Dave Swanson is Pastor at Pittsburgh Mennonite Church. 

Three months ago, after a few years working as pastor of Pittsburgh Mennonite Church, the PMC community ordained me. Ordination is a kind of baptism. The ordination liturgy reaffirms baptismal vows. And this baptism is an immersion in a beautiful, “Yes!”

My ordination was performed by people I have come to know, love, and trust—people who have seen me at my soaring best and floundering worst. As the service drew near, it was all smiles. It was being known. It was being seen. It was grace.

But beneath a baptism of “yes” that was about me was a deeper and wider yes. The people of Pittsburgh Mennonite Church and Allegheny Mennonite Conference were saying yes, not because they like my work or me, but because they have seen God’s life happen in our life together. They were saying, “God’s life happens among us when you do your work in this community.”

These friends and congregants were firsthand witnesses to the life of God happening in our church fellowship and they made a connection between my work to help that happen and the thing itself. I am so grateful to have experienced this. It is a kind of miracle.

I asked Isaac Villegas, pastor at Chapel Hill (North Carolina) Mennonite Fellowship (CHMF), to preach as part of this service of “yes.” I chose Isaac because I have seen and felt God moving when he ministers and does his work.

I first registered this at a meeting I attended five years ago in Durham, North Carolina. Isaac invited me and five other congregants from CHMF who were interested in ministry to meet with Clyde Kratz, the Conference Minister for Virginia Mennonite Conference. Of the six of us who came, five are now Mennonite Church USA pastors and the sixth is a hospital chaplain. What other pastor of a church of 70 attendees assists six people to enter church ministry in one season?

In Isaac I see the Spirit at work—driving people to open themselves to God and each other and drawing people into a larger, more complicated and connected life than before. Given the life that flourishes under Isaac’s ministry, it seems tragic that Isaac has been publicly censured by Virginia Mennonite Conference and resigned from the Executive Board for faithfully doing his work.

But what feels like tragedy is actually irony. It turns out those of us watching this saga play out knew life was happening even while some of the main players did not. Whether it is CHMF or Iglesia Mennonita Hispana, the Worship and Song Leader’s Retreat or a Harrisonburg (Virginia) Bach Festival or, now, the Future Church Summit, people want to have Isaac preach, plan and converse among them. People across our denomination know Isaac’s voice and work are needed as we interpret our past and imagine our future. We have seen his work and the Spirit’s work in it and said “Yes” because of the life there.

It should be said that Isaac broke rules. He performed a wedding ceremony for two women. But he did so after a long process his church community used to discern faithfulness given the calling of their current context.

The response to the rule-breaking reveals that we value our rules over life. We have chosen control instead of ordination.

We should expect Spirit-led disruption. When Isaiah claimed that God does not desire “burnt offerings and sacrifices,” that would have been strange news to any Torah following worshiper at the time. It sure seems in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy that God desires animal sacrifice performed in particular ways. But Isaiah was redirecting the faithful to life—the end goal of the Law.

When the Spirit put Peter into a trance in Acts 10, let down a sheet full of pigs and told him to eat, Peter’s voice echoed across the rooftops: “Never!” Those animals and the people and places they represented were out of the bounds of fellowship. But life—Spirit life—was happening in ways that undercut previous theological understanding.

In both testaments, the Spirit drives us relentlessly toward an abundance characterized by surprising, even transgressive, fellowship and practices that redefine life in God.

I hope we—the people that are Mennonite Church USA—can recognize that we have often lacked the courage to place life at the center of our practice. Instead we, as in the case of Isaac’s discipline, have been content to exercise control. And so we resist the Spirit. We quench flourishing.

I also hope that we can see that we also have a track record of affirming life and pronouncing it God-ordained.

The time has come to renounce our lack of courage and live into our ability to recognize and affirm life. I write in the hope that next month in Orlando we will have the courage in our conversation and deliberation to ask openly: “Where is life happening among us?” “Where are new things being birthed?” “Where are people flourishing and the marks of new communion appearing?”

If we can ask these questions, then perhaps we can ask even more difficult ones like, “Do our institutions help us affirm and celebrate the life that is happening?” “Do our rules and practices support or suppress the life and beauty at work in our communities?” “Are we helping or hindering the Spirit of God?”

My hope is that our Future Church, including but not limited to the upcoming summit, will be one marked by this kind of courage—a courage that makes us willing to subordinate the idol of control and the illusion of institutional permanence in favor of new birth. I hope we can be an ordaining church that senses and celebrates life when and where it flourishes, no matter what.

This “Opinions” section of our website provides a forum for the voices within Mennonite Church USA and related Anabaptist-Mennonite voices. The views expressed do not necessarily represent the official positions of The Mennonite, the board for The Mennonite, Inc., or Mennonite Church USA.