FMCSF History Moment: 2000-2010 Deep Joy Meets Deep Needs

By Karen Kreider Yoder

By 2000, we had been without a full-time pastor for 3 years. During the last year of the 1990s, Lee Loots served as our interim pastor. Our storms had not ceased.

We longed for a full-time, long-term pastor.

We found our pastor from within. More accurately, Sheri found her calling among us. Sheri had taken to heart the words of Frednick Buechner. “Look deeply for your vocation…where your deep joy and the world’s deep needs meet.”

Thirty-eight-year-old Sheri Hostetler became our pastor in November 2000.

Pastor us, she did. Our motley congregation, in her words, was “depleted, demoralized, but determined. She had “pent up energy. And a calling.”

Sheri met regularly with the most vulnerable among us, giving pastoral care. She found untapped leadership in young people who, in other churches, had experienced trauma.

Sheri pastored us collectively, through sermons, worship series, and committee tasks.

With Sheri’s leadership, we navigated a series of changes.

The 25th anniversary of our congregation.

The Mennonite Church and the General Conference Mennonite Church merged into Mennonite Church USA (MCUSA)

We added the part-time position of Minister of Worship Arts and Administrative Assistant.

And, after the attacks on September 11, 2001, we joined many faiths in services of prayer, solidarity and grieving. Those interfaith collaborations have continued.

An immediate challenge was our decision-making policy. We had used a consensus model where, after a great amount of discussion, all needed to agree– and we moved to a voting model, but with the values of consensus and deep listening, including a moderator and business leader.

Our first major test came several years later when we decided to move worship spaces.

A notice appeared on the grand wooden doors of Golden Gate Lutheran Church. Something like, “Enter at your own risk. Unsafe masonry building.” Knowing that finding an alternate space was our most consequential decision since 1998, Charity, now on Steering, led the charge with deliberation and skill.

After 18 months, we moved down the street to Congregation Sha’ar Zahav. Only one person abstained from the otherwise unanimous decision. The greatest concerns were eating only vegetarian food and the locked front door.

We were delighted with the clean, bright space, the options for meeting rooms–our first service was in November 2005. The move proved to be a fruitful collaboration with our Jewish hosts–on climate action concerns, Judaism 101 and interfaith services.

Back in 2000, Russ had become the first Local Program Coordinator of the Mennonite Voluntary Service (MVS) unit, then in its 25th year. In Spring 2001, the owner of the MVS building wanted to sell, a great set-back for us as renters. Behind the scenes, four members pooled their money to buy the building for $725,000., a staggering amount back then. The hope was that our congregation would eventually buy the building.

We established a Capital Campaign, raising money first from within, then from family and friends. By 2008, we owned 802 Page Street. The building solidified our identity as having a strong MVS unit that fed our growing congregation.

We were ready to make a bold statement to our national church body– that we are a vibrant congregation, ready to celebrate our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. We hosted a Brethren Mennonite Council for LGBT Interests (BMC) gathering prior to the MCUSA convention in San Jose in the summer of 2007.

Sheri then collaborated with others to write the Open Letter to MCUSA, asking them to be a welcoming denomination, signed by 87 Mennonite pastors across the US. Soon after, young adult leaders organized Pink Menno, for lay people to show support. In Sheri’s words, “We were on the snowplow wedge.”

We were out, we were affirming. Young people wanted to come to San Francisco.

Sheri provided leadership at the district level– Pacific Southwest Mennonite Conference–serving on the Pastoral Leadership Committee. But then, after participating in David and Benjamin’s 2003 wedding, the conference committee placed a “letter” in Sheri’s file. Sheri officiated at Bart and Russ’ marriage in 2008. Two years later, the committee reviewed her credentials. We pulled out our playbook of radical hospitality, talking, listening, sharing. Russ and Bart joined Sheri as she met with the committee.

The Pastoral Leadership Committee put Sheri on probation, and when the 2 years were over, across the country, the times had changed. The committee reinstated her credentials.

And to cap off the decade, in April 2010, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence paraded in during fellowship time and Sainted our Sheri, with the words, “Sainthood at Last! Thank Goddess Almighty, Sainthood at Last!”

It had been a heady decade, with decision-making, moving, plowing ahead. And in all of it, a deep sense of call, a realization that we are a beloved community where deep joy meets deep needs.

Our FMCSF banner that John Flickinger created for the 2007 MCUSA convention in San Jose. The background is our beloved hymn from Hymnal: A Worship Book, O God in Restless Living