More than 600 people gathered in-person and online Feb. 14-15, 2025, at Ridgepoint Church, a USMB church in Wichita, Kansas, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS).
In 1950, a Sunday School class in Hesston, Kansas, held a picnic with the hope of more formally organizing their mutual aid efforts. Seventy-five years later, MDS is stretching to keep up as natural disasters grow more frequent and severe. Fortunately, MDS’s capacity to serve—thanks to thousands of volunteers from Anabaptist churches of all kinds who wield hammers, paintbrushes and chainsaws—is growing, too.
The celebration honored the past seven-and-a-half decades and looked ahead to a year during which MDS will have an unprecedented number of responses across the U.S. and Canada.
“Tonight we’ll celebrate tens of thousands of MDS volunteers,” said Lana Tieszen, Region 3 vice chair and a member of the MDS National Board of Delegates. “Think of the passion of that initial small group of men and women who had a heart for service and a vision for action.”
Addressing the celebration, Kevin King, MDS executive director for the U.S., asked those gathered to pass along a message that the MDS movement is alive and well.
“Our volunteers are salt and light,” he said. “Lives are being changed. Hope is being restored—not only for the 135 homeowners last year who got new homes, not only for the 287 repairs that were finished, not only for the owners of nine bridges, but for the 6,486 volunteers as well.”
MDS’s partners—including the Brethren Church, Church World Service, Catholic Charities, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, United Methodist Committee on Relief, National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster and the Federal Emergency Management Agency—shared greetings for the special anniversary.
The worship service featured choirs from Bethel, Hesston and Tabor Colleges. The joint choir sang a new hymn, “Respond, Rebuild, Restore for All,” by Benjamin Bergey of Eastern Mennonite University.
The celebration also included prayers, many written or compiled by Evelyn Peters-Rojas. As Peters-Rojas said, when MDS volunteers work, they often pray: “May our hammers, paint brushes and saws be the continual prayer to fill this home with love.”
The event spread throughout the Ridgepoint church building and beyond. Throughout the two-day event, volunteers shared stories, helped with a house build, attended workshops, enjoyed tours, joined a sewing circle, heard the first reading of Mended, a new MDS children’s book, and celebrated the launch of a new MDS photo and stories book, Many Hands: Being Good Neighbors in Times of Disaster. Saturday afternoon activities included volleyball and corn hole tournaments.
Some visitors toured the cabinet shop in Goessel, Kansas, that has furnished MDS houses since 2022. According to Many Hands, the shop produces solid-wood kitchen cabinets for $600 instead of the $2,500 to $4,500 that MDS used to spend on cabinets at big-box home-improvement stores. Volunteers made 85 cabinet sets last year.
For California Unit board member Kathy Heinrichs Wiest, Hope Kingsburg Church, California, the cabinet shop tour was a highlight of the weekend.
The anniversary gathering included the annual binational meeting of the MDS units that make up the four U.S. regions, alongside MDS Canada, which operates separately.
David Zarate, Rio Grande City, Texas, is the U.S. Mennonite Brethren representative to the MDS Board of Delegates, attended the 2025 MDS Annual Celebration.
Other Mennonite Brethren that traveled to Central Kansas for the celebration were members of the MDS California Unit. In addition to Wiest, who is the communications vice char, California Unit co-chairs Jim and Shirley Holm and treasurer Sue Ewert, all from Butler Church in Fresno; vice chair for construction Steve Wiest and Central California vice chair Mike Hofer, both from Hope Kingsburg, and Northern California vice chair John Little, Greenhaven Neighborhood Church in Sacramento, attended the two-day celebration.
“Our California board might be an exception to MDS boards as the majority of us are Mennonite Brethren,” Ewert says. “Other Mennonite Brethren on our board (who did not attend Celebration) are Richard Penner, Shafter MB Church, and Anne Guenther, Butler Church in Fresno.”
This was Ewert’s third Annual Celebration, and she says Friday night is the highlight.
“The Friday night program is just that, a celebration of the work that MDS has done in the past year in various places. On Saturday, there is a bit more detail as each region provides an update, but the Friday night program is uplifting to me,” she says in an email interview.
Ewert is also a member-at-large on the MDS Board of Delegates. “I really enjoy the broad spectrum of Anabaptist church participation with MDS, especially coming from an area that is pretty heavily Mennonite Brethren,” she says. “I’ve enjoyed working with all the other Board delegates and directors who are from such varied backgrounds. My understanding is that MDS is one of the few Mennonite agencies who has really good working relationships with Plain groups.”
According to Anabaptist World, about half of MDS volunteers are Amish or members of other Plain Anabaptist churches. Eight regional Amish organizations have formed within the MDS network.
Steve Wiest shares Ewert’s appreciation for working with a variety of people.
“One of the most amazing things about MDS is the way people of vastly different beliefs and practices can really enjoy working and living together,” Wiest says. “The horse and buggy Plain people work alongside the jet airplane pilot. The way people voted—or didn’t vote—does not get in the way of focusing on the storm victims and their need for a MDS volunteer to bring God’s healing hope and restoration.”
For Wiest, who retired in May 2024 as the MDS regional operations coordinator on the West Coast, the opportunity to talk with other volunteers is about more than reconnecting with friends.
“One interest of mine is the house plans that MDS uses to build new houses,” he says. “In the old days you could draw a house plan on a shopping bag and just start building. But today there are building codes and the realities of climate change require more thought and resilience built into the house. The convention allows me to compare notes with those who are designing houses in other areas and how they address the challenges of wind, flood, fire and earthquake.”
Wiest views MDS as having a two-fold mission: bringing home and restoration to storm survivors and providing service opportunities to volunteers. Wiest recalls a volunteer who looked depressed and withdrawn.
“He would not communicate much more than one word answers to our questions,” Wiest says. “He would not sit with the rest of us at the table for meals. Thru the course of the week volunteers were admiring his work and praising his skill. By Thursday he was in the middle of the conversation and laughing and telling stories. We learned that he had been in a house fire and received burns and was himself dealing with trauma and loss. Volunteering helped his spirit to heal.”
For Jim Holm, the stories he heard over Celebration weekend were the highlight. This include three stories “of people whose lives were turned upside down and who found that God gave them new opportunities to rise out of the ashes,” he says.
“The stories included a founder of MDS who became a paraplegic as a young adult and had to find another way to make a living than farming; a pastor whose house was destroyed during a tornado as the family huddled in the basement; and a man whose wife was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s and who had found a place in life running the cabinet shop of volunteers who build cabinets for MDS-built homes,” Holm says.
The second standout for Holm was the reports given by representatives from the five regions that MDS serves (East, Mid-America, Midwest, Pacific and Canada.)
“The reports on projects being done and lives changed are inspiring,” he says.
Shirley Holm also found the stories to be a highlight.
“As always, the individual stories of people’s transformed lives are both sobering and inspiring,” she says. “It’s always wonderful to meet friends and reconnect,” she says when asked about highlights. “I enjoy music, so the combined choirs of Bethel, Tabor and Hesston were uplifting as well as the acapella congregational singing.”
John Little has been a weekly MDS volunteer since 2018, working in California, South Dakota and the Pacific island country of Saipan. He served as project director in Planada, California in 2024 and project coordinator in Santa Cruz from 2023 until February 2025.
When asked why he’s volunteered, Little says, “I like to help people who genuinely need help. Most people who get help from MDS eventually learn it’s a Christian organization and they can’t believe people (i.e., MDS volunteers) would actually travel across the continent— or Pacific Ocean—to help complete strangers build a house, a bridge, etc. What better witness for the love of Jesus Christ?”
Little says seeing volunteers and others he had worked with on various projects over the years was a highlight, along with the storytelling “open house” and the capacity building workshop.
For Michael Hofer, the highlight of the MDS Annual Celebration was meeting with previous site volunteers he has worked with or had the opportunity to observe as they worked on a project.
“Not all of us are great public speakers or people who can communicate the message of hope in Jesus’ redemptive message, but we can communicate through the talent of building and repairing,” he says about volunteering with MDS. “I have seen the appreciation in the eyes of those we were able to help.”
Other members of the California Unit board who have volunteered with MDS echo Hofer’s feelings about serving people who have lost their homes.
Recently Ewert worked on a MDS project in Planada, California.
“Planada is a mostly farm worker community that about 80 percent flooded when a levy broke,” she says. “Originally, we worked with United Way to do some ‘emergency’ remediation work, but now, MDS is running a national project partnering with Habitat for Humanity and doing more extensive work on houses. The families are very grateful. I think most feel forgotten, invisible, so I’ve experienced nothing but smiles and appreciation from folks where I’ve been on site.”
Jim Holm has also volunteered in Planada.
“I have seen the response of people whose homes have been restored,” Holm says. “One man in his 80s, whose wife had died five years before MDS fixed his home, broke down in tears when the job was finished. When his daughter asked why, he said, ‘I wish your mother could have seen this.’”
Holm speaks for many MDS volunteers when he says, “I volunteer with MDS because it is an organization that helps people. I see it as soft evangelism, because people’s lives are changed. Almost all of our workers are volunteers. For example, in the entire western United States, counting Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, Saipan and other U.S. protectorates, MDS has only two paid staff members. I volunteer because I’ve seen so many people who want to help other people.”
Last year in the U.S. there were 174 federally declared disasters, MDS executive director King said. When he started with MDS in 2004, there was a major disaster every 80 days, on average. Now there is one every 18 days.
MDS is in the early stages of planning its response to the Los Angeles fires, which destroyed over 12,000 structures and burned 40,000 acres in January. Brian Showalter, operations coordinator for MDS Region 4, reported MDS is one of four nonprofits with a California building license. The others are Habitat for Humanity, Samaritan’s Purse and Hope Christ Recovery Network.
“We are going to be part of the discussion on how to build back sooner,” he said.
With 21 active projects in the U.S., personnel are stretched. MDS needs more leadership volunteers who can stay a month or more, King said.
King urged supporters to continue MDS’s role as an Anabaptist unifier.
“MDS is a people’s movement and a gift to the church,” he said. “I’m going to say this with love: The church can’t afford to keep squabbling about buildings and budgets and board compositions. No, we must stop that at once. Our neighbors need us.
“Take this message back to your congregations: The MDS movement is alive and well. Our volunteers are salt and light. Lives are being changed. Hope is being restored.”
With files from MDS and Anabaptist World.
Read the MDS report here.
Read the Anabaptist World summary of the 2025 MDS Annual Celebration here.
Connie Faber joined the magazine staff in 1994 and assumed the duties of editor in 2004. She has won awards from the Evangelical Press Association for her writing and editing. Faber is the co-author of Family Matters: Discovering the Mennonite Brethren. She and her husband, David, have two daughters, one son, one daughter-in-law, one son-in-law and three grandchildren. They are members of Ebenfeld MB Church in Hillsboro, Kansas.
