RZehr wrote: ↑Mon Jan 08, 2024 3:17 pm
Western Conservative Mennonite Fellowship:
The local ministry invites a preacher from a different church to come and help.
The congregation is reminded not to just nominate your family or your buddy. Congregation is encouraged to give a nomination instead of just wishing the Lords blessing on the process. But you are free to do either. There would be a problem if no one receives enough votes to hit the minimum threshold.
The ministry considers the amount of possible voters, and decides and announces the number of votes required for a person to be nominated. A large congregation may have this number set at 13 or a small half size congregation may be as low as 5. Members must be 18 years old in order to vote.
The ministry and the visiting preachers are in a private room. Each single voter, or each married couple walks into the room and verbally tells the ministry the name of their vote. Husband and wife are free each give different nominations, or the same nomination, each spouse is 1 vote.
The ministry does not ever privately disqualify a person who has been nominated. I would find that to be highly scandalous and problematic if they tinkered with the vote totals or anything like that without prior ratification of such a thing by the congregation. Never has one in my memory ever been disqualified at all. But I do reckon that the ministry would publicly disqualify someone if that happed. The threshold for disqualification though would probably be very high.
After the votes are taken, the ministry emerges from the room, and publicly reads the names of the nominees. We are never given vote total at all. So we don't know if someone got the majority, or if someone got the minimum threshold.
Then the nominees are interviewed by the ministry the next day. Sometimes a nominee will for personal reasons, remove himself at this point from the ordination process. In this case, the church is notified that the nominee has with drawn his name. I know one man that did this, and then the next ordination he was nominated again by the church, and this time went through with it and was ordained. He felt more at peace the second time.
We use the same number of songbooks as there are candidates. No "extra book". This is because we aren't asking God to decide if any of the men should or shouldn't be ordained. We are asking God to show us which of these qualified men it should be. The lot isn't more sacred than the voice of the church, but rather it is the deciding factor that causes contentions to cease.
If there is only one nominee that reaches the set number of votes, that man is ordained and no lot is necessary in any way to prove or confirm that he is Gods choice. We believe that Gods people should be able to discern qualified men. It's only when there is multiple qualified men, that the lot is used, and that is because we have an overabundance, and we only need one.
