Re-Envisioning Virginia Mennonite Conference

Virginia Mennonite Conference (VMC) was formed in 1835 by former members of Lancaster Mennonite Conference who had moved into Shenandoah and Page Valleys from Pennsylvania. 

I first became an official member of this branch of the Mennonite Church after graduating from Eastern Mennonite College, which was then a VMC school, and a year after being employed as a teacher and dean of boys at Eastern Mennonite High School. In 1965 I was asked to serve as an assistant pastor of Zion Mennonite Church near Broadway on a marginal time basis, and it was then that I officially moved my membership to VMC.

I had no seminary training at the time and was only 25 years old, but felt honored to have been invited to join the Zion family and its affiliated Mennonite congregations, one with many rising young leaders in my age group. 

Last Saturday, over 55 years later, I took part in VMC's winter delegate session, along with over 100 fellow pastors and other congregational representatives. It was a well planned and inspirational event, where we heard moving stories by some of our members of color who further convicted us of our need to repent of the latent racism we have been guilty of condoning and even perpetrating throughout the church's history. Having to meet via Zoom, though, we missed the camaraderie and the kind of "family reunion" feel of our normal conference sessions.

Recalling my many years good years as a part of VMC, I again felt sadness over the number of congregations who have left our Conference due to differences they had with the rest of VMC and with the national Mennonite Church USA. Meanwhile I have also mourned the steady number of individuals and households leaving VMC congregations and joining other churches in our community. 

Like many older denominations, VMC has an increasingly aging membership. As I looked over the gallery of participants in Saturday's session I saw no teens and very few adults under 30 among them, not a hopeful sign for the church's future. We were also told that the pool of potential pastors for congregations seeking trained leaders has been shrinking drastically, another disturbing sign.

Maybe it's time for a radical rethinking of how we do church. 

For one thing, might we need a new name? We have been planting churches in West Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky for years now, so we are not just about one state. And while I value the term "Mennonite," it also conjures up images for some that may not be positive. Also, the word "conference" may suggest a kind of bureaucratic organization rather than a living and loving organism that embodies the presence of the loving and living Christ in the world.

So how might something like "South-Atlantic Family of Anabaptist-Minded Congregations" sound? Interestingly, Dutch Mennonites have long been known as "Doopgezinde," or "Baptism-minded," as in representing free churches whose members belong by choice rather than by their being christened by their parents as infants. 

This kind of name change should be accompanied by a less centralized, top-down form of administration and suggest a fellowship of self-governing congregations collaborating with each other for purposes of fellowship, support, outreach and discipleship. There could and should also be more focus on providing mentoring and training for developing pastoral and other leadership roles from within congregations rather than relying on hiring professionally trained pastors from elsewhere.

In my mind, this would be one of the best ways to increase participation and a sense of commitment to the local congregation, that is by intentionally providing lots of apprentice leadership opportunities for all members from the time of their baptism. These opportunities for learning by doing could include people of all ages and from all walks of life bringing Sunday morning messages, for example, always with coaching and mentoring help offered by those with more training and experience. In this way, Sunday morning and other church gatherings would be more like celebrative "carry-in meals" rather than well-orchestrated "buffets" prepared by a special team of professional chefs. 

In short, we need to think creatively and boldly about how to not only create new wineskins,--as in making some structural or organizational changes--but to pray together for an infusion of new wine and new life in our congregations, starting from the ground up in each of our local congregations.

These newly energized and re-envisioned congregations should then reach out to invite, and re-invite, other Anabaptist-minded congregations around them to friendship with them as they seek to follow the way of Jesus together. 

I believe we may be enriched most by not simply allying with other Christ-following, Sermon-on-the-Mount heeding congregations who are most like us, but with communities of believers who are also in some ways unlike us.

In every way possible we need to be an answer to Jesus' final, heartfelt prayer, "That they may all be one, as I an my Father are one," and in this way having communities of Jesus followers becoming outposts of heaven right here on planet earth.

E pluribus unum.