Listening Committee Report - ACG 2024

The Listening Committee, comprised of Hayden Epp, Brian Quan and Carol Penner, listened through the weekend and summarized their observations on Saturday afternoon.  This is their summary:

Listening committee

• Serves to receive comments from individuals that they want to have registered but are not comfortable raising on the delegate floor.
• Serves to assist individuals frame a response or motion that they would like to put forward to the delegate body.
• Serves as a “listening ear” to the voice of the delegates and the Gathering as a whole in terms of the spirit/ tone of the event and provides feedback in this regard.
• Is attentive to how the Spirit is at work and may wish to comment on what they observe.
• A several minute closing report/reflection has been schedule for the Listening Committee at the end of the Saturday session. However, Listening Committee has the prerogative to offer a few minutes of comment at the end of the Friday evening and Saturday morning if they feel that would be helpful. If the committee would like to make a few remarks at these other times, please inform the moderator.

Carol Penner, The First Mennonite Church, Vineland 

What is the spirit in the room? What are our hopes and dreams? 

First, before I get into that, we want to say thank you for inviting us to be part of this listening task. And thank you for talking to us. Many of you came to talk to us. 

We felt there was a really positive and hopeful spirit in the room, and that there was excitement, faithfulness, and passion for people to come here to spend their weekend here and to hear the reports that were delivered with great excitement as well. And passion from the staff and from our volunteers. There is a sense that that the people who are doing the work for us in MCEC are trying to be transparent and they're improving what they're doing, and they're trying to be clear with us and we heard Ann saying, “This is what we're hearing” and I appreciate your honesty, that these are some of the challenges that you're facing. Also Ben saying that you want to hear us dissenting voices, that it's important not to always just say yes, but to have questions. And so that's really important that we heard that today. 

A number of people talked to us about the land acknowledgements. Some people really appreciated the storytelling nature of giving the land acknowledgements, but we also heard caution that our land acknowledgements shouldn't get too chatty about our own attachment to the land. Because we should really highlight Indigenous attachment to the land because that's a given that we love our land. We don't have to talk about that so much, it's more important to do the other. Also, that not all churches do land acknowledgements. So this is a new thing for some people, when they come to an event like this, and that perhaps, MCEC Annual Gathering could be a time to acknowledge the larger land that we all wish upon. Even having a map of Indigenous nations.

Brian Quan, Toronto Chinese Mennonite Church

We affirm that the Executive Council and staff team have also been listening very well, and they have been echoing your feelings. We affirm strong engagement with what has been presented even though voices were expressing frustration and deep query. 

We acknowledge that there has been a good effort to minimize impact on environment with e-documents at the same time, perhaps a little bit more printed material can be offered for those who have not been ready to ask for that in advance. 

We also wonder if there were better ways to also hear the rumblings at each of the tables. We know that that has been happening. And we know that there has been strong engagement at the three individual mics. We also noticed that the majority of speakers were male, and less female, and all Caucasian. And I am the first speaker that is of non-Caucasian visible minority. So we wonder if MCEC could think about the different ways that other voices can be heard. Because typically, the Chinese don't come up and speak their mind though they have many thoughts to say. Last year from my observation the bouncing passing of the foam mic was fun. It was light and it was less intimidating than having to stand pointed at one of these three mics. 

We also heard about inclusion and diversity in all areas of church ministry and leadership. And we were wondering how MCEC could resource churches to work on that, to help individual churches - how do we have conversation, how do we open that space? How do we have courage to welcome others and so that there is greater offering of gifts in each of the churches. 

And we also had wondered if MCEC thought about offering the listening committee next year to report in the middle of the conference so that there can be some discernment and adjustment when necessary. 

And we missed some table conversations. I don't know if we've had any designated time for us to talk to each other, even maybe judging not judging, but maybe discerning what is the feeling of the table. Often there may be some voices that are afraid to say but at least we're going to express an adjective that expresses how we are feeling and that can give some good discernment to our time together.

Hayden Epp, Stirling Avenue Mennonite Church

Through all of this, I keep reflecting on the idea of Wild Hope that was introduced last night. I love the line of the song – “The future is dim and we want to live into a Wild Hope.” I think it reflects the tone of this weekend well and it reflects what I’ve heard. 

We've heard stories of hope in the youth research report from Marilyn and also from Doug who reminded us that the binary-breaking, fully human, fully divine thing is for all of us, not just Christ. 

The future is dim is maybe harsh, or maybe it isn't. But I think we've heard some of the things that we at least wonder about what the future holds for MCEC.

As the weekend comes to a close, I feel hope in the fact that we all showed up this weekend to live into that wild hope together.