The General Conference Mennonite Church (GCMC) was a mainline association of Mennonite congregations based in North America from 1860 to 2002. The conference was formed in 1860 when congregations in Iowa invited North American Mennonites to join in order to pursue common goals such as higher education and mission work. The conference was especially attractive to recent Mennonite and Amish immigrants to North America and expanded considerably when thousands of Russian Mennonites arrived in North America starting in the 1870s. Conference offices were located in Winnipeg, Manitoba and North Newton, Kansas. The conference supported a seminary and several colleges. In the 1990s the conference had 64,431 members in 410 congregations in Canada, the United States and South America. After decades of cooperation with the Mennonite Church, the two groups reorganized into Mennonite Church Canada in 2000 and Mennonite Church USA in 2002.
Background
Mennonites first came to North America as early as 1644. The first permanent settlement was in the Germantown, Pennsylvania area when a group of 34 Mennonites and Quakers from Krefeld, Germany arrived in 1683. A total of 4000 Mennonites and 200 Amish, a closely related group, settled in eastern Pennsylvania by the 1820s.Dyck p. 196. This group tended to separate from their neighbors because of refusal to participate in the American Revolution, opposition to public education and rejection of religious revivalism.Pannabecker p. 12.
In the first half of the 19th century new waves of emigration and migration brought thousands of Mennonites to Pennsylvania, Ontario, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. By the 1860s Mennonites were found in Missouri and Iowa. The recent arrivals from Europe tended to be more educated than the eastern Pennsylvania group and had adopted new ideas and practices.
These various groups of Mennonites were loosely organized. The settlements west of Pennsylvania were scattered and had difficulty communicating with each other. A concern arose independently among these congregations for a way to connect and organize families that were scattered from Ontario to the American frontier.
Franconia Conference
By 1769 a group of 22 Mennonite congregations in eastern Pennsylvania had organized Franconia Conference.Kaufman p. 5. Franconia Mennonite Conference is now part of Mennonite Church USA. Member congregations sent representatives to regular meetings where policy and membership issues were discussed and decided. Decisions were based on Biblical interpretation. The group felt no need for a written constitution and no meeting minutes were recorded.
In 1842 John H. Oberholtzer became a minister within the Franconia Conference and shortly thereafter a bishop. In this role he attended the conference sessions. As a schoolteacher and locksmith, he had greater contact with the outside world than other ministers. Early on he resisted the expectation of ministers to wear a particular style of colonial coat, preferring more contemporary attire. Observing the process the more conservative members of the conference used to apply pressure to bring him in line with their expectations, it was evident to him that a clear set of rules and a fair process would be better for the conference than relying on arbitrary interpretation of scripture passages.
At a subsequent conference session Oberholtzer proposed a set of guidelines, a minimal constitution, for the organization and suggested that minutes of meetings be recorded so that decisions would be documented. When a majority of the more influential members of the conference refused to let him even present his proposal, or distribute a printed copy, a rift developed among the conference delegates.
East Pennsylvania Conference
After attempts to reconcile the two groups failed, Oberholtzer and about a quarter of the members formed a new group, the East Pennsylvania Conference. Oberholtzer purchased a hand printing press in 1851 and set it up in his locksmith shop. He began publishing Der Religiöse Botschafter (the Religious Messenger) with a circulation of 400, the first successful Mennonite periodical in North America. The financial burden and the demands on his time ended the operation after three years. In 1856, with funding from 92 shareholders, the Mennonite Printing Union was organized and printing resumed with a periodical named Das Christliche Volksblatt. Besides the periodical, books and other material were printed at this new facility. Oberholtzer's contribution as publisher and editor was to have significant influence on Mennonites in North America.
Through wide circulation of his paper, visits to Mennonites in Ontario and Ohio and correspondence with Mennonites in Europe, Oberholtzer begin developing a network of contacts with shared interests. These Mennonites were more open to interaction with other Christians and were interested in education and mission work. Volksblatt published reports from among the scattered North American Mennonites and from the more educated Mennonites in Europe.
Oberholtzer was particularly interested in organizing Mennonites in Ohio, Ontario and Pennsylvania for the purpose of ministering to Mennonite families scattered throughout the region. He proposed a union based on a basic set of ideals: the doctrine of salvation in Christ, the sacraments, good works and freedom in externals.Pannabecker p. 37. Although formal organization did not materialize, this type of cooperation was an ongoing theme in Volksblatt.
Organizing and gathering In the 1850s the Mennonite congregations of Franklin Center and West Point in Lee County, Iowa adopted a common constitution in order to cooperate in various projects, stressing the desire to preserve the religious faith of the small frontier groups of Mennonites. At their 1859 conference meeting a resolution was adopted to invite North American Mennonites to join this union in order to promote home and foreign missions.Pannabecker p. 44. This invitation was extended to all Mennonites and published in Volksblatt.
At a meeting the following year, four individual from outside the local congregations attended the gathering, including one from Ontario and Oberholtzer from Pennsylvania. An association of Mennonite congregations was proposed that would accept any congregation, regardless of other connections, that held a basic set of Mennonite beliefs: baptism, non-swearing of oaths and the authority of Scripture. Complete freedom was to be permitted in all matters not explicitly taught in the Scriptures.Pannabecker p. 49. Although Mennonite beliefs such as rejection of violence were not specifically mentioned, these were assumed to be covered by the authority of Scripture.
Agreement in essentials and freedom in nonessentials was the formula for uniting congregations that varied widely in custom and practice. This formal organizational meeting on 29 May 1860 is considered the beginning of the General Conference Mennonite Church. The minutes of the meeting refer to the group as Conference Minutes of the General Mennonite Community of North America (translated from German).Pannabecker p. 48-49.
The group resolved to organize a mission society, establish a training school for Christian workers, form a historical society and print tracts. Daniel Hege was appointed to travel among Mennonite communities in the United States and Canada to promote cooperation for mission work and education.Dyck p. 258.
Higher education
Through the contacts made by Hege in the year after the 1860 meeting, other Mennonite communities became interested in the new conference. The East Pennsylvania group joined the conference in 1861, shortly after Hege's visit. Hege also raised nearly $6000 for the proposed school. Within ten years the General Conference had 1500 members from 20 congregations.Dyck p. 259.
Plans to create a school for training pastors and missionaries proceeded rapidly. A site was chosen in Wadsworth, Ohio and the school was constructed and dedicated in 1866. Wadsworth Institute was opened on 2 January 1868 with twenty-four students enrolled in a three-year program of study. Wadsworth was the first Mennonite institution of higher learning in North America and trained a generation of church leaders. The school operated for eleven years before it fell into financial difficulty. The conference had several other competing concerns, including supporting mission work and resettling thousands of Mennonite immigrants from Russia who started arriving in the 1870s.
The arriving Mennonites had a century of experience running schools in Russia. Emmental,Emmatal in some sources such as Kaufman pp. 141–142. a training school for teachers was opened on 13 September 1882 north of Newton, Kansas in a school building associated with Alexanderwohl Mennonite Church. The school was moved to Halstead, Kansas where a new building was dedicated on 16 September 1883 as Halstead Seminary. The transformation of the Halstead school to a college began in 1887 when Bethel College Corporation was granted a charter.Kaufman p. 51. The school was closed for the 1892–1893 school year while preparations were made to relocate it to North Newton, Kansas where it opened as Bethel College in 1893. Other schools followed: Mennonite Collegiate InstituteMennonite Collegiate Institute official website. (Gretna, Manitoba, 1899), Mennonite Central College (Bluffton, Ohio, 1898; now Bluffton University), Freeman Junior CollegeFreeman Academy continues to operate as a grade 5–12 school. (Freeman, South Dakota, 1903–1986), English-German Academy (Rosthern, Saskatchewan, 1905) which became Rosthern Junior CollegeRosthern Junior College official website . (1946), Bethel Bible Institute (Abbotsford, British Columbia, 1939), which joined with Mennonite Brethren Bible Institute to become Columbia Bible Institute (now Columbia Bible College) in 1970, and Canadian Mennonite Bible College (Winnipeg, Manitoba, 1947) which combined with Concord College and Menno Simons College in 2000 to become Canadian Mennonite University.
In 1914 Mennonite Central College was reorganized into Bluffton College and Mennonite Seminary. The seminary was renamed WitmarsumThe name refers to Witmarsum, the birthplace of Menno Simons. Theological Seminary in 1921 and provided training for church workers until it was closed in 1931. In 1945 Mennonite Biblical Seminary was started in Chicago, Illinois. The seminary was affiliated with Bethany Biblical Seminary, a Church of the Brethren institution. In 1958 Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary was formed when the seminary joined with Goshen College Biblical Seminary, a Mennonite Church school in Goshen, Indiana. An Elkhart, Indiana site was chosen as a neutral location between the two previous schools. Originally planned as two separate institutions sharing common facilities, the seminary functioned in practice as a single school after the first decade.
Mission work
A mission board was formed shortly after the 1860 creation of the conference. Its initial work consisted primarily of promoting missions and collecting funds. The mission board explored sending mission workers to Java under an existing program of European Mennonites. When it became clear that the Europeans were not interested in working jointly with the new conference, the board decided to focus on working independently of existing mission organizations.
The first mission worker, Samuel S. Haury, was sent to Darlington and Cantonment in Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) in 1880 to work among the Arapaho. He was followed in 1884 by Henry R. Voth. Voth moved to Arizona in 1893 to start work with the Hopi.Kaufman p. 330. Rudolphe Petter spent fifteen years in Indian Territory and then worked with the Cheyenne in Montana for the rest of his life.Early mission work among Native Americans is covered in June 2006 Mennonite Life.