This article was originally published by The Mennonite

Reinventing conferences

Elwood Yoder has taught high school history and social studies courses for 34 years, since 1988 at Eastern Mennonite High School. Elwood has written seven books, including congregational histories and historical novels. Elwood is Editor of Shenandoah Mennonite Historian, and he is also Editor of Today, a publication of Eastern Mennonite School.

Conferences need to reinvent themselves periodically or they risk withering up and becoming irrelevant. Our current era appears to be one of those critical time periods when church leaders in institutions need to reimagine their structures or face an uncertain future. I believe in conferences and their purposes, though it appears to me that the future will not be like the past.

I’m positive on conferences because I regularly see young adults join in and help to work at ministry tasks. My current membership context is Virginia Conference, though I grew up in the Conservative Mennonite Conference, and was a member of the Lancaster Mennonite Conference for almost 10 years. In each of these settings young adults have been willing to step up and take leadership roles.

A second reason I’m positive about conferences is that they continue to be a vital setting for meeting church goers from other regions, counties, and states. At my conference delegate table this past summer, I worked with a millennial from North Carolina, a young adult I hadn’t met before, while the rest of us at Table 15 were from different churches in Virginia.

A third reason I’m positive about conference is because of the resources we receive at the local church level that are offered to around seventy Virginia Conference congregations. We have two workshops coming up in the next several months in which speakers and conference leaders will help congregational members learn about timely topics. I chair a conference committee and I regularly receive good help and assistance from conference staff.

Yet conferences risk decline and irrelevancy unless they periodically reinvent themselves. I can count at least five times when the Virginia Conference recreated itself in a positive way for a new era. The first was adopting the English language and giving up German in the mid-19th century, prior to other Mennonite Conferences adopting English. A second was an evangelistic effort in the mountains of West Virginia during the late 19th century that planted around twenty new churches. After World War II, many young men had participated in Civilian Public Service, had seen the world, and they came home after the war to help reshape the Virginia Conference.

A fourth makeover was in the 1980s and ‘90s when staff and many volunteers hosted five day Conferences at a church camp and families came with children, youth, and campers. For 14 years, with attendance well over 1000 for many of those years, Virginia Conference families camped at Highland Retreat, Bergton, Virginia, for their five-day Conference Assembly.

The Executive Secretary who initiated conference events at the church camp called it a “movement” because he did not know if the new direction would work. But it did, and children loved to come, families bought campers and tents, and some made it their annual family vacation. Delegates carried out their business under two large conference owned tents. Parents could let their kids run all day while they did other things. By the end of the 1990s, people voiced complaints about the heat and bugs, and with new conference leadership, the multi-day outdoor events were discontinued.

I talked recently with a parent whose children are in middle school, and he spoke of wanting a conference family event like those at Highland Retreat that he attended as a teenager. Conferences will need to pay attention to human relationships and people, creating friendly environments for children and youth, or their value for future generations may decline.

Along with creating relational settings for human interaction, Conferences will need to be alert to changing theological beliefs found in all generations. Sometimes adults ask questions, read stimulating books, hold discussions, and chart new directions for their beliefs and convictions. These changing theological understandings of conference members will require attention from leaders, in order to give people room to think and ask hard questions. Allowing for adjustments in practice and theological interpretation will help keep folks from a variety of perspectives involved in the conference. These changes, though, will require creative solutions as to how to keep congregations and people who disagree in fellowship.

I witnessed an example of a fifth historic reinvention for Virginia Conference at church on September 18. Our District Minister, a woman, licensed our new Associate Pastor, a woman, who was blessed and prayed for on stage by an Elder, also a woman. When I joined Virginia Conference close to 30 years ago, having only three woman leaders on stage and no man present, for an official function like licensing, would have been unthinkable. Without doing any research, I’d guess this may have been the first time in Virginia Conference for such an event, and I was happy to be a participant. The Virginia Conference has reinvented itself in a generation, and the women and girls of our congregation caught a glimpse of ministry potential for themselves, with a clear understanding that they are eligible for the highest positions in the conference.

When analyzing a conference or a congregation, historians look for elements of continuity while seeking to discover changes that inevitably take place over time. Virginia Mennonite Conference has operated continuously for almost 200 years. Yet it has been able to reinvent itself periodically in creative ways when adjustments were required for new eras. Conference includes me, so I need to get to work as one who cares deeply about this wholesome network of congregations and help to reinvent an institution I care about.

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