New Voices: By and about young adults

It’s interesting what a little church polity and a history lesson can do to inform your church service experience and give it meaning. This story is mine, a young person’s perspective that I’m sure is limited in scope. Nevertheless, it shaped my ministry to the church.

More than four years ago, I was invited to serve Texas Mennonites as their treasurer at an important crossroads for the Mid-Texas Fellowship. At the assembly that year and the months that followed, four important events shaped the future of the fellowship, whose name at the same time would be changed to the Texas Mennonite Convention (TMC).

First, all the churches in Texas could no longer hold dual-conference status and had to join either Western District Conference (WDC) or South Central Conference (SCC).

Second, the entire coordinating council for the fellowship would change.

Third, this council would be given new guidelines that would outline steps into greater autonomy from any conference.

Fourth, later that year, the associate conference minister for the WDC would exit, and a new one would be appointed for Texas.

As the marriage between General Conference Mennonite Church (GC) and the Mennonite Church (MC) created the unity of Mennonite Church USA, the children (and may I call myself a grandchild?) have a lot of sorting to work through.

The churches had to choose the conference that best served the congregation’s needs, but the future of the TMC was not considered in the shuffle of the divorce of two conferences that for years had been trying to parent this union of two denominations.

The majority of churches chose WDC over the mother-creator of the Mid-Texas Fellowship, SCC. They chose the father who had more resources to support them and maybe a similar theological/values system, especially for the women, as the GC churches seemed historically to create a space for women leaders.

By default TMC moved under WDC authority, and one can see that WDC comes from a GC legacy that supports individual churches, whereas MC churches had a system that encouraged power at a more local level within the unity and fellowship of churches. No one seemed to consider the systemic difference between WDC and SCC until they saw the consequences of choosing their conference.

What became clear was that the TMC didn’t have a place in the WDC system because it understood power as centralized in the individual churches, and the voice of TMC (strongly Latino, mind you) was no longer heard. After a year of trying to find a way to work with WDC, the TMC moderator resigned. The secretary and I worked together to bring unity, and in an effort to hear the different voices within Texas at a scheduled assembly meeting, a significant number of churches declined to attend.

The discouraged secretary resigned, leaving me to hold the reins of an institution the WDC system didn’t have a place for systematically and an associate conference minister who didn’t at times recognize my leadership with this Texas convention because I was not a pastor or under the WDC system. Here I was trying single-handedly to call the churches to make a decision on the future of TMC.

Last year, as my final attempt, I worked to organized a financial assembly that lacked organizational support, and it didn’t come to fruition. After speaking to a Texas pastor friend, she encouraged me to walk away. These obstacles were evidence that the end had come (at least for me).

That morning, I resigned from TMC, knowing full well that TMC would end without a proper, communal burial or deserved recognition. I grieved and burned with anger that the money I was entrusted would possibly not go into the hands of Texas pastors but in WDC’s.

That night, at 2 a.m., I had a gallbladder attack that sent me to the hospital with pains like being in labor. I could hardly breathe. There I experienced the death of TMC through a day of tears, angst and anger, and I alone buried her.

My hope is that with my healing a birth of something new may be happening in Texas, something only the Spirit knows.

This story shows what I believe to be true and a call for a more honest conversation about how polity—how we see church power and where that power lies within the church/conference—influences our struggles with other issues, such as homosexuality within the church, immigration, the “purity” of our Anabaptism and diversity of cultures among many other issues.

As Mennonite Church USA continues to work on its unity, let’s remember polity matters now more than ever.

Janet Trevino-Elizarraraz lives in San Antonio, Texas. She can be reached at
alpasofirme@gmail.com.