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2007-06-19 issue:

Lancaster church ordains Elizabeth Nissley despite conference polity

by Anna Groff

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Lancaster, Pa. - More than 380 people gathered Sunday afternoon, June 24, at James Street Mennonite Church, Lancaster, Pa., for the ordination of Elizabeth Nissley, associate pastor at James Street—even though Lancaster Mennonite Conference ministers rejected a resolution to ordain women in a January 2007 vote.


In 1993, Nissley was licensed by Lancaster Mennonite Conference (LMC) to serve in the Mount Joy (Pa.) Mennonite Church. In 2002, she began serving as associate pastor at the James Street congregation.

Linford King, overseer of Lancaster district, ordains Elizabeth Nissley, associate pastor of James Street (Lancaster) Mennonite Church.

The ordination credentials for Kathy Keener Schantz, also an associate pastor at James Street, were also transferred from Pacific Southwest conference to LMC.

Keener Schantz spent 17 years with the Trinity Mennonite Church, Glendale, Ariz., and was ordained by Pacific Southwest Conference in 2000.

Linford King, bishop-overseer for Lancaster City District, performed the ordination for Nissley. The service included a sermon, readings and 11 songs. Children waved scarves while leading the processional and recessional.

King said the service is not a “reaction or act of defiance,” and that those were “unfortunate” phrases in a Lancaster newspaper article. King said James Street came to the decision to ordain Nissley “carefully, prayerfully and intentionally.”

James Street spent the last six months, after the vote to ordain women did not pass, evaluating how to respond since there was no initiative from the conference.

“This is not acting on a whim or a knee-jerk response,” King said.

A statement from Mennonite Church USA executive leadership says executive leadership hopes LMC will find a way to hold the ordination credentials for women and “the prolongation of this ambiguity will be detrimental to Lancaster Conference, the women who are ordained and to the larger church.”

“Today is certainly a day for celebration … we are not alone,” said Jane Peifer Hoober, pastor at Blossom Hill Mennonite Church, in her sermon during the service. “Jesus consistently calls us beyond where we think we can go … we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t believe this.”

LMC will not recognize this ordination. A letter from Keith Weaver, moderator of LMC, states: “Not recognizing this congregational ordination is not, in any way, meant to diminish the leadership gifts of any of the nearly three dozen women licensed for ministry with Lancaster conference … We will also continue to remain in loving relationship and conversation with the James Street congregation.”

Jim Lapp, general secretary of the former Mennonite Church, Jeff Wright, conference minister for Pacific Southwest conference and Ofelia Garcia Hernández, president of the Mennonite Church in Mexico attended the ordination service.

Karen Sensenig, of Red Run Mennonite Church in the Reading-Bowmansville district of Lancaster conference, said she attended this service to support Nissley and be a part of a “historical moment for Lancaster conference.”

Sensenig, who graduated from Lancaster Theological Seminary in 2006 and is now chaplain-in-resident in the clinical pastoral education program at Lancaster General Hospital, said she has a lot of hope for the church and the new ways to read scripture.

She said she has slight concern that this action opens doors for churches to ordain anyone and she wonders how to maintain an Anabaptist identity.

“While I have that concern I still choose to believe that all will be well,” she said.

Lancaster district formed its own credentialing committee to approve candidates for ordination.

“This has to happen,” said Miriam Charles, of the Habecker Mennonite Church in the Manor district of Lancaster conference. “There’s no other way for the church to move forward.”

Charles said the bishops worked hard to have the vote to allow the ordination of women pass, and they grieved over the results. “[This service] is the breaking point for things to move forward,” she said.

Charles does not believe there will be discipline from the conference, although that might have happened 20 years ago, she said.

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