Saying that Southridge Community Church and Toronto FreeChurch have chosen “a different path from that as set out in our Mennonite Brethren Confession of Faith,” the Ontario Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches (ONMB) has resolved to revoke the membership of the two churches.
Delegates will vote on the resolutions to expel the two congregations at the ONMB annual convention on February 24-25.
In its report, the ONMB Provincial Faith and Life Team (PFLT) said delegates will be asked to “either affirm or reject the recommendation of the ONMB board and PFLT to release and bless these two churches as they pursue a different understanding and belief regarding marriage.”
In the case of FreeChurch, its membership in ONMB is being revoked because of their “commitment to full inclusion of all 2SLGBTQ+ persons including those who are in or seeking same-sex marriages.”
For Southridge, it is their intention “to move into a model of full inclusion for 2SLGBTQ+ persons and make the discipleship expectation of sexual intimacy limited to male/female marriage a ‘disputable matter’ and not a requirement for participation and leadership in their church.”
The recommendations to remove the two from membership are coming to delegates “after much dialogue, interaction, process, prayer, and discernment by both the ONMB Board and the PFLT over the last four years,” said Michelle Knowles, ONMB Board Chair, and Ryan Jantzi, Interim Executive Director in a letter to delegates posted on the PFLT report on the ONMB website.
In the letter, the two say they “share a deep concern for how we can grow in love and invitation for 2SLGBTQ+ persons,” but believe this is best done “by a careful exploration of the way of Jesus and the ethical expectations articulated in Scripture for disciples of Jesus.”
These expectations are summarized well in Articles 10 and 11 of the MB Confession of Faith (about discipleship and marriage, singleness and family), they said.
While stating they believe those articles “faithfully describe the way of Jesus in terms of sexuality and sexual expression,” they go on to say “we need to grow in our posture of love and invitation especially to those who have been excluded and marginalized.”
At the same time, this state that this topic “really matters” because it has “larger implications for how we understand the nature of Christian discipleship, the authority of Scripture, the nature of the gospel, and so on.”
For that reason, “we do not see sexual ethics as a standalone issue, but one integral to the overall framework of how we use Scripture.”
“While some declare that our historic understanding of sexual intimacy for Christians as limited to male/female marriage is really a disputable or secondary theological matter, the Faith & Life Team and ONMB Board believe it is critical to hold fast to our existing convictions. Our ethics cannot be distanced in significance from doctrine,” they said.
The biblical teaching on the subject of sexuality, “as historically understood and articulated in the MB Confession of Faith, is strong and biblically defensible,” they said, adding by allowing “differing views on sexual ethics, many of our other faith commitments are also dramatically and negatively affected.”
At the same time, “divergence from sexual ethics expressed in the Confession of Faith would violate our existing commitments both relationally and organizationally with the broader MB community,” they said.
If a church moves away from its commitment to operate in agreement with the MB Confession of Faith and practices, “it must recognize that this necessarily puts at risk their affiliation with the larger church family.”
Since both Southridge and FreeChurch “have each publicly expressed their decision to move away from our shared biblical understanding that, for disciples of Jesus, sexual intimacy is necessarily limited to the context of a male/female marriage covenant,” both churches are “violating their ONMB affiliation covenant to operate in agreement with the MB Confession of Faith and practices.”
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