exciting. Those young people who had biked or hitchhiked to Basel and Karlsruhe in the 1950s had become leaders or teachers in their home countries, or missionaries and Christian service workers overseas. And thus, MWC grew into a scheduled reunion of spiritual brothers and sisters from around the globe.
     I still remember rooming with a young Indonesian whose name isnow well known in Mennonite circles, and walking the streets of Curitiba after hours with the cast of These People Mine, one of the first plays written specifically for a World Conference premiere.
     And we promised each other to meet again, "Deo Volente - the Lord willing" at the next MWC.
     After Curitiba the five-year intervals were lengthened to six. A delegation from the Soviet Union made it to Wichita, Kansas, USA in '78. Ingrid van Delft and Dick Klomp produced a musical, The Wedding at Cana, performed by a youth group from Amsterdam.
     At Strasbourg '84--a three-generation event for our family--my father, now 89, was reported to be the oldest person in attendance. Because his legs had become stiff and unbending, he attended all sessions standing up, leaning against a pillar or wall. In a variety of languages and gestures many people offered this old man their seat, but he was unable to accept their kind offers.
     The twelfth MWC, in 1990, was held in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the heart of the world's largest urban Mennonite community. Conference-goers had free use of the city's mass transit system, and Elisabeth Soto brought a delegation from Cuba. And who can forget the Guatemalan Children's Choir, joyful voices from a land still torn by civil war?
     But by far the most interesting, most colorful and multi-ethnic MWC of them all was Calcutta '97. For once, those among us who can easily keep a conversation going in four languages, and follow a discussion in a few more, were at a loss for words. How we appreciated the capable, spirited and seemingly tireless interpreters on the speakers' platform.
     I am eagerly looking forward to the next MWC, the first on the continent of Africa. Now, if only Christian Neff, the person who came up with the concept of a Mennonite World Conference, and the others who came to our home and bookstore in 1936, could see how their idea has flourished beyond their wildest imagination!
     Long may it grow!

Jan Gleysteen, Goshen, IN, is an artist, photographer, and longtime interpreter of Anabaptist history and heritage.