lesterb wrote:This is a hard question to answer, in some ways. There are some things in plain Mennonite churches I don't really like. But a person could wander the whole world over and not find a church where he liked everything. There are certain things that I believe are biblical and I don't know of any other group that holds to them.
Like I used to say on MennoDiscuss in the good old days, you need to chose a congregation as a package. If that package results in what you think is right and biblical, then you can live with some things you don't care for. I've seen too many people walk away from the package because they didn't like the color of string it was bound with.
I could just echo Lester's words - they are so true. I appreciate the standards our groups hold to, I appreciate the cautious approach to change, and like I said in another thread, the cape dress (among many standards) is good in helping us maintain the package.
I have found the story of "Change" in Anabaptist churches very interesting but also discouraging. In the late 1800s we experienced a split in the Swiss Mennonite churches of eastern USA and Canada. The plain group reined in their standards and practices to recover ground they had lost while trying to satisfy the more liberal groups. The liberal groups, freed from the plain restraints, went all out until after twenty five years of free fall, they became concerned by the modernist spirit of the time. Fundamentalism seemed a good way of stopping the trend, but eventually, to some, it looked, felt, and acted too much like their Old Order cousins. This was followed by hippy type trends, long hair and facial hair on men, cut hair and no covering for women and the loss of even the better aspects of fundamentalism.
One hundred years after the onset of the fundamentalist era, those churches have largely exchanged all other standards for the concept of love and acceptance. And yet in the words of Sandra Cronk in her dissertation "Gellassenheit", "Discipline is the highest form of love we can show." Freely calling everything good, in spite of what the Bible says, is not truly the kind of love we wish to have for each other.