I think it says something about the way many older Mennonites handle conflict across the board that Upland is a community of 66,000 people and has three Mennonite Churches (Mountain View Mennonite Church and First Mennonite Church, which both have nice buildings, and Peace Mennonite Brotherhood, which has rotating meetings in members’ homes in the ‘classical Mennonite tradtion’)whose total population would equal the congregation of one of any of the other churches in the same city. Of course, originally, they were all the same church (back in my grandfather’s day) and now they are not.

It is my experience that Mennonites of a certain generation and upbringing have only two ways of dealing with conflict: avoidance, either pretending it does not exist or simply ignoring those with whom one might come into conflict, and retreat. My mother fits this pattern, while my father (who grew up in a secular household that attended a Presbyterian Church, and who joined the Mennonite Church when he and my mother married) is much more ‘activist.’ In his own younger days he sought of those whom he felt were wrong and forced confrontations… this leading for sometime to a bit of stand-offishness between my family and others in the Church.

Since I mentioned my mother, I will use her as an example. She is a tremendously good woman and far from racist. She is a teacher by calling as well as profession, and her longest running teaching job was for San Bernardino County teaching kids who had been expelled from school. While there were some genuine ‘bad kids’, many of them had been expelled for truly silly reasons. The majority of them were black or hispanic. My mother gave them personal attention designed to get them back into school or to allow them to graduate independently.

We had a gentleman in our church who had a very old 19th century European attitude about anthropological ethnology. He was not a traditional ‘racist’, but he held views that could only be seen as racist and he had unfortunately allowed these views to color his reading of the Bible. As such, he had an unfortunate habit of butting heads with a member of our congregation (himself an ordained minister, which the gentleman with the racist views was not) originally from Ethiopia.

The behavior of nearly the entire church (including my mother, who privately excoriated such views) was to ignore the conflict in the hopes it would resolve itself. It did not and, ultimately, a valuable and productive elder of the church left the congregation because he did not feel welcome. Not because he WAS unwelcome, but because the need to avoid conflict trumped the necessity of correcting the problem in the minds of many of the other elders of the church.

It is only natural, sadly, that these tendencies would be mirrored in the larger frame of the MCC. We are a traditional, European faith and many of our members are proud of their ancestral connections to European Mennonites. This leads to a European consciousness that is fundamentally at odds with the more multicultural direction the larger church has taken in recent years.

I realize this is an old post, but I could not withold my own two sense. I apologize that this is largely anecdotal, from my own experience, but it is not the sort of thing easily supported by links.

So true, Tim, so true.

Thanks very much for your thoughtful analysis of racism at work in MCC. I especially resonated with this part:

For me it felt like if there was a perceived conflict or disagreement, those with power (usually white men) would consistently avoid conversation or ignore the issue. Because they were in positions to make decisions, this meant that they got their way without having open conversation. For example, sometimes staff would be asked for input on new policies or ones that were being reviewed. Many times my co-workers and I would respond with our in-put. More often than not, I(we) received no response, and the feedback would not be reflected in action or policy. Sometimes I would try again to follow-up and would still be ignored.

I think this is something not just to consider as part of MCC, but something I can see in myself. It’s often easy to just back away from uncomfortable conversations about race or gender. And if I don’t choose to engage with them, I don’t have to. Even if I’m not in a decision making role, this tendency to avoid challenging conflict is problematic.

Many prayers as you move your way through this.