Contextualizing Community Hermeneutics: Mennonite Brethren and Women in Church Leadership

This thesis examines how Mennonite Brethren in Canada and the United States contextualized the practice of community hermeneutics as they sought to discern how to respond to the issue of women in church leadership. A detailed narrative of the Mennonite Brethren conversation regarding women in the church between 1954 and 2002 focuses primarily on the activity of the bi-national General Conference, which was responsible for facilitating theological reflection among Mennonite Brethren in North America. This intentional engagement in a process of discernment over the course of five decades reveals the difficulty Mennonite Brethren experienced living out their ecclesiological and hermeneutical convictions in the midst of significant cultural transition and in the face of profound theological disagreement.;This study analyzes the Mennonite Brethren practice of community hermeneutics through the lens of two contemporary Anabaptist theologians, John Howard Yoder (1927-1997) and James Wm. McClendon, Jr. (1924-2000), who offer complementary theological visions of the practice. Yoder's location of the practice of community hermeneutics within a set of related social practices encourages Mennonite Brethren to develop a healthy process that can effectively facilitate consensus within theological diversity. Yoder challenges Mennonite Brethren to reflect the nature of the church through their practices as well as develop greater awareness of the complexity of the hermeneutical task. McClendon's articulation of the baptist vision offers Mennonite Brethren a hermeneutical framework for interpreting Scripture and understanding their own identity, while his portrayal of practices provides a helpful model for assessing their experience of community hermeneutics. McClendon challenges Mennonite Brethren to take seriously the guiding work of the Spirit within the gathered community as they seek to understand the formation of their shared convictions and assesses the influence of diverse overlapping convictional communities.