Feb. 4 issue
Growing awareness
Seven years after profile of MC USA, northwest Ohio churches examine what lack of growth means for them
By Kelli Yoder Mennonite World ReviewFULTON COUNTY, Ohio — Seven years ago, sociologist Conrad Kanagy analyzed a survey of Mennonite Church USA and warned the denomination might be headed toward extinction. Today he thinks the church isn’t much better off, but at least it understands the problem.
Central Mennonite Church in Archbold had 436 members in 2012, down from 539 in 2001. — Photo by Lynn A. Roth
“What I observe that I think has changed since 2006,” said Kanagy, professor of sociology at Elizabethtown (Pa.) College, “is that there’s greater awareness of our situation and a willingness to recognize it.”
Published as the book Road Signs for the Journey, the profile’s conclusion was bleak in terms of growth for the church. If things didn’t change, Kanagy wrote, “the denomination itself will eventually disappear.”
“The reality was right in front of us,” Kanagy said in December. “But we didn’t see it because we had lived it.”
Now, recently released numbers show MC USA membership dropped by nearly 7,000 since 2011 (MWR, Jan. 21) — confirming the urgency of Kanagy’s message.
What would it take to turn things around? Kanagy recently completed a second book, Winds of the Spirit, profiling Mennonites in the global South. He can identify two engines of growth for churches.
“One is reproduction, which historically as Mennonites we’ve been good at; the other is conversion,” Kanagy said. “Traditionally, Mennonites in North America have not been so good at the latter, and today reproduction has failed us as we produce fewer and fewer children.”
Mennonites in other parts of the world are doing much better.
“In the global South what’s amazing is that both of these engines of growth are working,” he said. “That’s why the church is growing so quickly.”
The motivation to gain new converts is stronger in some cultures. Mennonite church plants among immigrant communities in North America are a shining example.
Comments
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My friend and sociological colleague Conrad Kanagy is right that change will be necessary for the church to grow. Mennonites don't produce as many of their own children as they used to, partly because family size has decreased and partly because staying single longer has increased as it has in the larger society. Secondly, North American ethnic Mennonites don't evangelize their neighbors terribly well. However, there is a third possibility he missed. There are thousands of Mennonite born adults who have left the Mennonite church, often for work reasons, who might be welcomed back. This is especially true for the huge baby boomer generation now starting to retire, who could relocate back to Mennonite communities.
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Ah, I recognize some faces in the pictures; there are really good folks here in Fulton County!
However, my family hasn't been to a Sunday church service in 20 years. Why?
The traditional Anabaptists amongst whom I was raised were very much apart from normative civilization, usually rural and rather quirky, in defiance of modern culture, hearkening back to the good old days.
Yet much of that being different—dress and black bumpers and no radios—became merely being different for the sake of being different, so the illogical, extraneous differences were slowly abandoned, along with the more rural lifeways.
Now Mennonites are largely integrated in both lifestyle and theology to mainstream civilization, and have transformed into Evangelical Fundamentalists (or Liberal Progressives in love with the saving powers of The State, hardly different from Mainline churches.)
Which means the chief purpose of local Mennonite churches isn't the center of a lifeway community anymore. It is now the same as every other church; i.e., hawking a divine fire insurance policy, based on a narrow, selectively literalist interpretation of the Bible.
In spite of strong beliefs about it, "Hell" is quite literally not in the Bible. Hell is a Nordic goddess of a mythological underworld who got inserted into European translations to frighten people into conformity, as fear is an effective tool of social control.
But even if one acquiesces to "hell" being a word in the Bible, since when is a rigid literalist exegesis of the Bible necessary? Did not Jesus have to shake loose Nicodemus from his literalist interpretations of Jesus' literary illustrations that carried a deeper truth than a literal explanation?
Besides, there is no fear in love. I'm a conscientious objector to torture, and to threatening it. And that's all the mythical Nordic "hell" is - sadistic threats of brutal torture.
So people ask me: If you don't believe in hellfire and brimstone, why be a Christian?
To follow Jesus.
And I follow his teachings because I think Jesus was intuitively aware of what the last 60 years of evolutionary biology, anthropology, and archeology are now confirming: that the Neolithic Revolution, agricultural civilization itself, is The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race as Jared Diamond puts it, and the hellish domination system from which we humans seek salvation.
My exegesis of the Bible includes a sampling of quirky beliefs:
• The paleolithic Garden of Eden as The Original Affluent Society. (Sahlins, 1974) • The story of Cain and Abel as the annihilation of Non-State tribal "leaver" society in favor of the city-builders "taker" society. (Quinn, 1995) • Jesus critiques all five of the primary characteristics of civilization. • Jesus especially speaking out against agricultural destruction of the soil and earth when he spoke against the bigger barn builders and told us to "consider the ravens" who still live naturally as God intended.
Which really speaks to me, because I'm un-farming my farm, and get the land back to what God intended. Wildness is next to Godliness.
For the sake of brevity, Mennonite theologian Ched Myers has has spelled-out much the same Biblical interpretation in two excellent articles, “The Fall” and “Anarcho-Primitivism and the Bible,” his entries in The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (edited by Bron Taylor, professor of religion and nature at the University of Florida.)
Salvation? Basically, humanity need saved from the many consequences of the agricultural revolution, the "wisdom of this world" exemplified by Cain the farmer/city-builder and the rich man building more barns and ignoring the natural lifeways of the lilies and ravens.
Sure, that makes me about as oddball as my long-bearded grandfather wearing a broad-rimmed black hat and buttoned broadtail britches into town back in his day.
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In spite of Brian's colorful and creative interpretation of the Bible above, what seems to be slowly killing off the MC USA is the same thing that is killing the Episcopal Church, the United Methodists, the ELCA, etc. and that is an abandonment of core Biblical truths in favor of perceived cultural relevance. I live just across the border in Indiana very near to these communities and the conservative Anabaptists in our area are growing quite nicely, largely due to large families but also because people stay as they grow up.
Maybe the answer is not to keep heading down the road to cultural acceptance and Kingdom irrelevance but rather to get back to the roots of Anabaptism?
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Hell is quote literally not in the Bible, (or at least any honest version.) That is a "core Biblical truth."
What got dishonestly translated into the name of the scary Nordic Goddess of the underworld is literally a tourist attraction (the valley of Gehenna) or what you may sometimes whistle past (sheol, the graveyard.)
If an establishment has to believe in torture, and psychologically terrorizes people with threats of torture, then Hell, let it die-off. I won't raise my children under such an abusive doctrine. Especially when it is demonstrably false.
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Brian, good to hear you're reading Ched Myers. He's got some great ideas. But I was left a little disappointed in the picture you painted so eloquently above. Where is the good news inherent in the message of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus?
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Jeff,
The last several hundred years, the church has been marketing Jesus purely as a magical fire-torture insurance policy. So I frequently get asked your question, often in more simpler terms such as: "If there's no hell, then from what specifically are we saved with Salvation?"
I think Ched Myers says it well "The gospels seem to call for the re-opening of older ways…healing power suggest an ancient capacity renewed, not just for 'shamans' but for all disciples…" ("The Fall", published in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Continuum, 2005.)
Older ways? Ancient? What's he talking about?
The same thing that anthropology and archeology have discovered in just the last 70 or so years of scholarship: Human life was healthier and measurably superior in many facets before the Neolithic revolution. University of Chicago professor Marshall Sahlins provocatively identifies as "The Original Affluent Society." (Stone Age Economics, 1974) The Paradise or Garden of Eden of ancient times.
Those ancient people lived in the hands of God. They didn't rely on their own wisdom, thinking that agriculture was a better means of feeding themselves. They weren't "cursed" to hoe fields "by the sweat of thy brow." They lived as the Ravens Jesus told us to consider.
And with my being a health care professional, I'll reiterate, our ancestors were much healthier back then, as Mark Nathan Cohen argues in his "Health and the Rise of Civilization" (Yale University Press, 1989) and we can go back to older, pre-civilization ways right now, and our bodies will heal.
And our Land (II CHRON 7:14) will heal too. I'm following Jesus to those ancient ways right now--no new barns and bigger grain bins here!--on my "farm" by getting away from soil-mining agriculture and into life-enhancing permaculture, hoping one day to copy the lush Oak Savannah the Indian tribes created here.
Our minds will heal too. As Civilization has intensified, it begins to drive us insane, as documented in Dr. E. Fuller Torrey's "Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present" and "Schizophrenia and Civilization." Just think if Adam Lanza had not gone crazy, perhaps had better nutrition and medium chain fatty acids for his brain that God intended for good health, many children would have been saved.
Yes, SALVATION is real--even scientifically measurable--with healing to our bodies, minds, and land from the scientifically measurable "hell" of mankind's Original Sin: agricultural city-Statism (Civilization.)
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I was born and raised in the Mennonite religion and frankly I think the bigger problem is the extinction of Christianity rather than any one particular denomination. Jesus never worried about numbers He wanted true believers. Christian religions need to concentrate more on spiritual growth and maturation of the soul. In other words teach what Jesus taught including the power of an ever present God. If we don't, the Nones, or perhaps the Muslims, will overtake Christian organized religion.
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As a Catholic convert from the Mennonite Brethern denomination, I watch Mennonite travails with interest. My information about the Mennonite Church is that it is fully in tune with the Zeitgeist, including feminism, homosexuality and and general extreme liberal thought. The decline in your denomination, along with other mainline groups, including certain orders of nuns and religious in the Roman Catholic Church, could be seen as the result of an abandonment of anything that differentiates it from the world at large. If following Christ means only that you are just like the surrounding world, (or at least 53% of the American culture), what need is there to belong to an ecclesial community that embodies that? Jesus said that the world would hate us, and that we would be persecuted. While we do not seek out this hate and persecution, the absence of it should reveal something about our doctrines and behaviors. To join with the most atheistic of progressivism in lockstep with modern thought indeed will spell doom for your group. Which is a tragedy.
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Beriggs - It's probably less about liberal theology and probably more about modern demographics in which Mennonites find themselves. Most Mennonites in MCUSA are having less children than their plain cousins - mainly the reason why plain groups are growing.
I'm intrigued by your assessment about a 'doomed' church. I think you are confusing political liberalism with being agnostic. What I have found though is that many Christian 'liberals' I know are so because of their commitment to follow Jesus, not because of their secular agenda. I think that's an important distinction. In fact, when a 'liberal' talked to a 'conservative' Christian, they found out that they read the bible more often and had a more biblical worldview than the popular Christian who embraces cultural Christianity but has no personal faith.
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Brian,
You raise some good points about the changes we need to take in order save the planet. In many ways think humanity has some profound choices to make. But I struggle to find any hope outside of ourselves in the narrative you offer. Where is God's activity? (How) Is your narrative different than what secular scientists have been saying about climate change?
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