LMC — a fellowship of anabaptist churches

Heritage

Lancaster Mennonite Conference grew from the Swiss-German Mennonite settlement of the Pequea in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, beginning in 1710 — for most of American history the largest Mennonite conference in the country, with its own bishops, mission board, and schools. In 2015 its delegates voted to withdraw from Mennonite Church USA, effective at the end of 2017, amid the denomination's discernment over sexuality and the authority of church standards; it now carries the name LMC — a fellowship of anabaptist churches, relating congregations across the United States and beyond.

Theological family

Evangelical Anabaptist: believers' baptism, the authority of Scripture, nonresistance, and the church as a covenanted, accountable community, with a strong emphasis on mission and church planting in its current life.

Who decides what

Congregations are gathered into districts under the care of bishops — an episcopal thread unusual among Mennonites — with a Conference Assembly and moderator serving the whole fellowship.

What a first-time visitor would find

A visitor finds a wide range: rural Lancaster congregations with a cappella singing and traditional order, urban and immigrant congregations worshiping in many languages, and church plants with contemporary music. The head covering and plain dress, once general, now vary by congregation.

What it has always cared about

Mission at home and abroad through Eastern Mennonite Missions; Christian education; mutual aid; and holding congregational accountability together with evangelical warmth.

Its gift to the wider church

A demonstration that a three-hundred-year-old conference can become a church-planting fellowship — LMC carried one of American Anabaptism's deepest taproots into a multiethnic, mission-focused present without discarding its Anabaptist convictions.

Commonly confused with

With Mennonite Church USA, the denomination it withdrew from — both are Anabaptist, and the parting was over discernment and authority, not over the Anabaptist essentials; and with conservative Mennonite conferences, which are generally plainer than most LMC congregations.

Range of views inside it

Congregations range from traditional to contemporary and from rural Pennsylvania German heritage to first-generation immigrant fellowships; convictions are shared, expression varies widely.

Moments this body was part of

• 2015–2022 — The Mennonite realignment

  Mennonite Church USA — itself a 2002 union — lost a substantial share of its congregations through the 2010s over sexuality and authority: Lancaster Mennonite Conference, the largest and oldest conference in American Mennonitism, completed its withdrawal in 2018 and now relates congregations nationally as LMC, and the Evana Network formed in 2015 from the same current.