Tag: mennonites

Changes

There’s an old joke – maybe you have heard it. 

Q: How many church members does it take to change a light bulb? 

A: Change the light bulb? My grandmother donated that light bulb!

We laugh because it can be true – oftentimes we can grow used to things being a certain way for so long that we are resistant to change. 

Open Door is going through some changes right now. 

This October 1st it will be two years since I became the solo pastor at Open Door. During that time we have grown some, and some folks that had left have come back, and the reality is that we are no longer the same church we were when I was installed. 

And every so often, we have to look at things we have held onto for a long time and ask if they are still serving us. 

So right now, we are in the process of changing some things to meet our current realities. 

Like how we make decisions. In the past, we had a team of leaders who made those decisions on behalf of the congregation. But we decided that wasn’t in keeping with who we are, so we are moving to a congregational model, where the members of the congregation will decide what is best for the congregation. 

This means that soon, we will announce a schedule of regular congregational meetings. It also means that if there is something you don’t like at Open Door, you have the power to influence how we do it, and to even advocate for something different.

Of course, this sort of change in polity (that’s a fancy word for church government) means we have to change our bylaws – sort of like the constitution of the congregation. We did that years and years ago, but lIke I said, we have changed a lot, and the old bylaws no longer fit us. 

This is actually a very Mennonite path. We take Jesus’ telling the disciples that governance in the community is their responsibility (Matthew 18) seriously. We also believe in the priesthood of all believers – as pastor I am not somehow more of anything than you are – rather, we are whatever we are together. And finally, we believe that God’s voice is most clearly heard in community. 

So this is an opportunity for us to decide, yet again, what sort of church we are, and how we want to demonstrate the reality of God’s love to a world that has legitimate reason to doubt that love. 

And we will do that work together.

One year in

The first Sunday of October marks one year since Open Door called me to be their pastor, so I thought this would be an excellent time to give you an update on how that’s going – at least from my perspective. Besides, so much in ministry takes time to measure, and can only be accurately seen in hindsight. 

Over the last year, without a doubt our biggest challenge as a congregation has been dealing with our becoming a more egalitarian, congregation led church. I am incredibly proud of how Open Door has been willing to stretch to meet this challenge.

In the year prior to my being called, Open Door went through an intentional plan of discernment about who we are as a congregation and who we want to be.  The last year has been mostly about us living into that, and trying to turn it into reality.  It is only now, a year later, that it feels real. 

Our normal Sunday attendance has nearly doubled (that sounds much more impressive than if I told you the actual numbers) – some of them are old friends who want to give the new vision a chance, and some of them are people who found us and are attracted by who we have decided to be. What makes me really happy is that every single one of them are there because of who we say we are. In other words, they are there as a result of the vision we cast.

One thing we decided in our discernment was that our Mennonite identity was important to us. We had no desire to be Open Door Community Church. But, Mennonite identity here in the diaspora is difficult to maintain. So we have intentionally built partnerships with Mennonite Mission Network, and we host 4-6 tour groups a year as they come through town for Civil Rights learning tours – the last one was a few weeks ago.

Likewise, we are working on strengthening our ties with our fellow Mennonites at Nanih Waiya Indian Mennonite Church in Neshoba County. In September, many of us went up there for their quinquennial remembrance walk from the sacred mound to the church. And this fall, we hosted Mennonite Central Committee – Central States for their semi-annual board meeting. I also serve as a board member for MCC-CS, which also helps in our efforts to connect with Anabaptism at large. 

Before I go, I would like to tell you about my single proudest moment as pastor at Open Door (so far). 

As is well known, one of the outcomes of our discernment process was our deciding that Open Door would be an inclusive congregation. This is more than merely changing a statement on a website, but rather, we as a congregation needed to change – to increase our cultural competence, to be truly curious and open, to be affirming of who people said they were. 

So one day in June, when one of our people asked us to call them by a new name during a potluck, I was not at all surprised when everyone instantly agreed. And then, because I am human, within 5 minutes I used their old name. Instantly, several members of the congregation spoke out and corrected me. 

What I love about this story is several things: 

  • They were hearing this person when they asked to be called by a new name.
  • The person in question trusted us enough to ask us – they were not yet out to all their family or co-workers.
  • And the members of this congregation felt safe enough to instantly correct the pastor when they saw me make a mistake. 

I think we are going to be OK. 

Mennonite with a Southern accent

In September, I was part of a tour hosted by Mennonite Central Committee Central States, where we spent time learning from the Mennonites in Oklahoma who are Cheyene. It was a lovely trip, and if we were sitting down across from each other, I would love to talk about it for ages. But the thing that has stuck with me, and the point of this letter, is how the Cheyenne have contextualized their Mennonite faith. 

The faith tradition they currently practice was not theirs – it came to them, it must be said, by conquest and colonization and white supremacy. And yet, they see things of value there, and stay, and insist that they, too, are Mennonite. And for them to be Mennonite looks very different from what it means to be Mennonite if your last name is Unruh or Yoder and your family has a favorite shoofly pie or peppernuts recipe. 

As someone who became Mennonite through a commitment to peacemaking and nonviolence, the veneration that Cheyanne Mennonites give to warriors and veterans was something I did not expect. As honored guests of Koinonia Indian Mennonite Church, we received blankets and were then smudged with the smoke from cedar shavings and were brushed with an eagle wing as part of a purification after having spent the day among the dead in various burial grounds. 

Never have I been in a Mennonite service that involved the words “smudging” or “eagle wing”. 

But it was their tradition, not mine. It doesn’t have to make sense to me – it only has to make sense to them. It serves their needs in their context. They have taken what they were given and made it their own. 

So what does any of that have to do with us? 

There are not a lot of Mennonites in Mississippi. We’re an urban congregation. We’re diverse in multiple ways. Some of us were Mennonite in other parts of the country, and some of us have only experienced it here. In short, being Mennonite at Open Door in Jackson won’t look like it does in the Midwest or in Pennsylvania or Florida.

Being Mennonite at Open Door will have a southern accent, but still be Mennonite. For example, we are more likely to have a pecan pie on the table than a shoofly pie, but hospitality and table fellowship are still key to our identity. 

Part of my job as Open Door’s new pastor is to help the congregation discern what being Mennonite in our context looks like, and then how we share that with the world. 

The God of the Universe is frugal, and wastes nothing. It is not an accident that we find ourselves in this beautiful but broken city, in these fractious times, at this point in history. It is our job to work to figure out what that looks like for us, and then, once we do that, to get to work making God’s vision a reality.