Churches, Dealerships, and Franchises

[Ernie]

This thread is to discuss the pros and cons of Church dealerships and franchises.

A church starts a "dealership" whenever it sets up shop (church) in another region, while keeping its headquarters at the original location.

Churches become "franchises" whenever churches can join an official network with a headquarters, but the headquarters is an entity and not necessarily rooted at a particular original location.

I think the whole idea of national or international dealerships and franchises is very toxic to the Kingdom of Heaven, and I don't see many pros. But this is your chance to try to convince me otherwise.

Mennonites in America typically operated regionally and set up new conferences across the US as people moved and settled elsewhere.
John Oberholtzer, in 1860, was one of the first Mennonites (in recent Anabaptist history) to introduce the national dealership thing all over North America (General Conference Mennonite Church), stealing sheep from other conferences and setting up rival congregations in their backyard.
Daniel Kauffman and company were the first ones to attempt bringing all the Mennonite regional conferences under one federal government. (More of the franchise model) (which was something the Washington/Franklin conference would not consent to being part of.)
Eastern and Nationwide then followed Oberholtzer's footsteps, in setting up dealerships all over North America in other Mennonite church's back yards. Recently more conferences have started doing this, everything from Lancaster Conference to BMA to Mid-Atlantic to Pilgrim to Northeast.

The South Atlantic separation from South Eastern and now the Pilgrim Conference planning to separate into regional conferences seems like a good step to me. I wish that there was even more regional networking and less national networking. It doesn't make sense to me to have people flying back and forth over the US all year long in order to maintain the dealerships and franchise networks. It seems to me that this system is following the corporate model rather than the New Testament model.

[steve-in-kville]

Okay, so maybe to complicate things, what is the difference between a fellowship and a conference? KMF was considered themselves a fellowship, but I never could see much difference between them and other sizable Mennonite churches.

[Josh]

Is this essentially a criticism of the hierarchical “conference” model? How do you feel about flat fellowship style organisations where no one congregation lords it over anyone else, and there aren’t bishops?

Another difference could be with a fellowship that doesn’t let existing churches “switch” allegiances and instead mostly focuses on establishing new churches where there isn’t much Anabaptist (or even Christian) influence, perhaps basing it one where there has been some response to mission / tract work etc. My own church has done this and it seems to have had good results, although for unknown reasons, our new congregations tend to end up collocated with other plain groups - often with no collaboration whatsoever.

[Neto]

The only conference structure I am familiar with is that of the Mennonite Brethren. It is congregational in organization, so the "franchise" comparison doesn't compute. It would be like if the corporate decisions of McDonald's were directed by delegates sent from each McDonald's 'restaurant", with regional decisions being made by the delegates from each operation in that region, then with referals to the districts and eventually to the national level for the more complex issues. Yes, there are MB offices maintained at the District and National levels, but they implement decisions as directed by the delegates who represent each congregation. That is completely backwards from the common business model.

[Josh]

As I understand it the MB organisation is quite “flat” and congregations hold the power. I suspect institutions derived from the Kleine Gemeinde all have this model, because Holdemans are the same way. For whatever reason the old Swiss model did not prevail.

[eccentric_rambler]

I think that as travel has gotten easier and cheaper it has hurt rather than helped the franchise model. (I'm not convinced the model was good originally, either.) The franchise models I am familiar with still rely on districts to simplify administration. Once upon a time these districts were regional, allowing two or three bishops to be responsible for each district. Today, as far-flung congregations are established, franchises are slow to set up a new district and instead fold the new congregation into whatever district the administrating bishop/s are from. There is still some regionality to a district, but increasingly a regionally named district also contains congregations from 500 or 1,000 miles away.

The first problem I see is the lack of regional fellowship. If a group of congregations is attempting to work together the members of the congregations should know each other. As it is people are as likely to know well members of any district, instead of, as it was historically, fellowship outside of their own congregation being with others in the same area. This lack of regionality brings us to the second problem. Different regions have different cultures. Attempting to administrate cookie cutter solutions that are often specifically targeted to the congregations inside the district's historical region means imposing "solutions" that are pointless or even contradict the outlying region's culture. The third issue is related to this. As travel has become easier and cheaper, and disposable income has increased, it is common for members of one district to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to other districts for special events or to see relatives. Travelers can easily become dissatisfied with their home practice when seeing different practices in the churches they visit, because "we're part of the same franchise". My opinion is that this strongly contributes to a "lowest common denominator" practice, and subsequent franchise-wide declarations against practices, with the declarations making no sense in many congregations who aren't seeing these pressures.

Props to Pilgrim for what they are doing. I wonder if they had done it sooner how the Northeast split may have gone differently.

[steve-in-kville]

As I understand it the MB organisation is quite “flat” and congregations hold the power. I suspect institutions derived from the Kleine Gemeinde all have this model, because Holdemans are the same way. For whatever reason the old Swiss model did not prevail.

If I remember right, back then in KMF (15+ years ago) the congregations had some margin to work with on certain issues like technology and headcovering style. I also remember a local congregation withdrawing from the fellowship and affiliating with BMA.

But like I said, that was a while back.

[Judas Maccabeus]

Not being privy to the foundation of these conferences, and only having personal knowledge of one of them, it is notable that Southeastern, Cumberland Valley, Keystone and Mid Atlantic have largely stuck to their home territories and not extended much beyond that.

It reminds me of a line from Melvin Lehman's paper on the subject:

"Second, the New Conservative rejects authoritarianism without relationship as a means of church discipline and maintenance of traditional practices. "

If a conference gets too large, or geographically scattered, leadership gets too far away to maintain relationship. I suspect that this plays into the reason that these conferences have stayed geographically compact. KMF for example plants churches, but they are not in geographically diverse areas.

[Judas Maccabeus]

As I understand it the MB organisation is quite “flat” and congregations hold the power. I suspect institutions derived from the Kleine Gemeinde all have this model, because Holdemans are the same way. For whatever reason the old Swiss model did not prevail.

If I remember right, back then in KMF (15+ years ago) the congregations had some margin to work with on certain issues like technology and headcovering style. I also remember a local congregation withdrawing from the fellowship and affiliating with BMA.

But like I said, that was a while back.

That is Wolmsdorf, I think.

And yes, a congregation has flexibility in these areas, but mostly it has to do with application and definition. A congregation also can specify things that are more conservative than KMF's published standards, but not less so.

[Josh]

As I understand it the MB organisation is quite “flat” and congregations hold the power. I suspect institutions derived from the Kleine Gemeinde all have this model, because Holdemans are the same way. For whatever reason the old Swiss model did not prevail.

If I remember right, back then in KMF (15+ years ago) the congregations had some margin to work with on certain issues like technology and headcovering style. I also remember a local congregation withdrawing from the fellowship and affiliating with BMA.

But like I said, that was a while back.

If I understand correctly, current BMA policy would be to avoid such a “transfer” from a similar affiliation like KMF.