U.S. Mennonite Church Splits Over Homosexuality

[Free Vulcan]

The largest conference of Mennonite churches in the U.S. split from the Mennonite community Monday in a dispute over the denomination’s stance on homosexuality.

The Lancaster Mennonite Conference’s (LMC) 2015 vote to officially leave the U.S. Mennonite Church took effect on New Year’s day as the culmination of dispute over the definition of marriage and whether homosexuality is a sin, according to Religion News. The LMC’s split from the denomination tore the U.S. Mennonite church in two, as it was the largest conference of Mennonite churches in the U.S., comprising 179 church congregations in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.

“We are in a sense not really leaving,” Steve Olivieri, pastor of Cornerstone Fellowship of Mill Run in Altoona, Penn., told NPR. “They are the ones that essentially have left true biblical Christianity in this respect.”

Read more at: http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/02/u-s-mennonite-church-splits-over-homosexuality/

[Suppressed]

There are approximately 2 million members of the Mennonite denomination worldwide, 78,000 of whom are members of the U.S. Mennonite Church as of 2016 according to RNS.