Cynthia Yoder reflects on Daniel Shenk’s memoir of leaving the Mennonites as a gay man

In a first-person essay published by Anabaptist World, writer Cynthia Yoder describes her reading of *Search for a Blessing: A Gay Man’s Journey from a Mennonite Missionary Childhood to the Streets of AIDS Activism* (Pandora), a memoir by Daniel Shenk. Shenk left the Mennonite church in the 1970s so that he could live as an openly gay man. Yoder, who has helped with aspects of the book’s publishing, says the memoir was co-authored with Joyce Maxwell, Shenk’s niece.

Yoder writes that her uncle, Joe, the president emeritus of Eastern Mennonite University, wrote an apology to the LGBTQ+ community that was included as a blurb inside the book’s front cover. She says she had not expected to hear such an apology from him and that it was significant to her.

Yoder links the story to the church’s past treatment of gay and lesbian members. She says the church’s exclusion of Shenk and other LGBTQ+ relatives was one of the main reasons she left the Mennonite church after college, and that the church’s position at that time on women as ministers was another. She describes the experience as what she now calls “moral injury.”

She also recounts the 1990s removal of Germantown, the historic Mennonite church in Philadelphia, which dates to the late 1600s, from membership over this issue. Yoder writes that her father, Ray, was among the conference ministers who supported the removal, and that the vote, which she describes using the word “excommunicate,” was one they argued about. She says he later softened his views and attended a welcoming congregation late in his life. She reports speaking recently with a Germantown congregant who described that period as “We were dis-membered.”

Shenk’s memoir, as Yoder describes it, recounts his isolation as a child sent to boarding school at age 6 and his later estrangement from the church in which his parents had served as missionaries in East Africa. His mother died in a plane crash and was buried on that continent. Shenk later became an ordained chaplain and worked with people with AIDS in New York City, and Yoder says he hopes to reach evangelicals with his story. Yoder notes that she has herself left organized religion and now holds what she describes as a spirituality of inclusion, and she says she hopes the book reaches people who have left the church and are seeking healing and community.

Source: Read the original report