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2004-04-20 issue:

Goin’ to Carolina in my mind

Leadership column

by Jorge Vallejos

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You have probably read by now that the next biennial assembly of Mennonite Church USA will be held in Charlotte, N.C., July 4-9, 2005. You have probably heard that Mennonite Church Canada will also meet with us in Charlotte. This will be the first time for our churches to come together since the integration of the General Conference Mennonite Church (GC) and Mennonite Church (MC). Charlotte will offer an excellent opportunity to reconnect with friends and family.

People have asked me which came first, the decision to meet jointly or the selection of the meeting location. The answer is simple: neither. We had originally planned to meet in Canada. In fact, Canadians recommended that our office contact Toronto and Montreal, both wonderful cities with enough meeting space and hotel rooms to accommodate a group our size. We were also seriously considering the possibility, had Toronto been chosen, of offering billeting in the Kitchener-Waterloo area for anyone willing to make the 90-minute car ride each way every day.

What happened? We hit a snag. July is a busy month for hotels in Toronto and Montreal, with many tourists and other groups wanting meeting space. Hotels were not willing to give us the rates we normally get in the United States. This is how hotels figured it: Why should we give Mennonites an $80 U.S. rate when someone off the street is willing to walk in and pay us more than $100 U.S. for the room? It was my sad duty to recommend to the Joint Executive Committee, the group working on the 2005 convention, that we reconsider meeting in those cities.

We could have made a sacrifice and paid the much higher rate in order to meet in Canada. But at least two big issues worked against us. First, in late 2002 and early 2003 the United States was in a recession and cost was a huge concern for everyone. Second, and not necessarily the most important but the one with the greatest long-term effect on our meetings, was that once the word was out that our group had paid more than $100 for a room it would have been difficult to convince future cities that we were not able to pay a higher room rate. There were other, nonmonetary considerations for this decision, but they are beyond the scope of this article.

Just for your information, the average hotel rate in Charlotte will be $5 lower in 2005 than it was in Atlanta in 2003.

Although the number of Canadian youth and delegates coming to Charlotte won’t have a huge impact on our overall numbers, the symbolic value of meeting together is huge. U.S and Canadian delegates will spend time dealing with joint agenda and will come together for all worship sessions. The rest of the time will be spent on country-specific agenda. The committees working with our office to put all this together have Canadian representation on them.

Speaking of committees, our first planning meeting for Charlotte was held in January, and we have a creative bunch. After three days of hard work, the group came up with the theme “Can’t Keep Quiet,” based on Acts 4:20. Before deciding to go forward with this theme, we looked at past convention themes for the former GC and MC denominations to be sure we were not recycling an old theme. We found that in the last 30 years this type of theme had not been considered by either group. One of the committee members wrote: “The convention planning committee embraces the story of the disciples in Acts 4:1-31 as having a message for the Mennonite Church today. We commend this entire text to the worship planning committees. It challenges us to speak the good news, to pray for boldness, to believe that God will act with and through us. As narrative, it is a model of the stories we could tell each other about God’s activity in our lives.”

The worship planning committees met in early March and are well on their way to giving life to the work of the planning committee.

Atlanta was memorable because it was the first gathering of Mennonite Church USA this side of integration. Charlotte will also be memorable because it will be the first time Mennonite Church Canada and Mennonite Church USA gather jointly. It will be good to watch friends and family reconnect in an assembly setting. I invite you to start making plans now to join us in July 2005. Don’t stay quiet about this. Spread the word to others. See you in Charlotte.

Jorge Vallejos is director of the Executive Board Office of Convention Planning for Mennonite Church USA.

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