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Explain the "chain of command" at your church. Are you part of a conference with a bishop in charge of a district? Do you have deacons and ministers? Elders in charge? Independant fellowship?

Feel free to share.

My affiliation, Hope Mennonite Fellowship, bills itself as a "fellowship" as opposed to being a conference. However from what I can tell we operate precisely the way a conference would. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong. The formal leadership structure works like this.

Conference decisions (by vote of all ordained men in HMF)
Senior local bishop (if applicable)
Local bishop
Local ministers & deacons
Lay membership


Where our conference may be unique, and I'm not sure about this, is that all conference decisions are apparently made by all ordained leaders. I assume some conferences may have a hierarchical structure of decision making even within the body of ordained men, where for example decisions by bishops or bishop committees might rank above decisions by the entire body of ordained leaders. Our bishops do meet, and I assume their opinions hold a lot of weight in discussions, but as I understand it, the votes that matter are always among the entire group of ordained.

In theory we believe in elder led churches, with elders knowing the congregation and seeking counsel from the congregation before moving forward with something. In function, this has been hard to implement.

We would follow the traditional Brethren structure, just with different names.

Head pastor/ministry team leader/elder-in-charge are elected from the ministry for a four-year term. This allows the ability to replace them if there is an issue, but it is rare. Otherwise they serve until retirement (emeritus, age 70 for us).

Ministers are ordained for life and serve until the afore mentioned age 70.

Deacons are ordained as a couple and typically serve as a couple, with few exceptions.

There would be various committees below this, mostly by lay members.

The Dunkard Brethren have a few odd quirks to this, which I can detail later.

The smaller conservative spin-offs vary quite a bit and tend to be more exclusive.

Our structure is, each congregation has a bishop, minister and deacon. The bishop is considered the top leader, or however you want to phrase that.
Sometimes a church will have one of these offices vacant but the intent is to have all three. Large congregations will add ministers and deacons as needed, but not more than one bishop.

If there is a hierarchy within the Western Fellowship ministry, who meet at least once a year, I don’t know exactly what it might be. But I would suspect that age and office would be a big part. And maybe the congregation size. But the ministry work hard to be more accountable and hold in high regard their own congregation’s beliefs, and keep the influence of other churches and Bishops in less regard than the local members. Our churches have a strong culture of pushing back on the idea that anyone outside the congregation has a vote or say in what that congregation does or doesn’t do. It’s not that we won’t ask for opinions and council. But the final decision is each church. I would say this is a defining characteristic of the Western Fellowship structure.

Every church is autonomous and free to make its own decisions within the Western Fellowship. Oddly enough, there are no rules nor agreements or minimums at the Fellowship level. The Fellowship has no mechanism to force a congregation to do or not do anything, or to eject a congregation.

Over the 75 years of existence, there has not yet been a congregation ejected from the Western Fellowship. There has been some congregation that have left on their own. Maybe two in order to join more liberal allies and I’d say one more for other reasons.