About

Mark Van Steenwyk is the fouinding member of Missio Dei, a writer, speaker, and grassroots educator. He and Amy (who teaches English to adult immigrants and refugees) have been married since 1997. They, along with their son Jonas, live with a random assortment of friends at Missio Dei’s Sattler House.

Mark Van Steenwyk is a member of Missio Dei (an Anabaptist intentional community anchored on the West Bank of Minneapolis that pursues Jesus’ way of simplicity, prayer, hospitality, and peace). Missio Dei is affiliated with the Mennonite Church USA and the Baptist General Conference.

Mark is the general editor of the Jesus Manifesto, a radical Christian webzine with roughly 20,000-30,000 visits each month. The Jesus Manifesto is a clearinghouse for propaganda meant to frustrate and disrupt quaint notions of Jesus and the movement he founded.

What passes for Christianity in our culture has very little resemblance to the radical (and indeed political) movement Jesus started on the fringes of the Roman Empire roughly two-thousand years ago. Most of the ways in which we’ve been taught to think about our faith get in the way of following Jesus. JM wants to captivate readers with a kingdom vision and explore what it would look like to follow Jesus in the shadow of empire.

The Missio Dei Breviary was edited by Mark with the help of the other members of Missio Dei (especially former member Christopher Brenna). The Missio Dei Breviary is a simple, accessible book of morning and evening prayers. It reflects a commitment to a missional, incarnational way of life with a counter-cultural vibe. The Missio Dei Breviary draws primarily from the Anabaptist tradition, but is also inspired by Benedictine, Franciscan, and Eastern Orthodox spiritualities. It offers a 28-day repeating cycle of morning and evening prayers that draw from all four gospels.

The breviary is available for free online with a paperback edition available on Amazon.com here.

Mark is a co-conspirator with the Common Root. In these violent days, the Spirit is stirring a prophetic, nonviolent movement of communities committed to embracing the way of Jesus in creative and sustainable ways. The Common Root attempts to network and nurture such communities by leveraging social media. Mark offers leadership to the Common Root Planting Initiative, which equips, deploys and networks self-financing teams pioneering creative counter-cultural communities that seek shalom in the shadow of empire.

In a role that overlaps with his work with the Common Root, Mark is a contract employee with the Central Plains Conference of the Mennonite Church USA (with the support of the Mennonite Mission Network) as a “Community Network Developer”. He is fostering a growing network of emerging Anabaptist church planters and communities and developing a relationship between them and existing congregations and institutions of the MCUSA.