Pilgrim Conference split

[mike]

Our congregation in contrast is a relatively young (17 years), sorta outlying (couple hours from any other church in the conference), and fast growing outreach with a small minority of charter members from the conference. The majority of our group are former Pilgrim, Washington-Franklin, Eastern, Horning and one independent (my family) who joined in the years since. There is also a former Nationwide fellow and a former old order Mennonite couple. Our church building is maxed and there’s talk of splitting the congregation.

How do the people from the various more-conservative groups feel about the future (other than the former Pilgrim folks, and yourself)? Will they be surprised when their own children decide that this kind of church is too "conservative" for them?

I am just amazed at the lack of self-insight about this, when a church is almost entirely composed of people from more-conservative backgrounds.

I don't really know the answer to the question. Of the few youth that we have 'lost' to more liberal groups since I was here, a couple were of W/F background and their parents haven't seemed that bothered by their leaving, and one other was a single Eastern guy. In general our youth and parents seem to have pretty good relationships; it's one of the things I like about our church.

The bottom line is that our church isn't that conservative anyway in a lot of ways. Not the topic of this thread though.

[ohio jones]

I was simply citing Paul's criticism of churches breaking into factions. Which is a particular affection of Anabaptists. This Pilgrim split is but one small example. In fact, in Galatians he lists it up there with sexual immorality, witchcraft, and drunkenness as sins to be avoided.

We all read into the Bible what we want to see, and conveniently ignore what we don't want to see. Or explain it away in various ways. I'm no different to be sure and will plead guilty to doing that too.

The Pilgrim division is not "churches breaking into factions".

The Pilgrim division is more about how a church in one end of Pennsylvania is quite along way away from a church in Florida, and it would simply make more sense for them to be organized into different conferences now.

It is no different than how MC USA has Mosaic Conference, Mountain States Conference, etc.

Are you able to understand that?

It's no different than how the pre-2000 Mennonite Church split into MC USA and MC Canada.

[JohnL]

The winter Bible Study teachers (ordained men) get together in advance and make up lesson sheets with 10-12 questions per lesson based on a text. It may be a scriptural text or some other book. Youth are expected to put significant time into researching and answering the questions ahead of the weekly Bible study. At the end of the Bible Study, the teacher calls for 2 or 3 youth to submit their lesson sheets for him to review. Noone knows when their sheet will be called for, so until they have turned theirs in for that winter, they need to keep doing good work in case their paper is called for.

I like that plan. It keeps the students interested in completing the work.

[Ernie]

Josh Lindsey covers this at the beginning of this video. The rest of the splits... well... sounds like so many attempts at being the right one...

[Soloist]

Josh Lindsey covers this at the beginning of this video. The rest of the splits... well... sounds like so many attempts at being the right one...

Wife: Just curious, what does this have to do with the pilgrim split? it sounded like it was about Anglican politics and lawsuits.

[ohio jones]

Wife: Just curious, what does this have to do with the pilgrim split? it sounded like it was about Anglican politics and lawsuits.

It's just the first two minutes that are about Pilgrim.

[Soloist]

Wife: yeah, his link started me in the middle of the video, so I thought that was where Ernie wanted us to listen. I found it interesting, his banned list. I didn’t actually know about the anti- pink/lavender standard on men’s clothing, but I think most men I know of would find it weird, and most of the teens/youth I know wouldn’t be caught dead in it.

Also, the only insurance absolutely forbidden is life insurance. It doesn’t say anything about company insurance and government assistance is just discouraged, but not forbidden.

[barnhart]

Maybe we should use the terminology they prefer and call it branching rather than split. I was a part of a conference that did this in the 90's. As far as I know there was no rancor and the division was strictly geographic. Why does this deserve a negative connotation like split?

[Soloist]

Maybe we should use the terminology they prefer and call it branching rather than split. I was a part of a conference that did this in the 90's. As far as I know there was no rancor and the division was strictly geographic. Why does this deserve a negative connotation like split?

There is a narrative that splits= bad and anything phrased as a good split is washing the narrative.

Sometimes splits are actually planned and not hostile.

[Ernie]

Maybe we should use the terminology they prefer and call it branching rather than split. I was a part of a conference that did this in the 90's. As far as I know there was no rancor and the division was strictly geographic. Why does this deserve a negative connotation like split?

I vote to change the title of this thread to "Pilgrim Conference Branching".

The author of this thread has spent time in EPMC and in Catholicism and the concept of "branching" understandably seems like a foreign concept, in his experiential ecclesiology.