UNITED STATES
The Christian Century
The case of John Howard Yoder
Aug 04, 2014 by David Cramer, Jenny Howell, Paul Martens, and Jonathan Tran
Thirty years after John Howard Yoder was first accused of sexual misconduct and almost two decades after his death in 1997, the story of his abusive behavior remains painfully unresolved in the Mennonite communities in which he was for decades regarded as the foremost theologian and chief representative of Anabaptist thought.
During his lifetime Yoder faced two separate disciplinary proceedings. The first led to his 1984 resignation from the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries (now Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary) in Elkhart, Indiana, after which he became a full-time professor at the University of Notre Dame, where he taught until his death. The second was conducted by the Mennonite Church from 1992 to 1996.
Last year a third discernment process was launched, spurred by women who believe that the church has repeatedly failed to uncover and acknowledge the truth.
In 2013, Ruth Krall, professor emeritus at Goshen College, a Mennonite school in Indiana, published The Elephants in God’s Living Room, which used the church’s response to Yoder’s actions as a case study on how sexual abuse is often mishandled in the church. That same year, Barbra Graber, a retired professor at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia, wrote a pair of online essays about Yoder’s case. Soon after Graber’s essays appeared, AMBS president Sara Wenger Shenk announced that the seminary had committed itself to “new transparency in the truth telling that must happen.” Last summer the Mennonite Church USA formed a committee to “fairly and accurately document the scope of Yoder’s sexual abuse and the church’s response to it after a careful review of the evidence.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.