Jeanette Hanson, director of International Witness for Mennonite Church Canada, began a Zoom call last spring with an apology to members of the Anabaptist Network in South Africa.
“I told them I was sorry for the way MC Canada broke relationship with them,” she said. “Two people on the call cried, talking about the hurt and then the silence, and how they had waited for this apology. Seven years later, this was still so raw that they cried.”
Hanson has repeatedly apologized since she began as director in 2019. It has been vital to her work.
“To be shown MOUs [memorandums of understanding] that we had signed with national church bodies in other places and then just walked away from…. How do you have any kind of relationship within Mennonite World Conference after those things have happened? Your only stance can be the stance of apology,” she said.
Roots of restructuring
In October 2017, MC Canada hosted a special assembly at which recommendations of the Future Directions Task Force (FDTF) were approved by delegates. They were implemented immediately. The task force, which had begun in 2013 in response to declining donations to the national church, was composed of 10 people from across MC Canada, who consulted broadly. Their final report recommended a denominational church model with fewer national staff; regional churches that would take on “direct ownership and governance of the national agenda”; and a focus on local congregations as the “primary setting … for holistic witness beyond the church doors.”
“Good things came out of the restructuring,” said Doug Klassen, who has served as executive minister of MC Canada since 2019. “But we got some things wrong. It’s been confounding.”
After the assembly, 13 MC Canada office staff were let go—this followed five previous lay-offs and one resignation in 2015—and were made to sign non-disclosure agreements.
MC Canada Witness workers abroad were given a year to cultivate their own donor base, and after that were required to raise 50 percent of their own funding. International ministries were to transition to short-term assignments rooted in a “confirmation of call” coming out of congregations, whose church members would form teams to help with communications and fundraising.
“People were confused because … that kind of call is not the culture of our congregations. Sending happens in a larger body,” said Hanson. “Very little funds were raised within that model.”
Witness workers were no longer offered reintegration support when they returned to Canada. Funding commitments to church partners abroad were put on hold, Hanson said, with little to no explanation. Some Witness workers did not renew their terms because of the new structure, while others were let go. In one case, a family was left stranded overseas and had to seek funds from a ministry partner to get home.
“We made the wrong assumption that we could simply make structural changes and not consider how relationships would be affected by those structural changes,” said Klassen.
In February 2016, Canadian Mennonite published part of a letter signed by all 24 MC Canada Witness workers, detailing their concerns with the FDTF report. This included a lack of consultation with international partners and an understanding of mission they said demonstrated the very same colonial assumptions that the FDTF wanted to avoid.
“When I look at the hurt … and the broken relationships [the decision to restructuring] caused both in Canada and outside of Canada, I would say it was a mistake,” Hanson said.
Apologies
Since beginning to work for MC Canada in 2019, Hanson and Klassen have offered dozens of apologies through Zoom calls, visits and emails to former Witness workers and to sister churches around the world, including Colombia Mennonite Church, ASM Geschäftsstelle in Germany, Mennonite churches in Burkina Faso and Congo, churches represented by Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission and Integrated Mennonite Church in the Philippines.
In 2022, at Mennonite World Conference (MWC) in Indonesia, Klassen stood in front of the General Council of MWC, a body made up of MWC members representing 11 countries, and apologized for MC Canada’s actions within the global church.
“Hurt was profoundly felt in Burkina Faso,” noted Klassen, who recalled that Pastor Siaka Traoré of the Mennonite Church in Burkina Faso stood up immediately after Klassen’s apology to pray for MC Canada.
Hanson, who was also present, recalls Traoré’s words to Klassen in front of the Council: “In families, we sometimes hurt each other, but we also forgive.”
“For those who knew what was going on, that was monumental,” said Klassen.
Letting go
Repair and forgiveness have also been needed closer to home. Elsie Rempel, 72, who served MC Canada for more than 15 years as director of Christian education and then faith formation consultant, was dismissed without warning in November 2015, cut off immediately from email access and escorted out of the building to a waiting taxi.
Rempel, however, is one of six former MC Canada staff who have come back to work for MC Canada or contribute directly despite painful partings in the past decade. Rempel has written and coordinated resources for MC Canada and Mennonite Church USA, and, in 2019, even offered an apology on behalf of MC Canada to ASM Geschäftsstelle church in Germany for the earlier withdrawal of a promised grant to their house-church program for immigrants. Others have helped with communications, updating policies and editing books.
“I knew these folks as having such deep integrity, who said, ‘We love Jesus, and we love the church,’” said Klassen.
Rempel recalled conversations in the months and years following her dismissal that helped her to forgive and heal. During a conversation with MC Canada leadership, she expressed her hurt directly to those who had let her go. After Henry Paetkau became interim executive minister of MC Canada between October 2018 and June 2019, he had coffee and meals with former staff who openly shared their hurt with him.
“Henry asked me to talk, and the way he apologized for the severance of trust and the poor process that had happened was very, very touching—very healing,” Rempel said.
“What do you do with that pain and that anger and that grief?” Paetkau said in an interview with Canadian Mennonite.
“That was not a part of my assignment when I was hired,” he said, “however, I was concerned for these folks.” For Paetkau, it was crucial for MC Canada, which he described as being in a financial and structural crisis at the time, to also address “the pain in the system.” He noted that people in the congregations of the dismissed staff witnessed their denomination doing something “inconsistent with their own theology, practice or belief,” which “led to a disaffection from the organization and the denomination.”
“If these members of the Body, these congregations, are carrying this pain with their people, that impacts the whole denomination,” said Paetkau.
For both Rempel and Paetkau, pain within MC Canada was caused by a hierarchical approach to enacting change. Severed communication between staff and board members and executive staff was also problematic. “If staff have been heard in the process, I think it helps ease the transition and the pain,” Paetkau said.
Re-restructuring
While there is more communication and collaboration between regional churches than previously, Klassen said it became clear the regions didn’t have the capacity to take on the roles of the national church office as envisioned in 2017.
In a string of adjustments since 2017, MC Canada has resumed responsibility for nationwide staff positions, leadership and formation programs, and has regained autonomy for its own operations. Realizing that the “confirmation of call” Witness model was not working, Hanson and Klassen set aside the 50 per cent funding requirement and trimmed the budget in other ways to support International Witness.
Klassen remains sensitive to the 2017 vision, however, as he looks ahead to Gathering 2025 in Kitchener. The gathering will, for the first time since 2017, include congregational representatives, as well as the usual regional church delegates, whose feedback will be reported directly to MC Canada’s Joint Council, an example of congregational input on nationwide agenda that the FDTF had hoped for.
“The Holy Spirit speaks through every congregational member that we have, not just a dozen, two dozen or 30 of us in the upper end of the structure,” said Klassen. “I feel that it’s my mandate to create avenues and open up spaces where the Spirit can be heard through the people—everybody.”
Even as MC Canada faces a financial deficit, Klassen is excited by the possibilities. “We want to forge ahead and emphasize these congregations coming together to speak into where we’re going.”
Global fellowship
In light of the drastic change and cuts International Witness experienced, Hanson sees relationship-building as key to MC Canada’s current and future work with the global church. “We have learned that vision grows out of relationship,” Hanson wrote in a recent report to Joint Council.
MC Canada now employs part-time liaison staff, who have worked to re-establish and strengthen ties in West and South Africa, Latin America, Ethiopia and Myanmar. Congregations are stepping up to support Witness workers through fundraising, meetings, prayer and exchange visits in Witness Support Networks. Several couples, student interns and people in diaspora congregations within MC Canada are also volunteering to help build global connections.
As the work of repair continues in the church, based, in part, on apologies, Hanson holds to a clear vision for International Witness. “These are companions that we are walking with globally because we are the church together. All the decision-making has to be made in light of that. It means that we become responsible for each other. We have to go beyond borders to build each other up and strengthen each other,” she said.
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