A close friend of the Anabaptist family is counseling Mennonites to take a deep breath: It’s time to bring out the “right stuff,” Jim Wallis told the crowd of 500 attending the final adult worship service.

“I want to pull out your best stuff,” said Wallis, president and chief executive officer of Sojourners. “Mennonites, you’re too shy about your good stuff. I don’t know where I’d be without the peace churches and the black churches.”

Wallis, who was raised in the Midwest in an evangelical family, spoke from his longtime familiarity with Mennonites to call the delegates and other adult attendees to make their voices heard in broader culture. There may be differences within the church, he said, but there are core Anabaptist values that the country and the world could benefit from hearing.

“I’m sort of a friend of the family,” Wallis said. “I’m aware of some controversy in the church. These things will not be resolved quickly or easily.”

Wallis first heard about Anabaptists while at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Ill. “I remember talking a lot with this really tall guy,” Wallis said, referring to theologian and scholar John Howard Yoder. It was around that time in his life, Wallis said, that he “began to recognize how what Jesus was talking about was revolutionary.”

Jesus’ revolutionary message has always been at the heart of Anabaptist theology. Wallis said that Mennonites know the difference between nationalism and patriotism. Many Christians don’t. “To believe that we are Christians first would transform this country,” Wallis said. “To say that Jesus is Lord means that America is not.”

What would it look like to live our vision of healing and hope? Wallis reminded adults that “God is personal but never private.” If our good news — as read from Jesus’ mission statement from Isaiah 61 — cures sickness but isn’t good news to the poor, it isn’t the Gospel.

Though Wallis was speaking to adults, he shared what he’s heard from youth across the country in order to highlight the urgency of his message. “Young people are less concerned with what you believe because you’re a Christian and more concerned with what you do because you’re a Christian,” Wallis said. “Young people have to clear up what it means to be a Christian.” And according to Wallis, it is “time for people to find [the Mennonite] tradition.”

Wallis illustrated three current shifts: religious, political and economic. These inter-generational and multicultural movements have placed poverty, peace and climate change at the “heart of a new religious agenda.” Wallis ventured that “God cares more about the 30,000 children who died today from preventable diseases than about gay marriage amendments in Ohio.” His comments were greeted with applause from many of the same delegates who, earlier in the day, acknowledged the Mennonite church’s existing stance on human sexuality.

As a boy in inner-city Detroit, Wallis questioned the status quo. He now sees similar desires in young people today, and hopes that Mennonites will, as in the song of Fannie Lou Hamer, “let their light shine.”

“A whole new generation wants to be for something not just against something,” Wallis said. “It’s time for you to live and preach your best stuff, because your best stuff is the right stuff.”