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Blaine Detwiler, Lakeview

This summer, we at Lakeview decided to do something we had never done in our 50 year history as a congregation. We decided not to meet together. For one Sunday in June we decided not meet at our meetinghouse. While there have been times when snow made this decision for us, this time we made the decision not to meet. Therefore, on Sunday morning, June 28th, I posted a note on our front door that read: “We are ‘not in the house’ today.”

Where the inspiration to do a “Church Day Out” came from we are not entirely sure.

Gilberto Flores (former Mennonite Church USA denominational minister) may have had something to do with it. At our 2007 Franconia Conference Assembly Gilberto told us the chairs in our meetinghouses ought to face the doors because that is where the church “goes.” He told us that when he showed up to church on his first Sunday at first assignment as a pastor no one was there to hear him preach. Church members were in the streets and he had to go there to find his congregation. I think Gilberto is an undercover agent of the Holy Spirit.

Jeff Wright is another culprit. Hired by Franconia Conference as a consultant for the Vision and Finance Plan Team meetings, he kept pulling his devotional material from the book of Acts. In the book of Acts the church is constantly on the move…and it began to seem as though we were not moving much. I think Jeff may be an instigator of the Holy Spirit.

And then there is Krista Ehst who kept sending us these Post-Christendom reports from her internship in East London. In her blog she wrote that her church took one Sunday a month, one Sunday every month, to be “helping about” and “connecting with” the neighborhood. I think of Krista as a Holy Spirit spy. So let the record show that on June 28, 2009 Lakeview Mennonite Church did not meet.

However a group did gather at the gazebo in the center of New Milford. From there they dispersed in “twos” walking about, praying silently with their eyes open.

Another group traveled to our local skilled nursing facility in Susquehanna to sing and pray and visit. One resident excused his usual Sunday ride with his family and stayed for worship with our visiting group. Another resident wondered if the group will come again.

A young mother with a theory decided to take her family, with three small children, to visit Harford Village Apartments. She was correct, seniors “perk up” when the energy of small children arrives.

After discovering that a local woman who is losing the use of her hands needed some firewood cut into very small pieces, a group of four men went to the woods with chainsaws and donuts. They piled two pick-up truck-sized loads of small pieces next to her door.

A woman prepared a meal and took it to her reclusive neighbor. In our area there are people who simply will not come out. Whether it be fear, hurt, poverty or the accumulation of loneliness and sadness, hermit-types seldom come out of their houses. This woman took a meal to the hard-of-hearing John and yelled conversation with him for two hours.

Another family escorted an elderly woman to her church.

Another woman, who admitted to being pushed far outside of her comfort zone, asked the most challenging woman she knew out to lunch.

A group of Lakeview people decided to fast for the entire day and send off the money they saved on meals to the Worm Project. One man, who fasted from Saturday evening through Monday morning said, “I still have the choice of when to begin and break my fast…but those going hungry are denied even that choice…so with my choices, I am well off.”

These are the stories, the report, from our “Church Day Out” at Lakeview.

We admit these are baby steps in our understanding of mission in the kingdom. Jesus once said the kingdom of God is like yeast in a loaf of bread. I think what we have learned so far is that you do have to add the yeast!

Noel Santiago, Blooming Glen

Like the change of seasons, ministry happens at different temperatures throughout the year. However, unlike the cycle of seasons, we can’t always know what to expect at any given moment. While we can expect it to be cold in winter, there are winters that are milder than others. Even more amazing is that on any given day the temperature during the winter season could rise to 83 degrees as it did on December 6, 2001. I remember this because our youngest son was born December 3rd. We brought him home that day and took a picture of the family in front of our home with all of us in short sleeves and shorts.

While we might enjoy these breaks in the midst of cold or heat, we might also wonder what this unusually warm weather pattern means.

Ministry also runs these types of patterns and extremes. When the life of ministry runs at a spring-like temperatures of 72 degrees, life is good! Then, we experience that extraordinary moment in time where the temperature doesn’t quite line up with where it should be. It gets too hot or too cold and we wonder what’s going on.

This year Franconia Conference has experienced very good weather and some days where we all wondered, “What is going on?” There’s been a shift in the questions we have been hearing. Earlier in the year it was “what does conference do?” Now the question seems to be “where is conference going?”

In part, it seems this first question was connected to the emerging, but not yet clear, oversight pattern after the change in the Conference Minister structure. While the first signs of our new oversight platform have begun to emerge and grow with LEADership Ministers and advisors getting into place, we’ve shifted to a team-based approach to oversight that includes lay leadership. This is a significant shift in oversight work.

This summer’s biannual Mennonite Church USA convention at Columbus provided great experiences for many; but some of us experienced anxiety, pain, and frustration. There was a great diversity of thought, opinion, and belief expressed. A group advocating for inclusion of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) persons into the Mennonite Church known as “PinkMennos,” organized themselves to be a presence at the proceedings in Columbus. For the most part the week went along fine. Then something happened that people experienced in very different ways.

The resolutions started pouring in regarding membership and the inclusion of all persons regardless of sexual-orientation. Many experienced this as a mounting storm with thunder, lightening, and hail pouring out. Others experienced it as a clearing of the storm clouds with bright sunny skies being revealed. The resolutions committee decided to put both sides of these perspectives aside and create a new resolution passed by the delegate body—On following Christ and growing together as communities even in conflict.

After convention, young leaders from within our own congregations penned an Open Letter to Franconia Conference inviting signatures from persons who are part of our congregations and schools, ages 15-29, calling for continued dialogue around this topic and for more openness in our congregations. Again, some experience this as storm clouds, others as clearing skies.

All of this, no doubt coupled with other things such as the economic downturn, loss of jobs, eroding financial security, and changing relationships have created even more stress and pressure. Out of the uncertainties facing us it seems the question of where Franconia Conference is going has emerged.

Without going into many details here, let me simply say that Franconia Conference leaders will continue to follow the vision, mission and financial plan the delegate body has discerned as God’s call to us. Our primary mission will continue to be focused on: “Equipping Leaders to Empower Others to Embrace God’s Mission” in the world. This means that our primary energies, resources, personnel, and focus will remain singularly focused around this mission. While not disattending to the concerns, anxieties, pain, and frustration that are present in our midst, we believe that the primary call is to remain focused on the good work that has been started.

We are committed to and act in accordance to the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective as our theological underpinning and belief in all we do. We are committed to participating with Mennonite Church USA in the follow up of the resolutions from the Columbus gathering as well. Therefore, I offer the following for your consideration and discernment…

In any discussion surrounding this topic, we invite you to not begin with membership and who is in or out. Instead, can we enter into a conversation that is first and foremost centered around our commitment to following Christ? What does that mean for our day and age? When people are following Christ authentically and holistically, what does that look like? What are the beliefs we have in common and where do we differ? These types of questions might indeed help all of us reexamine and recommit again to the understandings that have shaped and formed us while offering a deeper possibility into the future without compromising the Gospel.

As the seasons and temperatures continue to fluctuate and change, may this season of ministry find us being healthy and growing leaders, disciples and congregations so that God’s healing and hope flow through us to the world.

“To everything there is a season, and a time for every matter or purpose under heaven.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

John L. Ruth, Salford

As a freshman at Eastern Mennonite College in 1950, I was too immature, and too preoccupied with a girlfriend, to pay much attention when Goshen College Professor Harold Bender came to lecture. I didn’t know he thought that our Franconia Conference “customs and traditions” had “preserved…more nearly the ancient Mennonite forms of worship, doctrine, and church government than any other American district.”

I did get serious a half-year after first hearing Bender when at the age of 20 I was zapped, by casting lots, with an ordination for a mission station at Conshohocken, just outside of Philadelphia. A week later, to my joy, my girlfriend agreed to marry me. Dropping out of college, I got a job at the Mennonite-sponsored Herald Bookstore on Main Street, Souderton. There I found a book by Harold Bender and bought a copy of History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference by John C. Wenger. I was intrigued with his take on the meetings of the Franconia Conference, where only ordained men voted.

He wrote that the sessions were “not intended to be inspirational,” but to consider “the problems, needs, and difficulties with which the several congregations are confronted.” I saw that myself, starting at conference 13 years after the Wenger book had appeared. I had to agree that “little is done” at conference to start “constructive projects for the future.” Instead, “If there is any one thing which impresses a visitor…it is the grave concern there manifested lest the church become entangled with the world.”

I had sensed myself that we had a valid tradition of unusually practical obedience to Christ. But was it the whole Gospel? Not according to my experience in mission outreach in Conshohocken, or lively discussions with fellow-student Tony Campolo in our philosophy classes at Eastern Baptist College. Were we Mennonites more concerned with defending the faith than sharing it?

Happily, when I got a copy of what would become known as Bender’s Anabaptist Vision address, I found the threefold banner it lifted – discipleship, mutuality and love – very inspiring. Since those days, Bender’s vision of what our heritage has to offer has not only stood the test of time, but is relevant to the new situations the old conference mentality didn’t address. That is why Chris Nickels, Sandy Drescher-Lehman and Dennis Edwards, in the last three issues of Intersections, could apply the triple motifs to their own work. Discipleship (following Jesus), community (Bender’s old-fashioned word was brotherhood) and love (peace), is indeed how our heritage teaches us to do church.

This is not a trivial or marginal or obsolete vision. Emergent church leader Greg Boyd from Minneapolis spoke at a meeting of Mennonite leaders in Columbus, Ohio, saying that the power of what we call the Anabaptist Vision gave him “goose bumps.” You Mennonites, he testified, have by heritage a vision as current as tomorrow. “People are waking up to the truth that the Kingdom of God looks like Jesus and that the heart of Christianity is simply imitating him.” Chalk one up for “discipleship.”

Boyd continued, “Millions are waking up to the truth that followers of Jesus are called to love the unlovable, serve the oppressed, live in solidarity with the poor, proclaim Good News to the lost and be willing to lay down our lives for our enemies.” Whoa! Non-Mennonites discovering what Bender called “love and nonresistance”? Boyd added, “Multitudes are waking up to the truth that the distinctive mark of the Kingdom is the complete rejection of all hatred and violence.” We have something “distinctive?”

Then comes a real kicker. These multitudes are looking for somebody to share “tribal identity and historical rooting.” In fact, “A central feature of their outlook is ‘the longing to live in a story that is bigger than oneself,’ in other words, “a tradition they can align with.” Looking at our Mennonite fellowship, that sense of a covenant community over time is what gave him goose bumps. “You have this treasure,” he told his Mennonite audience. “Are you going to share it?”

The sometimes tattered “banner over us” as Mennonites bears the noble triple motif: Discipleship, community and love. These are not the invention of Harold Bender, but the practical embodiment of the Kingdom. Let that threefold ensign wave!

Stephen Kriss, Philadelphia Praise Center

It’s an easy flight from Philadelphia to Atlanta, less than two hours with frequent flights between the City of Brotherly Love and Delta Airlines’ main hub at Hartsfield Airport. However, upon landing, I was jarred to remember that I wasn’t in Pennsylvania anymore. Accents are different. Tea is sweeter. Stories of racial justice and struggle surface rapidly in the midst of conversation.

Atlanta is a new city, built as a railroad hub, largely grown up after the Civil War. It’s a sprawling city, seemingly too bustling for a plan. I’ve been in this capital of the New South a few times—for the Olympics, to eat at Hard Rock Café, to walk around in hip and pricey Buckhead, to engage the story of the Civil Rights struggle at the Martin Luther King Center.

This visit was different, I came to Atlanta on assignment—to become acquainted with what’s set to become Franconia Conference’s newest congregation—Atlanta Revival Center, tucked in a business park in the northwest suburbs. Atlanta Revival is part of an emerging network of Indonesian Anabaptist congregations. It’s a church of about 80 people, most of whom came to Atlanta following the political, religious and economic turbulence that jettisoned many Indonesian Christians toward life in the United States to seek peace and prosperity through religious and political asylum.

It’s a long stretch to imagine that the Swiss/German immigrant and farmer foreparents of our Conference would have imagined we’d be here in this glistening and ambling metropolitan area. However, we’re following the path of pursuing Franconia Conference’s people as they move out into the world, up Germantown Pike, up the Skippack Creek, up the Northeast Extension. This is different now though as Indonesian immigrants have migrated mostly to the big cities of the East Coast and are now grafting their future into our long history of migration and settling.

Atlanta Revival Center is a vibrant and committed congregation. Worship is energetic and similar to other Indonesian Christian congregations. Prayer is sincere. Music is passionate and movement is carefully choreographed. Worship flows with ease. There is prayer for persons in the congregation, prayer for local and global situations, recognition of economic struggle. The congregation’s expenditures and receipts are posted on the wall monthly. Worship is a commingling of Bahasa Indonesian and English. The congregation wants to connect with Franconia Conference because of other connections with the Indonesian Anabaptist community in Philadelphia. The church is socio-economically diverse including entrepreneurs, professionals who work at Emory University, persons working in the distribution hubs of Atlanta, and those who work at Chinese restaurants

However, one uniqueness about Atlanta Revival is their commitment to being together. The Sunday morning I visited along with Pastor Ertell Whigham and Beny Krisbianto from Nations Worship Center in Philadelphia, we met again for teaching at 11:30pm in the midst of a driving rainstorm. I led the equipping conversation and we nibbled on a small scale Chinese buffet. I returned back from worship around 2am.

The next day, Pastor Ertell and Beny met with a second offshoot group within the congregation. This group meets at midnight on Mondays. It’s intended to work around the schedule of those persons who work second shift. It proved too taxing to do these services on Sunday nights. The group includes persons who have recently converted from Islam and many who are natives of the island of Sulawesi where Christian/Muslim conflict has been intense over the last decade.

It’s a privilege to introduce this congregation briefly, to begin to build the connections between communities that will be essential to our life together as a conference as we spread up and down the coast, from Vermont to Atlanta, following Christ as we follow our relationships with each other, to bring forth a glimpse of God’s reign together.

Pending the blessing of the delegates at this year’s conference assembly, Atlanta Revival Center will become the largest Mennonite Church USA congregation in Georgia. And the history of our connection as we spread from and through Philadelphia, as immigrants and exiles will continue and manifest once again. May God’s peace and grace be upon us.