When Jubilee Mennonite Church was voted out of the Manitoba MB Conference in 2023, lead pastor Janessa Nayler-Giesbrecht felt herself being voted out.
“It was personal for me,” she says.
At the time of that vote, Janessa was youth pastor at Fort Garry MB church, a position she had held for a decade. While Fort Garry had been a good fit, the provincial and national conversations on LGBTQ+ inclusion in the MB Conference had increasingly become tense for her.
“I was profoundly impacted by Jubilee’s removal,” she says, adding she was sad to see it happen since she had been advocating for the MB conference to be more accepting of LGBTQ+ people for years.
A few months after that 2023 vote, Janessa was in conversation with Jubilee about their pastoral position opening. She was hired as lead pastor in September of that year.
“I got to step in just after this church had done a lot of work to decide on their affirmation statement and prepare for their removal from the MB conference in spite of their hopes to stay,” Janessa says.
What she’s experienced since that time “is a collection of people who have experienced a lot of challenges and difficulty together, and those who have stayed through are closer for it,” she says.
Although a few people left because of that decision, others have come to the church. That included two people who, independently of each other, described their experience of coming into Jubilee as "a light in a dark space."
That, says Janessa, “has meant a lot to me and other folks at Jubilee, whose affirmation statement was really born out of the conviction that all are welcome to be in community with us.”
This summer, Jubilee—which counts up to 80 people as part of the congregation—did a congregational check up on the health of the church and look ahead to what they might want to focus on.
During that process, Janessa read some of the original documents from the arrangement that brought together the Northdale and Valley Gardens to form a joint Mennonite Church Canada/Mennonite Brethren congregation.
“It sparked a wave of renewed grief for me, knowing how that merger ‘ended’ in 2023,” says Janessa of the vote to expel Jubilee from the MB conference. “I'm not sure we have fully processed that grief.”
Jubilee's hopes for the future is to “continue to be a place of worship, safety, and refuge for anyone who wants to be with us,” Janessa says. “We want to prioritize this welcome and bringing people in as they are.”
God, she concludes “is at work in Jubilee. We are just trying to follow God the best we can.”
