From the editor

The official beginning date for Mennonite Church USA was Feb. 1, 2002, the day the new fiscal year began for most agencies. But most of us think of the denomination’s “birthday” as that moment in the summer of 2001 when delegates at the Nashville, Tenn., assembly voted to form our national church and Mennonite Church Canada.
Nevertheless, on Feb. 1, both national church bodies will mark a decade of official existence. So what has changed on our side of the border?

• We’re smaller. According to Mennonite Yearbook, there are now 109,000 Mennonite Church USA members in 939 congregations. That’s down from 120,381 U.S. members and 1,063 U.S. congregations in 2000, the year before the vote to integrate Mennonite Church (MC) and General Conference Mennonite Church (GC).
• Some congregations switched area conferences for theological or geographic reasons. However, one requirement seems to have slowed the phenomenon: A congregation wishing to change conferences can do so only with the blessing of the conference it wants to leave.
• We have much less interaction with Menno- nite Church Canada. In an article we published last July, one of the co-chairs for the Integration Committee lamented this change.
  This is one of my deepest regrets about [Integration Committee] work,” said Dorothy Nickel Friesen, “and subsequent lack of Mennonite Church USA commitment to binational linkages.”
• Institutions in Elkhart County, Ind., have significantly expanded their facilities, while Harrisonburg Va., got the remnant of Mennonite Publishing Network through a new binational agency called MennoMedia. Scottdale, Pa., lost the publishing ministry completely, while the former GC offices in Newton, Kan., contracted from four buildings to one.
• Dueling agencies and redundancies—across GC and MC lines—are now a thing of the past. Further, the four current agency and Executive Board staffs are working collaboratively in a way that often did not happen in the MC structure before merger. This has happened even without the GC-style centralization of the agencies the Executive Board wanted in 2007.
• “Dual-conference” congregations, the group most adamant in their call for a GC-MC merger, no longer have their members counted twice and no longer need to split their time and financial support between two ecclesial structures.
• GC and MC identities are fading as we all become MC USA members. For the first six years there were quotas for appointments to agency boards to ensure both traditions were represented. We have moved beyond such quotas.

The last decade has been a “settling in” period for Mennonite Church USA. It is doubtful the next decade will bring as many significant changes. For that we can be grateful. Now the national church structure can concentrate even more on the mission before us: discern where God is at work and then, aided by the Holy Spirit, let God’s healing and hope flow through us to the world.