The Work of the Church
An Interview with Pastor Floyd Yutzy: Part 1
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak with Floyd Yutzy, senior pastor of Cornerstone Community Church in Kalona, Iowa, and the vice president of Clarity In Action, a ministry that provides education on domestic abuse to churches. Our conversation spanned everything from developing a church culture that’s safe for abuse victims to come forward, to Floyd’s experience of leaving the Mennonite church1 and how he interacts with Mennonite culture and theology now. Floyd is a natural storyteller, and I hope you enjoy his stories as much as I did!
Abigail: Can you give me a short introduction of yourself?
Floyd: I am the husband of one wife, Elaine. I'm a dad of four kids. I'm a father-in-law to three—two of my girls and one of my sons are married. I'm a grandfather of four, a pastor of one church, and a friend of a lot of people.
Abigail: How did you first become interested in speaking to the church about domestic abuse?
Floyd: Let me go back a few years. I'd left the Mennonite church for several years by then, and we were working with a situation at our church. I was talking to a good friend of mine about that situation, and I said, "You know, I told this lady this and that, and it was because of some abuse." I don't even remember all the particulars of what I was telling this woman—what I remember the most vividly is my friend saying, "Boy, you're actually doing more harm than good."
The pride in me wanted to fight back, but I also felt like it was probably an important moment, so I said, "Okay, unpack that for me. Help me out here."
He started describing how, "You're telling this lady this, but here’s what she's actually hearing." And he said, "What you're doing is, you're actually putting blame on her for what was done to her."
"Oh, man," I said, "I never intended for that to happen."
"No," he says, "I know. I know where your heart's at. You mean the best. But you’re not helping her."
I came back from that conversation and started praying, "Lord, I need help and I don't know for sure where to turn to for resources and so forth."
Around that same time frame, I received an email from Sydney Millage at Clarity In Action. She was working with a couple of ladies in conservative Anabaptist churches, and somebody gave her my name. She asked if she could pick my brain on some of the dynamics of that culture, and one thing led to another.
That was really the genesis of it. It was one of those hard conversations that kicked me into gear, largely because most of the time I'm slow to pick up on stuff! I need someone to be blunt with me.
Abigail: Wow. I'm so glad your friend was honest with you.
Floyd: Yes. I've tried to be that voice for a few other pastors as well, at least if I feel like there's an openness to it.
Abigail: What resources have you used to educate yourself?
Floyd: It began with some one-on-one conversations with Sydney. My wife and I met with her and we did quite a bit of emailing back and forth, which led to taking a 12-week course (the Biblical Victim Care Course), which then opened the door to a lot of resources.
I go through books, and I'm not even sure how many books by now I've read on this subject. My favorite ones are The Heart of Domestic Abuse by Chris Moles, and Mending the Soul by Steve Tracy. The most recent one is When Home Hurts by Greg Wilson and Jeremy Pierre. And I recently had the opportunity to take the Men of Peace track with Chris Moles and Greg Wilson. I own about four or five copies of When Home Hurts, and I just keep handing them out to church leaders every time I get into a conversation, and I say, "Read this book."
And then, you know, shockingly, the Bible! The Bible actually has a lot to say if we're willing to take it in its context and not impose our cultural ideas onto it.
Abigail: Let’s talk about your work with Clarity in Action. What is your role there?
Floyd: Sydney Millage lives in a town about 45 minutes from here, and we've had a fair amount of interaction. As a result, I ended up on her board, and with that has come opportunities to do training in churches. We've developed a training called Light in the Darkness Training, which includes about five sessions that Sydney and I tag-team on. She comes from more of the counselor perspective and I address more of the pastoral responsibilities with victims of abuse and perpetrators of abuse.
The mission of Clarity in Action is to promote healing primarily for victims, but to do so in a way that's involving churches and involving other people. That's been one of the things that's attracted me to Clarity in Action: this bigger picture of being a part of the church of Jesus Christ worldwide. The church is made up of a lot of different denominations and people who all love Christ and want to honor him. So we get into a variety of denominational settings, which has been really fun.
We have this mission of: Let's equip the church. Let's help the church anywhere they're willing to do a better job of addressing this so that we're not overloading the counseling offices. That's been the heartbeat of Clarity in Action.
Abigail: Have you been invited to speak in a Mennonite or Amish setting?
Floyd: Not really. The closest I got was Life Ring last fall in Pennsylvania (a ministry that specifically serves Mennonite communities). I think there's probably some reservation in Anabaptist churches, and I think I understand some of that.
Abigail: What do you think is the reservation?
Floyd: I think there’s an assumption that I am going to come in with a vendetta against the culture because I left. Another one of the accusations that I get is this—and I just really hate this statement, but this is the way it gets said: "Floyd believes in divorce.”
I don't know exactly what that's supposed to mean. I think I know what it means, and I've tried to explain that I'm certainly never promoting divorce. I think it's outside of the plan of God for marriage. That being said, I do see several biblical reasons why divorce is permissible. And I'm open to Christians having different views on remarriage, and so I don't speak into that.
But there may be a necessity, especially in abuse situations, for women to separate, and maybe even for [financial reasons], they may need to file for legal divorce.
I haven't been super shy about saying that that's where I land, and I don't really like to hide anything. I haven't been confrontational with it either, but I think those beliefs have been a barrier. I would gather from conversations that I have with my friends who are in the conservative Mennonite setting, that they're far more comfortable with somebody who is going to only allow divorce if the other party initiates it.
Abigail: Let's move to your background in the conservative Mennonite church. Tell me about your time there, when you left, and how you decided to leave?
Floyd: I'm going to have to really encapsulate because these moves are not made quickly—or they shouldn't be anyway.
I was raised in a Beachy setting, and my wife’s family also had a Beachy background. When my wife and I got married in '95, we started attending a church locally that at that point was a Rosedale church, and is now a BMA church. I started serving there as a youth pastor. I was ordained in 2001 and I filled the role of associate and youth pastor there from 2001 to 2012, and then in 2012 our senior pastor retired and I was asked to step in and fill his position. It was really a thriving church at that point—a lot of young families, and things were going well.
I went through a period of time around 2009-2010, where there was sort of a growing dissatisfaction with the maintaining tradition and . . . . I mostly just blame the Holy Spirit. I started praying and asking God to somehow build more of a fire within me than just keeping a culture alive. I really felt like that vision would fit seamlessly into our church. I was just naïve, and I saw myself growing old and dying in the Mennonite church.
At the time, we were doing a kids’ club ministry with kids from Iowa City. Almost all those kids had moved from the south side of Chicago into Iowa City, so we're talking about Black inner city, sort of a ghetto culture. It was a wonderful ministry. A lot of our youth group was involved and we were doing the big brother/big sister program, bringing them in on Sunday mornings. So every Sunday morning, there'd be 15-20 kids from Iowa City worshiping with these conservative Mennonites. It was this clash of culture, and I loved it.
That worked until it went long enough, I began to see that some of these kids were hitting adolescent and teenage years, and then they'd disappear. It was like this moment where they would realize, "We're never going to fit in here."
There were two girls in particular, identical twins, and we had been their home church—we discipled them, we led them to Christ. I had been a senior pastor for about a year and they approached and wanted to know if they could join the church. I said, "Yeah, but you might need to give me a little bit of time." But I said, "Let's work through this."
The church did not have a set of written rules at that point, but there were some unwritten expectations, one of them being that women would wear a head covering of some kind. That was the sticking point. And it was also a point that I, by personal conviction, felt like should not be a line of demarcation of who's allowed to be a member and who's not. It got really ugly, to say the least. That struggle lasted for a little over a year, and we finally got some outside help, which I'd been begging for from the time that it began, when there was a lot of resistance to that.
A big members' meeting was scheduled on a Sunday evening. Everybody was pretty tense about how that was going to go.
Without over-spiritualizing it, my wife and I both very clearly heard the night before that meeting that we needed to resign. It couldn't have been clearer in the moment, and I still think that. I got up that evening, unexpectedly for everyone, and read my letter of resignation. Even with that, I committed to staying there as long as it took to hand it off. I said, "I'm not angry. I'm hurting." I was hurting pretty bad. A lot of really, really painful things had happened
I told the church, "I will stay here long enough that we can leave with hugs and tears, and not clenched fists." And God was gracious and we were able to do that. We were there about another six weeks, then left. We bounced around for two years, wondering if God was done with me and what to do, and helped a couple other churches in that period of time.
Abigail: So the source of the conflict there was that you were willing to have the sisters join without the expectation of head covering, and the rest of the church was not? Just to be clear on that.
Floyd: Yes, that's correct. I think it was really a change of vision. And I want to be gracious to the people who were there because that was not their vision for church; they were completely uninterested in a community church that had a variety of backgrounds. That was not their vision. They didn't want to go to that church, you know? In looking back, I can understand where that was upsetting to them, and I try not to be harsh and judge them. It just took a lot of struggle to get to that point.
We actually have a really good working relationship with the leaders of that church at this point. So again, God's been really gracious in doing a lot of restoration. But I do have some war stories, you know? Things that are probably best forgiven and moved on from.
Abigail: How did you come up with the vision, along with the other people that you were working with, for Cornerstone? When did that idea come into being?
Floyd: We were attending a church in a town about 12 miles from here—the polar opposite of the Mennonite church that we had been a part of. It was like set up, tear down in a school and the music is loud and fast, the lights are down, the fog machines are going. Everything about this place was cool. It was just the coolest church you've ever seen. Eventually I got hungry for a simple, open-the-Bible-and-teach-it kind of service. I said, "I'm leaving church every Sunday wore out. It feels like I'm at a youth rally!”
So my wife and I were wrestling with: Where are we headed and what are we going to do with the next years of our life? It came to a head one Sunday afternoon, and we were on a walk, and we weren't on the same page. She was thinking, "We need to move ahead and do something." And I said, “We saw how that story ends, and I'm not doing that again. That ends with us getting hurt again."
What we agreed to do on that walk was to fast and pray for a week. We said, "God's got an answer to this." About Thursday of that week, again, God made it clear that it's time to start something. I started asking some friends in the area that I knew were also floating around without a church home and not sure what to do. One of the first ones I met with, he said [right away]: "I think we're supposed to plant a church." And long story short, four families planted a church [in 2016].
We were committed to doing it in prayer, so we held a couple community prayer meetings to begin. One thing led to another and away we went. The vision was very much to preserve the simplicity of the Gospel. We're seeker sensitive, but we're not seeker driven. We've tried to be careful not to win people with coolness, but to win them with Christ.
Abigail: About how big is the church now, and how many of its members come from a Mennonite or Amish background?
Floyd: Considering our community—our town's about 2,700 people—it’s considered fairly large. I think we're averaging somewhere around 350 to 400 right now. The thing that's a little crazy is about 100 of that number are sixth grade and younger. We do a meal train for every baby that's born, and right now, it feels like almost every Sunday, we're announcing another meal train. I joke that we're growing our church the same way the Amish grow theirs!
About 25% of the church is from a Mennonite or Amish background. It’s really an eclectic bunch of people. We've got probably three or four flavors of Mennonite represented, about three flavors of Baptist, some Methodist, some Charismatics, some Reformed, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, and unchurched.
There was a cult near our town, literally 200 acres with a compound, high fence, that kind of thing. It disbanded in the winter of 2018 because of abuse. We've got probably seven or eight families from that, which has been a real challenge.
Abigail: So it really did become that gathering of people from all different backgrounds, like you dreamed about.
Floyd: I couldn't have made it happen, but it has happened. Only God could do this. I often tell our people that if you look at the first 12 apostles and the diversity that existed in that group, the only thing that held that group together was that when Jesus said, "Follow me," they did it. If we can maintain that as our unifying source, we'll be okay.
I'm preaching through 1 Corinthians right now, and we just got done in chapter 14 where we were talking about tongues and prophecy, and no one was sleeping! You know, everybody's thinking, "What's he going to say?" One side is saying, "You better not say it's okay to speak in tongues," and the other side are saying, "You better not say that we can't speak in tongues."
But it went well. Not everybody was thrilled, but I tried to stick really close with what the text said, and just went with it. I got a little pushback on both sides.
Abigail: That kind of church setting would require a lot of graciousness from everyone! So how does your Mennonite heritage inform your ministry and your faith now?
Floyd: I think about this a lot actually, because most of the friends that I relate to are not coming from a Mennonite background, and they find our church to be sort of an object of curiosity. They say, "You just think and do things a little differently."
One of the things that I carry with me from my Mennonite heritage is the willingness to put to practice the stuff that we believe. There’s sort of a distaste for a lot of talk without action. If we're talking about something, the next question is, "Okay, so what are we going to do about it?"
Another one is that I'm hesitant to bind myself to a theological label. "Oh, well, are you Calvinist or Armenian?" Yeah, we're probably somewhere in there—depends on which Sunday you show up. And: "Are you continuance or cessationist?" Again, depends on which Sunday you show up. I'm just going to try and be faithful to what is described in God’s word there.
I [recently] had a conversation with my dad, who is still Beachy, about this label Anabaptist, and how there's this wide variety in the Mennonite churches of lifestyle and expression. At both ends of the spectrum and everywhere in between, they all like to adopt the term Anabaptist. And I've done quite a bit of reading on Anabaptist history, and I told my dad, "In some ways, I am still more Anabaptist than many of the churches that call themselves Anabaptist, if I go all the way back to that vision of, ‘I want to take the words of Christ and I want to apply them.’”
I accept the five solas of the Reformation: We're salvation by faith alone, in Christ alone, by God's grace alone, as described in Scripture alone for the glory of God alone. In that context, I find myself agreeing with Martin Luther and John Calvin and Zwingli, you know? And yet, here we are—we've rebaptized a number of people and some of them were baptized as babies.
The last one that we did, I was laughing, because we were at a pond and we were baptizing a couple people who had been baptized as babies. I looked at one of the other guys on our leadership team, and I said, "I guess this makes us Anabaptist, doesn't it?" So I do carry some of that influence and I don't apologize for it.
It's been attractive to people. People enjoy a context where they're challenged to put to practice what scripture teaches, in a way that is driven by love for Christ, not in a way that is driven by shame or guilt or anything like that.
Abigail: You mentioned how you sometimes feel like you're more Anabaptist than some Anabaptist churches now. So what's the distinction there? How do you think some Anabaptist churches lost that original vision?
Floyd: That's a complex answer, but one of the simple things that I see is there's a place where the original Anabaptists began to get things wrong really early. [They had] this idea of the church purifying herself, and taking on the responsibility of maintaining its purity, as opposed to Christ, the chief shepherd of the church, being responsible for the purity of his church.
And then that puts the responsibility for the purity of the church on a group of men instead of on a relationship with Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit. That's probably the biggest point of division for me from even the original Anabaptists, and a place where I see them having, not only gotten it wrong, but opening the door to a lot of really bizarre ideas, even in the first generation of Anabaptists. Guys like the Münsterites thought they could go and take over the city of Münster and Christ would return there, and reinstituted polygamy. It was an Anabaptist cult, driven by this idea of: "We will take the responsibility upon ourselves to reclaim the purity of the original church." That's where I see them headed off in some really unhealthy directions.
That's plaguing Anabaptists to this day. It's one of the reasons they keep splitting and dividing. I don't even remember hearing them talk about this belief growing up, but it was underlying in everything that was done: God expects us to maintain—through church discipline, shaming, whatever—our church purity. We are going to be Biblical!
And we, in the process of that, end up violating some clear biblical principles of Christ as the head of the church. That’s one of the reasons that I'm hesitant to even adopt an Anabaptist label, because there are problems with it, even from day one. There's things I'm on board with and then there's also some problems.
The ferocity that they needed in order to leave established churches and know that they would be arrested and probably executed—think about the level of courage and confidence that it took in order to do that. Wonderful thing, courage and confidence! But that courage and confidence also taught them how to divide with each other and demonize each other over small differences.
One of my favorite stories [is from] the Protestant Reformation, and I tell this story sometimes because it helped me frame [some things] for myself. John Calvin in Geneva had a guy that was working with him named Wolfgang Capito, and Wolfgang became personal friends with Michael Sattler, who was one of the early Anabaptist leaders. Sattler and Capito spent time in each other's homes, attempting to bring what we now know of as Calvinism in harmony with Anabaptism. The big issues that they couldn't get past were primarily the Lord's Supper and infant baptism. So they parted peacefully, and it was just a month or two later that Sattler was arrested, and then executed.
Wolfgang Capito, when he was told about Sattler's execution, said, "Sattler and I disagreed greatly on a variety of things, but I knew him to be a friend of God.”
I heard that story about three years after we had left the Mennonites. I was at a Gospel Coalition conference, and I began to weep because I realized that somebody had put into words some of the things that I was struggling to define in my own upbringing in the Mennonite Church. I had left, but did not want to leave with an edge of bitterness or any of that—but yet disagreeing.
I do disagree with a number of things in Anabaptist churches, but in many cases, I know them to be friends of God, and have a deep, deep love for Christ. Not in every case, but in many of them.
(To be continued . . . )
A quick note to my Anabaptist readers: I understand that the subject of leaving Anabaptism can be a touchy one. If you have strong (negative) feelings about this, I’d invite you to consider a truth that Floyd mentions in the interview: The church of Christ is made up of many different denominations. And the unity of the universal church is served when we seek to understand one another’s perspectives and learn from one another. For myself, I am intrigued with the many twists and turns that a life with Jesus can take, enjoy exploring the reasons one might leave a denomination for another, and firmly believe that growing in faith doesn’t necessitate staying in the same place, or with the exact same theological framework, for the entirety of your life.