March 25, 2015
“They vote on everything. They’re committed to peace. Can a church that defines itself by harmony survive dissonance over homosexuality?”
Emma Green writes about how the Allegheny Mennonite Conference comes to terms with one member church’s commitment to welcoming LGBTQ members and clergy, and its insistence on performing same-sex marriages. It’s a story of the events of one day that lets the reader feel the tension the entire denomination is confronting.
“The conference leaders handed out the ballots—simple slips of colored paper that might have been printed off from Microsoft Word. They weren’t checking who could and couldn’t vote—they even handed a ballot to the only reporter in the room. The conference, it seems, was determining the future fate of a church on the honor system.”
Read “Gay and Mennonite” by Emma Green in The Atlantic.
