At its November meeting, the Mosaic Board affirmed the recommended actions regarding a Giving and Receiving Counsel process with Beth Yoder. In April, Yoder officiated a same-sex wedding.
The discernment process, as outlined in the Giving and Receiving Counsel document, included a conversation with a review team comprised of members of both the Ministerial Committee and Credentials Committee. Yoder was not employed as a pastor in a Mosaic Conference congregation at the time of the officiating, though remains a member of Salford (Harleysville, PA) Mennonite Church where she was most recently part of the pastoral team.
The following recommendation came from the review team which was then affirmed by the Ministerial Committee and forwarded for final processing to the Mosaic Board:
We find Beth Yoder’s actions in officiating a same-sex wedding to be at variance with the policy and teaching positions of Mosaic Conference, specifically with Statement Three of the Church Together Statement Grace and Truth, which states that pastors credentialed in the Conference may not perform same-sex covenant ceremonies. We reaffirm that the Grace and Truth statement is the policy and teaching position of Mosaic Mennonite Conference. In accordance with the Giving and Receiving Counsel document, each incident is to be handled on a case-by-case basis. We recommend that Rev. Beth Yoder’s ministerial credentials with Mosaic Conference be placed on probation for a period of two years. Probation is defined by A Mennonite Polity for Ministerial Leadership as “the credential held by those…who are placed under close supervision for a specified period of time in order to determine whether the credential will be continued.”
Review team members included: Sherri Binder (Ripple), Tami Good (Souderton), Josh Meyer (Franconia), Michael Howes (West Swamp), and Aldo Siahaan (Philadelphia Praise Center).