A history of Mennonite Youth Fellowship, 1948-1968

Growing up in a Mennonite church, I was active in my congregation’s Mennonite Youth Fellowship group. While we regularly attended biennial Mennonite Youth conventions and occasionally met with other local MYF groups for service projects or social gatherings, our MYF was essentially a Sunday school class for highschool-age youth. Our adult MYF sponsors provided leadership and offered a mix of both social activities and more focused faith formation and outreach opportunities. However, we had no idea of the depth of history behind the term “Mennonite Youth Fellowship.”

While MYF has come to refer to any Mennonite youth group, its history stems from the churchwide MYF organization that operated from 1948 to 1968. As I researched its history and development, many people expressed surprise that a national Mennonite youth organization ever existed. Understanding this history—both MYF’s original goals and the reasons it was later dissolved—helps us better evaluate our contemporary structures for youth leadership development and faith formation.

The origins and early life of MYF: Like many other Mennonite institutions and organizations of the 20th century, MYF was a product of the post-war 1940s. One of the primary concerns of Mennonite leaders in the late 1940s was the faith development of young Mennonites. Mennonite youth were increasingly being exposed to a developing high school “youth culture” that delayed entry into social roles of adulthood and separated youth from adult care and guidance during their early teens. This development of youth culture withdrew youth from significant social roles both in secular society and within the church.

A variety of factors—notably a concern for maintaining distinctive Mennonite principles in the face of cultural assimilation, especially among youth; a period of institution-building within the Mennonite church; and the development of high school youth culture that withdrew Mennonite young people from active church involvement—combined with the apparent success of other national youth ministry organizations, such as Young Life (1941) and Youth for Christ (1944) to convince leaders of the (Old) Mennonite Church that their youth needed a program targeted specifically to them in order to strengthen their Mennonite faith and their allegiance to the church.

In May 1947, Paul Erb—at that time secretary of Young People’s Activities on the Mennonite Commission for Christian Education and Young People’s Work (MCCE) as well as editor of the Mennonite publication Gospel Herald—presented his idea for a Mennonite youth program. He envisioned a program that would support existing youth activities organized by congregations on the local level but also provide a network for churchwide coordination and communication. By facilitating churchwide fellowship among youth groups through annual gatherings, Erb hoped to encourage youth by cultivating a sense of belonging—that rural youth groups were no longer isolated and could continue to be uniquely Mennonite in a non-Mennonite society.

The Mennonite Church approved Erb’s proposal in August 1947, and the first annual churchwide MYF meeting took place at Mackinaw Dells near Eureka, Ill., June 11-12, 1948. The membership of MYF consisted of Mennonite youth groups that chose to affiliate with the churchwide MYF and paid a yearly membership fee (initially $5), with an additional suggested annual donation rate based on the total MYF budget. Each affiliating group could send one voting delegate to MYF annual meetings. The delegate body elected an executive committee consisting of president, vice president, secretary and treasurer. The executive committee then appointed a young person as secretary in each of three program areas of MYF: Faith and Practice (later shortened to Faith), Fellowship and Extension (later changed to Service).

In its first decade of existence, a main focus of the churchwide MYF was to provide each MYF unit with monthly program materials, including suggestions for activities related to the three areas of MYF. MYF Cabinet members wrote the monthly releases and emphasized various aspects of youth life: nonresistance, boy-girl relationships, nonconformity, fine arts, youth and Christian citizenship, and summer recreation. These releases continued to function as one of the most important activities of churchwide MYF and constituted a large part of its direct involvement in local MYF units.

The 1950s and early 1960s were a time of growth, challenges and changes for churchwide MYF. After 1955, monthly releases were discontinued in favor of publishing volumes of Youth Program Ideas, which were followed by a revised MYF Manual and a songbook titled Singing Together. By that time, attendance at the annual MYF meetings had topped 1,000.
To help manage the increased workload caused by this growth in MYF publications and attendance, the MCCE and the Mennonite Relief and Service Commission cooperated to hire H. Eugene Herr as the first full-time youth field worker in 1958. Herr organized annual meetings, communicated with local youth groups and interacted with non-Mennonite youth program leaders to obtain new ideas for MYF. Driven in large part by Herr’s efforts, the churchwide MYF continued to grow and flourish in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The bittersweet end of churchwide MYF: By the summer of 1961, the need for more internal direction led the MYF Cabinet to ask, Where does MYF stop and other youth work start? This question reflected a growing concern within the Mennonite church about the lack of communication between various Mennonite committees, organizations and institutions. In the early 1960s, the Mennonite Church began a process of revision that eventually resulted in a major restructuring of Mennonite organizations in the early 1970s. Concerns within MYF regarding the purposes and direction of the organization grew out of concerns in the broader Mennonite church.
In 1966, MYF delegates voted to suspend the MYF Constitution and the annual MYF meetings because of the increasing cost and energy required to coordinate national conventions. One year later, the MYF Cabinet officially dissolved itself, passing many of its responsibilities on to a broader Churchwide Youth Council, which included youth workers from each regional conference of the Mennonite Church.

Understanding the end of churchwide MYF: The churchwide MYF was dissolved in the late 1960s for various reasons. First, the political and social climate of the 1960s brought a new emphasis on connecting Mennonite youth with the broader society and world, not just local congregations. This emphasis on service and social involvement led to critiques of MYF as an insular organization that withdrew youth from social engagement.

Second, there was an increasing desire in many denominations to integrate youth into the life of the whole congregation and denomination instead of maintaining a separate youth organization. Some church leaders took this a step further and wanted youth to be active in the official decision-making of the denomination by involving them in General Conference delegate sessions, nominating them for leadership positions and committee roles and even including them as elders in congregations.

Third, there was a growing disconnect between highschool-age and college-age youth that made the format of churchwide MYF difficult to maintain. As more Mennonite young people left for college or voluntary service following high school graduation, the cultural and social divide between high school youth and college-age young adults grew. It became increasingly difficult for young adults (on the MYF Cabinet) to give counsel and provide leadership for high school youth.

Finally, increases in the number of conference youth secretaries and youth ministers decreased the workload and importance of the churchwide MYF. As more conferences created positions for adults working with youth, connecting these youth secretaries with each other became more important than providing new resources and programs for youth. As local conferences began doing more, the churchwide MYF could do less.

Together, these four changes helped bring about the end of churchwide MYF in 1968. In large part, the dismantling of MYF was not due to major flaws of the organization but simply changes that occurred in the Mennonite church and in society over the course of 20 years. While the organization was no longer adequate by 1968, MYF had largely fulfilled its purpose: it had created a sense of unity among Mennonite youth, given them a sense of belonging in a pluralistic society and helped nurture the faith and spiritual development of many Mennonite young people.

While modern-day Mennonite youth conventions continue to provide a similar opportunity for faith formation and social interaction among Mennonite youth, no national organization has taken the place of churchwide MYF. Without the formal structure of churchwide MYF to foster leadership development and faith formation for our youth, the denomination and individual congregations must intentionally provide these opportunities in new and imaginative ways. !Explore (run by Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary) and Ministry Inquiry (a joint program of Mennonite Church USA and various Mennonite colleges and universities) are two examples of attempts to formally invite youth to explore leadership possibilities, but more creativity is needed for individual congregations.

Changing times call for changing structures. Churchwide MYF was a successful model for youth ministry in the mid-20th century; today’s church must continue to evaluate its structures and programs to ensure that youth are regularly given meaningful leadership opportunities and nurtured in their faith development.

Jonny Gerig Meyer is a second-year student at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Ind., and a member of Benton Mennonite Church, Goshen, Ind. He wrote this as a student at Goshen College.