Editorial

After they finished speaking, James replied, “My brothers, listen to me … I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God.”—Acts 15: 13,19

Every group has within it a structure for organizational leadership. This structure is called “polity.” A politician is someone who understands the polity of a group and is a “polity technician.” Both leaders and followers can be politicians.

Two experiences during the 1990s brought me to this conclusion: a politician—“polity technician”—can use his or her skills with the group’s polity for the good of the group or for the private good of another group or person.

First, I was elected to the Goshen (Ind.) City Council in 1991. In that first four-year term I had a steep learning curve about tax levies, annexations, unfunded mandates and the limitations of our own law-making. The polity of a small town is simple, however. There is a mayor, a judge, a common council and a clerk-treasurer—all elected offices. Every four years we make our case to the electorate about why we should be reelected.

During this same period I also served as a Mennonite Church representative to the committee charged with creating a Mennonite polity for ministerial leadership. We were to have the document tested broadly, revised and ready for the convention in Wichita, Kan., in 1995. At that meeting General Conference Mennonite Church and Mennonite Church delegates took a key step toward merger and adopted A Mennonite Polity for Ministerial Leadership.

I learned more about politics in that church work than in the city council work. Furthermore, in the last 17 years I’ve found church politics to be more complex than small-town politics. That’s because there is less clarity about the polity within the Mennonite church. But what leaves me cold is when someone, frustrated by a decision in a congregation, an area conference or churchwide assembly complains, “It’s all politics.”

Of course it’s all politics. And my favorite political convention is the one recorded in Acts 15.

The early church had to set its boundaries, and its leaders gathered in what is usually called, “the Jerusalem conference.” The result: Circumcision would not be require of Gentile Christians, but they should refrain from eating meat offered to idols or strangled and blood, and they should refrain from fornication.

But the leadership polity of the group was markedly different from ours today. After listening to the debate—with both the apostle Paul and Peter weighing in—the turning point came when the elderly and venerated disciple James said, “I have decided.”

Such protocol was typical of the Ancient Near Eastern culture—and continues in some parts of the world today: a venerable and wise elder listens to the arguments, discerns what is best for the group and then makes the decision. The key to this polity as in any other: what is best for the group.

In this year when we elect a president it will be very difficult to discern whether a candidate wants what is best for the whole world, what is best for our country or what is best for himself. That’s because both campaigns will have millions of dollars to make their candidate look honorable.

But we do have some Mennonites with experience as elected officials at both the state and local levels. For these faithful Mennonites to continue in office as long as they do, they must understand their state’s or region’s polity.

If asked, they might also help us as a church to think more carefully about our country and our responsibilities as citizens in the most powerful country in the world.

As politicians, all of us—leaders and followers—straddle two kingdoms, and each has a significantly different polity. The first thing we can do is to discern together, with those who are wise and venerable, what is best for each group.—ejt