Concern for Church Polity and Discipline: Essays on Pastoral Ministry and Communal Authority, 1958-1969

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CONCERN: A Pamphlet Series for Questions of Christian Renewal was born in the 1950s of shared concerns over a gap between an Anabaptist vision and contemporary, North American Mennonite reality. The initial group views the increasingly hierarchical denominational structure, the emergence of centralized, professionalized, pastoral ministry, and the resultant changes in polity and practice as fundamentally incompatible with a Believers’ Church ecclesiology. Essays here present that critique and discussion of the reconfiguration of pastoral and communal authority, as well as the assertion that reclamation of a disciplined priesthood of all believers is the path of Christian renewal. Today the question of what institutional forms best structure the leadership, authority, and shared life of congregations persists, marked by particular concern to attend to the exercise of power within actual communities of faith.