How the Mennonite Church USA Abandoned Its People

Photo by Gwendal Cottin on Unsplash

Last April, the MCUSA Executive Board unanimously asked permission to break its promises. It had made promises in two forms.

First, the MCUSA adopted the Confession of Faith in the Mennonite Perspective as a founding document in the early 2000s. Among many other truths, this confession teaches the concept of marriage found in Genesis 2.22-25 and emphatically reaffirmed by Jesus in Mark 10.1-9. It says, “We believe that God intends marriage to be a covenant between one man and one woman for life.”

When organizations spend years drafting a confession of faith, months debating it in public, hours voting on it, and then spend more time to adopt it as the official teaching statement of a new denomination, they have made a public promise: Our churches will teach these truths and use them to nurture spiritual formation. Hundreds of people have participated in making this promise. Maybe even thousands. People in churches take the promise at face value. When someone joins the Executive Board, that new leader has personally guaranteed the promise.

(To have to spell this out at all should be cause for shame.)

Second, the MCUSA adopted Membership Guidelines for its conferences (regional organizations) and credentialed ministers. Leaders who join the Executive Board promise to uphold this document too. The Guidelines repeat what the Confession already says about marriage and repeat that this is the policy of MCUSA: Its ministers will not perform same-sex marriages.

Repeating points like this in official documents is problematic. If the Confession already states the teaching position of MCUSA on marriage, why was it necessary to pass Guidelines that repeat it?

The repetition was necessary because a large but uncounted number of MCUSA leaders never held to the Confession’s definition of marriage at all. They opposed it in the drafting, in the debates, and after adoption. They lost at every stage. Yet these leaders accepted the Confession as their own and led their conferences to become members of the MCUSA.

Why did these leaders do this?

The oral history is murky. I’ve heard several versions from participants. At this remove, I don’t think it’s possible to reconstruct what leaders really said in the room where it happened, or why many leaders agreed to a confession they did not in fact believe. But I do think this is a fair conclusion: The public documents said one thing and private discussions said another.

There is an official version of the story. In January of 2020, an advisory committee recommended that the MCUSA’s Executive Board “retire” the Membership Guidelines. Here is the committee’s summary:

From the vantage point of history, it seems that a decision was made to identify LGBTQ persons as the problem holding up [the founding of the MCUSA]. Instead of clarifying the implications of the proposed polity of MC USA, a fence was drawn around LGBTQ persons in a way that excluded them from full participation in the church, delegitimized the discernment of local congregations who welcome them as full members, and delegitimized the discernment of local congregations and pastors who believe the Spirit is calling them to participate in same-sex marriages.

It’s worth pondering that artfully worded statement, written from the rather lofty “vantage point of history.”

It “seems” that unnamed people decided to blame “LGBTQ persons” for holding up the founding of MCUSA. In fact, another issue held up the founding, the old-fashioned idea that ministers should obey and teach the Confession they claim to believe.

Next, from history’s perch, the committee says that the Membership Guidelines did not clarify “the implications of the proposed polity of MC USA.” Polity is the structure by which churches and denominations make decisions. MCUSA had decided to adopt the Confession. Nothing about polity needed clarification. The decision had been made, and all had participated in the process. But some of the leaders wanted the right not to follow the Confession after they participated in adopting it.

That’s not a problem of polity. That’s not a problem of clarity. That’s a problem of integrity.

Pretending that the polity was somehow unclear, the committee then says that “a fence was drawn around LGBTQ persons.” I love these uses of the passive voice to describe the actions of unnamed people. A fence was drawn. We can state what happened much more plainly: the polity of the MCUSA acted a second time to require conferences and ministers to uphold the Confession that the polity had adopted.

That is, the polity demanded integrity.

Then the committee orates about unjust exclusion and delegitimization. But all conferences, ministers, and representatives were included in the process. Even though their views were considered when the Confession was adopted, they wanted more than inclusion. They wanted the right to disregard the Confession of Faith as soon as they had agreed to it. Unless those leaders got the privilege of saying one thing in public and another in private, they felt unjustly treated.

The people in MCUSA’s congregations believed that the Confession was a serious document. But from the vantage point of history, many of the leaders seem to have treated the Confession as a joke.

The honest statement these leaders could have made at the time was, “We do not hold this Confession. We cannot join the denomination.”

Now the Executive Board has thrown away all pretense of believing the Confession. They ask their shriveled polity for permission to ignore it.

And that is how the MCUSA abandoned its people.