Photo: The Mennonite Publishing House building in Scottdale, Pennsylvania. Photo from Scottdale Historical Society. 

Six years after Mennonite Publishing House (MPH) in Scottdale, Pennsylvania, closed its doors, and 16 years after a financial crisis where many MPH employees lost their jobs and retirement benefits, Ervin Stutzman, Mennonite Church USA Executive Director, met with former employees to talk through unresolved issues and offer an apology. Twenty-four people representing more than 541 combined years of service to MPH gathered at Scottdale Mennonite Church on June 10 for a conversation with Stutzman. The staff represented were both Mennonites and Scottdale community members.

Stutzman was moderator of MC USA and, along with Jim Harder and Ron Sawatzky, was part of a three-person team appointed by MC USA and Mennonite Church Canada to address the financial crisis at MPH in the early 2000s. As part of its work, the team brought in an outside consultant to handle onsite downsizing, which was a point of great pain for many of the meeting’s attendees. The MPH offices in Scottdale officially closed when the Mennonite Publishing Network merged with Third Way Media to form MennoMedia in June 2011. The new organization moved its U.S. headquarters to Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Stutzman initiated the 2017 meeting with the support of then MC USA moderator Patricia Shelly, and after a year of conversations with Dorothy Cutrell, a former MPH staffer and wife of Ben Cutrell, who served as publisher for MPH from 1961 to 1988. Dorothy wrote to Stutzman after seeing conversations on a Facebook page for former MPH employees where it was clear there was still a lot of “hurt and misinformation.”

“So I wrote a letter to Ervin and posted it on Facebook,” Cutrell said in an Oct. 6 interview. “I thought, maybe it’s time for an apology.”

Cutrell hoped that a gathering of employees and a potential apology would offer a chance for healing to continue as well as an opportunity to celebrate the important legacy of Mennonite publishing.

“Books can go where people can’t,” she said. “These books traveled all over the world, and they were published in Scottdale. People knew about the Publishing House, and it made a difference.”

Stutzman began corresponding with Cutrell in 2016 and met for conversation at her home in Elkhart, Indiana, in March 2017. Together, they agreed to invite former employees to the June meeting. Invitations were sent to all former employees who lived in or near Scottdale. David Mishler, pastor of Scottdale Mennonite Church, agreed to serve as a facilitator for the meeting.

During the meeting, former employees shared stories of the things they loved about working at MPH, from flexibility to the organization’s family feel and a sense of being part of a mission that reached beyond themselves. They also told stories of the pain they felt at the way the broader church handled the downsizing and eventual closing, including the ways MPH and its leadership were represented in the Mennonite press.

For Kathy Royer, Cutrell’s daughter, allowing people to publicly process their unresolved feelings about the closing and to have an MC USA representative publicly acknowledge this pain was important.

“I was only the daughter of the publisher, but the closing impacted my life in significant ways,” said Royer in an Oct. 9 phone interview. “I believe people felt heard and understood. I don’t know if it was for the first time, but it certainly was the first time from an official representative of the Mennonite church.”

Royer also noted that since many MPH employees were not Mennonite but were Scottdale community members, the meeting also provided an opportunity for the “beginning of a healing between the town of Scottdale and the Mennonite church.”

Several meeting attendees raised concerns about the old MPH building, which sits in the center of Scottdale and which has fallen into disrepair. After MPH’s closing, the building was sold to another local church group that was unable to maintain the building. Several attendees expressed hopes that something could be done to restore the building or to turn the area into a green space.

David Mishler notes that because of the building’s prominent location in Scottdale and the proximity of many former employees to the building, addressing this concern would be one of the best ways the Mennonite church could repair relationships with the Scottdale community.

Stutzman acknowledges that the Mennonite church is limited in how it can address this concern, since neither the denomination nor MennoMedia own the building. He has begun networking with other local church groups to see whether there might be interest from others in purchasing the building. Stutzman does hope MC USA can help fund a new historical marker to be placed beside Scottdale Mennonite Church and near the former MPH building that would honor the work and legacy of MPH.

At the June meeting, following sharing by former employees, Stutzman read a fivefold letter of apology that named expressions of contrition for the loss of retirement benefits promised to MPH employees, “abuse from management,” the abrupt nature of some terminations, the lack of financial subsidy for MPH from the broader church and the portrayal of the publishing crisis in Mennonite press that unfairly compared the publishing crisis to broader financial scandals such as Enron.

“For all of the failings I have named above, I ask for your forgiveness. I cannot and will not demand your pardon, which I would have no right to do. In these matters, I am in your debt; you are not in mine. You do not owe anything to me or the broader church. But if it would contribute to your healing, I will gratefully receive any words of forgiveness, lament, grieving, or hope which you have to offer,” wrote Stuzman.

Read Stutzman’s full letter of apology.

In the end, Mishler acknowledged that while the meeting was not the final step in healing relationships between MC USA and Scottdale, it was an important one.

“What stands out for me from that meeting is that the pain is not far from the surface after six years,” said Mishler. “Although I think there’s been some healing and some moving on, this is the first apology these folks have ever heard from the denomination. Ervin’s letter was appreciated above anything else that happened that day.”

“The publishing house did as much mission work as any other Mennonite organization,” said Cutrell. “And lots of people came there and learned life skills and took them to many other places. There’s lots of history there, and most of it was good. I think that’s what has failed to reach people and be remembered.”

Royer believes that continuing to work at healing relationships with former MPH employees will also be beneficial for all of MC USA. “I’m not a Mennonite anymore, but I believe that if this is healed, it will invigorate the entire church.”

Over the next several months, we at The Mennonite will be running additional stories exploring the legacy and impact of the Mennonite Publishing House. 

Editor’s Note: Unfortunately photos from this event were not available at publication date.