Mennonite Weekly Review

PHILADELPHIA — When participants gathered April 16-18 for a gathering on how to look at the church in the 21st century, they were surprised how many Mennonites were present.

Heather Kropf of Pittsburgh performed at The Gryphon, a coffeehouse in St. David’s, Pa., at an event sponsored by Franconia Mennonite Conference during the Emergent Village Conversation — Photo by David Landis/Franconia Conference

For Jess Walter, who works with Franconia Mennonite Conference, the reason was obvious: a combination of her job, a personal interest in postmodernity and faith and a desire to show hospitality all motivated her to join the 2007 Emergent Conversation.

Nearly 150 people joined the conversation, held at Eastern University and at a nearby church.

Coordinated by Emergent Village, the gathering was billed as a “conversation” as a way to set an informal tone and invite participation from all levels.

Emergent Village is about 10 years old and best characterized, according to national coordinator Tony Jones, as a relational network of friends, not a denomination, that focuses on bringing together people interested in the emerging church.

Emergent Village also organizes conferences and publishes books.

Some of the Mennonites present at the gathering, such as Tim Stair, were there as official representatives of their local conferences and of Mennonite Church USA. Others, such as Mark Van Steenwyk of Minneapolis, Minn., came representing emerging Mennonite congregations.

Van Steenwyk’s church, Missio Dei, began more than two years ago in the West Bank neighborhood of Minneapolis, an ethnically diverse area with a high level of poverty.

A year after the church began, members began to explore how they could be more hospitable and present in the community around them. They also realized they wanted to be a part of a larger Anabaptist-minded community and approached Central Plains Conference about joining MC USA.

“We are very Anabaptistic at Missio Dei,” said Van Steenwyk. “We feel that we need to submit to some larger community so that we don’t get it into our heads that we’re doing this alone or that we can simply pick and choose what we want to do as a group of ‘consumers.’ ”