Photo: Hannah Chappell-Dick, one of the young adult event planners, takes notes during a Friday open space conversation between young adults and church leaders. Photo by Vada Snider. 

Friday night’s convention activities included a time for youth adults to have an open discussion with church leaders about their current concerns and hopes looking toward Mennonite Church USA’s future.

Young Adult convention coordinators Hannah Chappell-Dick, Bluffton, Ohio, and Tyler Eshleman, Harrisonburg, Virginia, worked hard to make sure that there was programming for young adults this week. Their efforts paid off as the young adult age demographic was the only one that grew since the 2015 Kansas City convention. At Kansas City, 75 young adults were present, compared to 267 young adults participating in the 2017 Orlando convention.

Chappell-Dick and Eshleman credit the Future Church Summit visioning process with providing a purpose that helped to bring young adults out. They also engaged in intentional efforts to help young adults find rides, shared hotel rooms and scholarships that helped to remove barriers to attending convention.

Activities for young adults this week included several social events, young adult seminars and Friday night’s discussion session. Themes for seminars were drawn from a survey that Chappell-Dick and Eshleman conducted earlier this year and sent out to young adults through area conferences, a mailing list developed at the Kansas City convention, Mennonite college campus pastors and social media. Themes that emerged as priorities included racial justice in the church, creation care, addressing sexual violence, sexuality and inclusion of LGBTQ individuals and the Doctrine of Discovery and the rights of indigenous people groups. 

“There was also a strong undercurrent in the survey that we were losing sight of what

makes us Christians,” said Chappell-Dick. “People emphasized that Jesus is at the center of all this work for justice.”

The young adult group helped to solicit the support to bring Ted & Company to perform their new show, Discovery: A Comic Lament, which explores the legacy and current manifestations of the Doctrine of Discovery.

Friday conversations with leaders

To start off the Friday night event, Eshleman and Chappell-Dick invited each attendant to share their name, home city, and a concern or hope they have regarding the church. The concerns named initially included sustainability, LGBTQ inclusion, keeping young adults engaged in the church, the church’s institutions, and bridging generational gaps, among many other things.

Participants were then split up into six groups of their choosing, under the categories “diversity, inclusion and racism,” “peacemaking and education,” “creation care and sustainability,” “young adult engagement,” “church agencies and institutions,” and “sexual health and identity*.”

Groups split apart into small group discussion focused around the questions, “where is the church now?,” “what are your hopes for the direction of the church?,” and “what do you need from church leadership?” Each participant was encouraged to join the group which best fit their biggest concern for the church and each group was joined by a denominational leader. 

The diversity, inclusion and racism group brought forward concerns of separation of white-populated Mennonite churches and minority-populated Mennonite churches, and a hope for more interaction and fellowship between groups. One of their hopes for the future was more implementation or even mandating of anti-racism courses within churches and room for new relationships and vibrant theologies to grow. The group also expressed the need for the hiring of people in color in leadership positions across the church.

The group that discussed sexual health and identity within the church shared that the church is currently at a turning point and that we need to continue to gain knowledge and create concrete processes when it comes to inclusion of LGBTQ individuals. They called for the church to continue to listen to the stories of active hurt and tension that exist today and expressed a need for people of different opinions to co-exist in disagreement within the broader church. In addition, they discussed sexual abuse and hopes for more “concrete processes to prevent abuse and to actually hold church leaders accountable,” said Scott Troyer, a young adult that participated in the conversation. 

The peacemaking and education group discussed the need for more education and more resources for people to actually engage in the faith that they claim to have. They brought up the point that there is an assumption that youth are knowledgeable about the Anabaptist faith, but in reality there is perhaps a knowledge gap. They hoped that in the future there would be more education and discussion about the things that are at the core of Anabaptism. 

The creation care group shared that they felt the church needed to bring more discussion about sustainability into congregations and encourage every individual within the church to be conscious of the way they are treating the earth. They hoped that in the future, there might be more offered from church organizations such as Mennonite Central Committee in terms of sustainability tours. A hope was also expressed that church institutions might work towards making clean investments in the future.

The group focusing on young adult engagement expressed their concerns for the gap between youth and adults within the church and hoped that we might work towards creating community and a welcoming space for young adults to bridge that gap. The hopes they brought forward were for more implementation of programming for young adults within churches. The group also hopes that programs, such as the Step Up program that was implemented in Orlando that allowed youth to participate in the Future Church Summit, will continue to grow and encourage young adults to take leadership within the church.

The church agencies and institutions group brought forward concerns about making sure that church resources, especially websites, are kept up to date to allow young adults to find Anabaptist resources more easily. They also called for more transparency within church leadership and a longing for institutions to not protect people in power over people being oppressed. They called for agencies to “try to do the right thing and do it the right way.” 

*Correction: A previous version of this story referred to the final discussion group as an LGBTQ inclusion group. The actual topic named for the group was “sexual health and identity.”