Executive Board OKs health-care plan

Board encourages Spanish-language initiative, reviews The Mennonite.

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Meeting Sept. 18-20 at Philadelphia Mennonite High School, the Executive Board (EB) of Mennonite Church USA gave its OK to a plan to provide health insurance coverage for all pastors and discussed an initiative to provide more resources in Spanish to congregations.

Keith Harder, director of the Health Care Access Project, reported the results of 27 focus groups in the past six months and brought a recommendation that a health-insurance plan for pastors proceed. The plan, called the Corinthian Plan, is to be communicated to Mennonite Church USA members in the coming months and must be approved by delegates at Columbus 2009 next summer. If that happens, the plan should begin on Jan. 1, 2010, Harder said.

Project team members Karl Sommers and Greg Lacher offered their perspectives as well. Sommers said the plan emphasizes wellness. “This is more about the kind of church we want to be than [about] health insurance,” he said.

EB members asked clarifying questions, then unanimously recommended that the Corinthian Plan be adopted by congregations and agencies.

In response to a request from EB, Iris de León-Hartshorn, director of intercultural relations, developed plans for a Spanish-language initiative in consultation with Iglesia Menonita Hispana. This five-year initiative moves from developing a pool of translators to creating material written in Spanish. A further goal is to catalog resources already available in Spanish and make them available in one place online and by phone.

EB members noted that Spanish speakers have been frustrated when trying to find materials done by different agencies. This needs coordination, they said. Moderator-elect Ed Diller asked, “How can we make this happen faster?”

It also needs ownership, said Ron Rempel, director of Mennonite Publishing Network. “We have Spanish-language curriculum gathering dust on the shelf.”

EB member Glen Guyton said the need goes beyond language. Materials he sees don’t fit his context as an African American in an urban area.

EB member Addie Banks said racial-ethnic groups are not all alike. She is writing curriculum herself, she said, because she hasn’t found any that fit her context.

The board asked staff to work with churchwide agencies to reduce the five-year proposal to three.

EB members review one of the churchwide agencies every third meeting or so. At this meeting the board reviewed The Mennonite, Inc. (TM), an entity of Mennonite Church USA. TM’s executive committee (Susan Sommer, Gerald Mast and Barth Hague) and editor Everett Thomas joined the discussion.

TM board members said they want to be collaborative with EB “and promote the ministries of and support identity building for Mennonite Church USA,” as the bylaws state, but they’ve been given few opportunities to do so.

EB members continue to express that the TM board should move from being a governance board to being an editorial board, with The Mennonite being part of the communications and development work of the church.

In the end, the two boards agreed to form a task group to propose an editorial policy and how the magazine will operate under the EB in line with the purposes of The Mennonite as described in the Mennonite Church USA bylaws.

This EB meeting discussed leadership development, one of the board’s four priorities. Members reviewed responses from area conferences, agencies and schools about leadership development.

The board liked the focus on competencies. However, said EB member David Boshart, “we have a ways to go to understand leadership from a missional perspective.” He said we need to look at the role of context in leadership formation and close the gap between congregations’ expectations of pastors and pastors’ expectations of themselves.

In other activity, EB members
• asked staff to develop equitable employment guidelines and human resources policies across Mennonite Church USA that further the priorities of antiracism and leadership development;

• called for delegate materials to be available in English and Spanish;

• expressed support and prayers for the Colombian Mennonite Church;

• received a positive audit report for the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2008, and a balanced preliminary budget for the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2010.

The EB’s next meeting is Jan. 22-24, 2009, in Glendale, Ariz.

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Additional Notes

Executive Board meets local leaders, school staff
The Mennonite Church USA Executive Board held its meetings Sept. 18-20 at Philadelphia Mennonite High School. Principal Barbara Moses led a tour of the school and introduced the school’s staff and four of its students. The board also met with representatives from Oxford Circle, Abundant Life Chinese, Vietnamese and West Philadelphia congregations in the city. These and other congregations build relationships so they can work together to address common concerns and bear witness to Christ.—Gordon Houser