Archive for October 2017
Conference terminates Yoder’s credentials
Based on the findings of the Virginia Mennonite Conference (VMC) Investigation Team regarding Duane Yoder, the previous pastor of Lindale Mennonite Church, Linville, Va., and on Yoder’s decision not to contest those findings by declining to participate further in this process, Conference leadership acted to terminate Duane Yoder’s ministerial credentials for further ministry within Virginia…
Read MoreFinding the image of God in each incarcerated neighbor
I will not forget my first time in the Harrisonburg/Rockingham Regional Jail. I was leading music for a Sunday service with Minister Mark Lehman. We were let into the building through a system of locked doors, each controlled by some unseen force behind the surveillance cameras. Arriving in the room where the service would take…
Read MoreWhere does the Virginia Mennonite story begin?
Perhaps the Virginia Mennonite Conference story begins in early summer 1671, in a village in the German Palatinate, where deacon Valentine Heatwole offers bedding and clothing to Christina Weis, a thirty-six-year-old refugee who had fled her home in Switzerland, traveling more than two hundred miles with her three children, the youngest only twelve months of…
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