[Daily Caller] 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."
Donald Kraybill, a professor who studies Mennonites and the Amish, told NPR that the LMC’s relatively quick decision to leave the U.S. Mennonite Church in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling on gay marriage posed a serious threat to the health of the Mennonite community at large.