Hannah Heinzekehr is Executive Director of The Mennonite, Inc. This editorial appears in the August issue of The Mennonite magazine. 

Every once in a while, my kids (a 2- and a 4-year-old) like to have a dance party. Days after returning from the Mennonite Church USA convention in Orlando, I walked into the room to find one of these parties in full swing. And the song they were singing and grooving to? Gospel classic, “You’ve Got a Place.”

Hearing these words, sung in small, spunky toddler voices, melted my heart.

 “You’ve got a place at the welcome ta-a-ble, You’ve got a place at the welcome table some of these days.”

And hearing them sing these words took me back to the work of the Future Church Summit. The FCS is one of the clearest examples I have seen to try to build a process that was representative of the breadth of diversity across our church. Extra effort went into publicity, translation, funding and more to try to ensure that groups that have been historically left outside of or underrepresented in delegate processes participated.

These efforts were apparent in the connections that began to emerge during FCS conversations. Stories celebrating the development of Mennonite institutions intersected with narratives of Indigenous, African-American and Latino/a church members being denied access to Mennonite resources. Mennonites from European backgrounds reflected pride in their particular heritage as well as their need to recognize the ways these identities have privileged them at the expense of other Mennonites. LGBTQ Mennonites shared their stories in face-to-face conversation with church leaders. And members from rural and urban settings examined shifting economic challenges facing both contexts.

As an FCS participant, I felt we were wrestling with what it meant to be church together and to make space for one another at the “welcome table.”

After convention was over, when I was sharing the story of my kids’ “dance party,” I learned that the words of this spiritual have also morphed over time. Dave Swanson, pastor of Pittsburgh Mennonite Church, noted that during the days of Jim Crow segregation, the song used to include a verse that said,

“I’m gonna tell God
how you treat me some of these days.”

Part of reckoning with our own history and planning for a different future is being honest about the ways we in the church have treated (and continue to treat) one another or the times when we have “put an asterisk on our love,” as Dr. Drew G.I. Hart said in adult worship.

The themes that emerged out of the FCS were varied, but they pointed our church in the direction of setting a more welcoming table with Christ at the center, a table that might be a witness to each other and to the world beyond us.

Among the themes that emerged from the FCS work were reminders that, “We experience the Holy Spirit in community” and “The Holy Spirit is present and unruly.” Picking up this work together will not be neat, linear and clear-cut. But that’s no reason not to join the “dance party.”

“We’ll come home to the welcome table,
We’ll come home to the welcome table, some of these days.
Hallelujah!”

Featured photo: A Heinzekehr toddler dance party.