My wife and I go to a "peace church". Specifically, a Mennonite USA church. It's called a peace church because Mennonites, along with several other denominations like Quakers and Amish, have historically refused to participate in war or other forms of violence. My grandfathers were both conscientious objectors during World War II (one fought forest fires in the Sierra Nevadas, and the other worked in a mental hospital). Mennonite organizations like MCC and MDS and others do great things around the world. The example of this nonviolent witness in the face of tragedies like the Inquisition is probably the main reason I've remained a Christian all these years, in the face of secularism and the poor example of much of the Church in America. I would say I'm proud to be a Mennonite. But right now it's bittersweet. <!-- SUMMARY_END -->
My wife and I moved to Pasadena to come to our church, hoping to be part of a community that really tried to live out Christian nonviolence. I was eager to learn how to be a peacemaker, to deal with conflict in love instead of either becoming physically (or emotionally) violent or just avoiding the conflict altogether. It crossed our minds that, like asking God to teach us patience, this learning might possibly involve actually being in a conflict. But we had no idea that this would happen. We thought maybe there would be training courses, or we'd talk with people who had dealt with conflict situations in great ways, and that we'd practice our conflict-resolution skills out in the world somewhere. Guess we were naive.
We've both always been people who stuck by our principles, even when it's unpopular. For me it's partly due to that history and partly because I've just always been a geek, and thus an outsider. In the last few years I've been trying to learn to be this way without being abrasive about it. The holy grail is to be loving and respectful even as I disagree with someone. Of course I fail miserably at this all too often.
I don't want to go into all the details here. I may amend this posting or add another one in the future. But basically we took an unpopular stand, one that we felt we had to do based on our understanding of the Bible. We attempted to express this through "proper channels" and were prevented from doing so, so we sent an email to the church listserv. At a congregational meeting soon after that (October 19), we expressed our unpopular position, something that we understood was one of the options for participating. During several timeouts we were pressured in private by the incoming church moderator to back down, and we did not. A week or two later, we wrote what we believe were respectful emails to church leadership asking for corrections to the meeting minutes, pointing out problems in the way the meeting had been conducted, and suggestions for how to do it differently in the future. Several weeks after that, the new church moderator had a meeting with us (in his official capacity) in which he roundly criticized us for taking our position, for expressing our position in the meeting and on the listserv, and for our emails to leadership. He also said other things which we found highly problematic and inappropriate. Soon after our meeting with the moderator, the outgoing conference elder indicated in an email that we if we were not willing to publicly apologize on the listserv for our original email, we should consider finding a different church. Two Sundays ago (February 15) we were informed that certain parties in leadership had been "in discernment" and had decided that we should step down from leading worship.
Until that happened, we had been trying to reason with the moderator individually but since then we've been talking to more people. Some of the people we've talked to have been helpful but others, who are in what would seem to be actual positions of power/authority in the church and who have seemed sympathetic to us, haven't. It's not quite clear whether they actually can't help (might be the case) or whether they're just avoiding conflict.
People at our church talk about "peace and social justice", but more and more these feel to us to be just liberal political positions rather than convictions reached based on Scripture. Disagreement with leadership, even expressed respectfully and in the proper forum (in this case addressed directly to leadership, and in private), is considered to be "breaking trust" and damaging to The Community. That great Anabaptist word gelassenheit, which as far as I knew meant "yielding to the Holy Spirit", is re-interpreted to mean bowing to the will of the community even when it's unbiblical, and is used to bludgeon us. As far as we can tell, this really is a peace where there is no peace.
Our church now seems to us more like the dried-out husk of the Mennonite tradition. Old-timers have told us it wasn't always like this. We have hope that it may yet again be a place where we let the word of Christ dwell in us richly as we teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in our hearts to God. Our hope is why we've stayed as long as we have.
UPDATE [2009-5-1]: Revised the sequence of events paragraph to add more detail.