• Menno companies tend to hold a monopoly in their menno market, and act like monopoly-holding companies - leaving innovation (or prophetic voice?) behind in favor of careful survival and profits.
• Careful survival is also a result of being customer owned, with a customer base that has not come together around the product, but around a fairly diverse faith. Being a monopoly in the market that owns you leads to a lot of bureaucracy and not much competition.
• Add on top of that, as your owner the church wants you to be prophetic, but as customer the church wants you to be cheap with high returns and you’re in a bit of a bind. To make things better, everyone in the church is defining “prophetic” in different ways.
• All that doesn’t lead to a particularly open and creative or innovative environment on the personal level either. And less inspiring work places tend to lead to less inspiring work

When it comes down to it, my conclusion (at this point) is that mixing church and business is potentially just as dangerous as mixing church and state. I’m not proposing you leave your faith out of your business practices (or your politics) - but I’m suggesting the church institution should probably avoid owning businesses, just as it ought to avoid running governments.

The problem isn’t Mennonites being college professors, but college professors working for the Mennonite church. There’s a potential conflict of interest there that Goshen College (and their employees) regularly deals with, and has been shut down over in the past.

Thoughts?

My last name isn’t Miller, Yoder, Steiner, Hershberger, Amstutz, Gerber or Troyer, either. I can trace my geneology back to Scotland, Germany and Norway, though.

“What it means to be Mennonite” is going to vary person-to-person. To 89-year-old Alma Yoder living on a dawdyhaus in Lancaster, PA, “Mennonite” may be something different culturally and generationally than it does to a 25-year-old in Washington State who grew up in a vaguely theistic home but recently fell in with a dynamic group of Mennonites.

There’s something about chosing your church for yourself that has distinct meaning. The most committed and theologically-consistent Catholic I know was raised Protestant. She doesn’t go around crowing about how horrible Protestants are or how she’s glad she left. She’s just happy to discuss why the RCC did this or that, or explain a particular doctrine. I’m dismayed when I see people just staying exactly where they’ve been their whole lives, never questioning much, just… there. Small towns are ripe for that—maybe someone who lives in a city can address the citydwellers’ propensity toward stagnation, too.

I loved the line about how there are a lot of Mennonites making money off of being Mennonite. I’ll bet you’ve left a lot of folks sputtering at that thought.

Then again, I get the feeling (from some) that just because I didn’t grow up Mennonite, then I don’t know what it means to be Mennonite.

Don’t believe it. From your writing, I would say it’s safe to say you understand Mennonites better than they [can or will] understand themselves. But don’t leave. MC USA needs people like you to stick around and be an uncomfortable thorn in their side if nothing else.