On a Saturday in March, the Allegheny Mennonite Conference met in Springs, Pennsylvania, to determine the fate of Hyattsville Mennonite Church. A decade earlier, the Maryland congregation had been formally “disciplined” for accepting gay and lesbian members. Now, there were three resolutions on the ballot: let Hyattsville back into the conference as a full member; remove Hyattsville from the conference altogether; or, if no agreement could be found, dissolve the conference.
When a Mennonite church gets called out for its conduct, that judgment comes from its peers. As of 2010, roughly 296,000 Mennonite adults lived in the United States, but the small Christian denomination is broken up into several dozen oversight organizations and church bodies. These tend to be decentralized and democratic: Church representatives vote on everything from budgets to service projects and summer camp.
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