The Mennonite Young People's Conference Movement, 1919 - 1923: The Legacy of a (Failed?) Vision

Abstract: Throughout the history of the church, reform initiatives and new visions both strain the fabric of church life while also enabling the church to address new challenges. The Young People's Conference movement of 1919-1923 was one such movement in the (Old) Mennonite Church. Young progressive leaders, shaped by their experiences as World War conscientious objectors and relief workers, critiqued existing church structures and proposed a program of sweeping changes. From its beginnings, however, the reform movement faced the difficult challenge of winning support from all sectors of a church polarized by broader modernist/fundamentalist debates. The challenge proved insurmountable--after four years the movement disbanded. Yet several decades later, the church had enacted most of the reforms proposed by the Young People's Conference movement, which raises interesting questions about the process of negotiation and compromise leading to changes in church life. In January 1921, Orie B. Gerig--a gifted young Mennonite leader, Goshen College alumnus, and World War conscientious objector--faced rejection at the hands of the church he hoped to serve. Gerig had applied for a position with the Mennonite Board of Missions as an overseas missionary. But despite his apparent qualifications the board denied the appointment because of his association with theological movements that the board had deemed unorthodox. Gerig faced the option of either denouncing those movements or severing his ties with the denomination. For years he had struggled--unsuccessfully, for the most part--to introduce reforms into the (Old) Mennonite Church that he hoped would become a defining vision for the twentieth century.(1) A year earlier Gerig expressed his discouragement to a friend and cousin, Jacob C. Meyer: You and will be old men before our people will grasp such a vision of service(2) Yet he believed so strongly in the possibility of church renewal that he had been willing, initially at least, to give up a promising career outside Mennonite circles to see that dream realized. By 1921, however, the lines dividing Gerig from key church leaders had become sharply drawn. Frankly he wrote to Meyer, I sometimes feel that we are attempting a hopeless task. [We] cannot reconcile ... on these grounds. It will be impossible.(3) Gerig's fears were confirmed early in 1921 when the Mission Board asked him to renounce all association with groups and doctrines, a concession that Gerig found to be unthinkable.(4) As Gerig explained to Meyer in March 1921, I have come to the point where can no longer view all problems only in the light of our own little branch of the church. We have a larger project in view7. In the end, our plan will live after all their intrigue has passed on the blemished page of history(5) Gerig had made his choice--a choice that would ultimately lead him out of the Mennonite Church. Orie B. Gerig was part of an early-twentieth-century reform movement in the (Old) Mennonite Church in which young people sought to engage their faith and their church with the rapidly changing world of their day. The initiative, known as the Young People's Conference (Y.P.C.) movement, sponsored four conferences between 1919 and 1923 at which youth and young adults envisioned the future of the Mennonite Church for their generation. Almost from the beginning, however, the Y.P.C. movement became entangled in larger church debates, framed largely as a struggle between Modernism and Fundamentalism. The controversy culminated in 1923 when conservatives successfully closed the reputedly liberal Goshen College and brought an end to the Y.P.C. movement. The struggles prompted Gerig and many of his progressive-minded friends to leave the (Old) Mennonite Church, disappointed by their failure to enact reforms and convinced that the church would not develop an effective peace witness in the twentieth century. Yet however tragic the demise of Y. …