Stanley W. Green is the executive conference minister of Pacific Southwest Mennonite Conference. Born and reared in South Africa, Green was part of the student movement that helped dismantle the legal apartheid system. He previously served as executive director of Mennonite Mission Network, prior to which he served as pastor, conference minister and mission executive in South Africa, Jamaica and the United States.
This was article was originally published by PSMC and is republished with permission. Edited by Camille Dager.
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Following Jesus: yesterday and today
Michael Danner, MC USA associate executive director of Church Vitality, Stanley Green and Sue Park-Hur, MC USA Director of Racial Ethnic Diversity.
With the theme, “500 Years of Following Jesus: The Nonconforming ‘Third Way,’ Then and Now,” the Pacific Southwest Mennonite Conference (PSMC) met at the Upland Peace Church in Upland, California, on October 10-11, 2025. Participants came from northern, central and southern California, as well as Arizona. Several churchwide denominational and agency representatives also joined us for an in-person celebration of our coming together, fellowship and mutual encouragement. Immersed in worship, bathed in prayer, ministered to through the proclaimed, those gathered shared in an uplifting time of being renewed by the vision of those in the Radical Reformation, which birthed an Anabaptist community marked by its passion to follow Jesus whatever the cost. Keynote speaker, Michael Danner, associate executive director of Church Vitality at MC USA, presented powerful messages that challenged the participants to reflect on the core convictions of early Anabaptist forebears that we still hold and share.
Update on Full Circle Thrift
Store Manager Paul Netherton welcomes PSMC delegates to Full Circle Thrift Store. Photo by Sue Park-Hur.
On the day prior to the weekend Gathering events, the Board visited our Full Circle Thrift Store in Altadena, California, sharing lunch with our staff, whose lives were disrupted by the Eaton Canyon Fire in early January. The store was shut down for almost six months due to extensive smoke damage. Employees expressed deep gratitude to the PSMC Board for its decision to fund the staff at full salary during the shutdown, even though the store was not generating any revenue.
Identifying as an “apartheid-free” conference
The Board also acted to identify PSMC as an “apartheid-free” conference, framing its commitment thus:
“We affirm our commitment to freedom, justice, and equality for the Palestinian people and all people. We oppose all forms of racism, bigotry, discrimination, and oppression; and we declare ourselves an apartheid-free community and to that end, we pledge to join others in working to end all support to apartheid regimes, settler colonialism, and military occupation to Israel and all places.”
Worship at PSMC Gathering. Photo by Stanley Green.
The celebration was blessed by the warm and generous hospitality of Upland Peace Church whose catering team provided us with delicious, sumptuous meals, as well as the input of workshops leaders who shared on a variety of topics designed to expand and deepen our witness to God’s way in the world. Those present participated together in prayers for our leaders, congregations and our congregational mission projects before sharing Communion at the closing of the weekend. We traveled back to our various contexts of life and ministry, energized and renewed. We are holding tight to our commitment to emulate our early forebears in the Radical Reformation, inspired us by their costly discipleship, as they sought to follow and pledge their alliance to Jesus.
Thanks be to God for a wonderful weekend!
Embodying the Way of Jesus
Michael Danner, MC USA’s associate executive director for Church Vitality
At the Pacific Southwest Mennonite Conference Gathering, Michael Danner, MC USA’s associate executive director of Church Vitality, invited participants to rediscover the heart of their faith through his three-part keynote series, “Embodied Anabaptism for Such a Time as This.”
“What about being Mennonite is worth keeping and spreading?” Danner asked. “It’s this: A way of following Jesus that begins with a voluntary yes, deepens through hearing and doing, and bears fruit in how we actually live.”
Drawing from Matthew 7 and the Sermon on the Mount, he emphasized that “Anabaptists understand that what we do flows out of our commitment to follow Jesus by hearing (deep listening) and doing (embodied application) what he teaches.”
In his second message, Danner described the church as a “voluntary community of believers” marked by shared discernment, economic sharing and “gifts-based ministry and multi-vocal leadership,” a model that embodies “the priesthood of all believers.”
Concluding with a call to live faithfully amid cultural division, he urged Mennonites to “be the people who stay in hard conversations, share resources when the culture says to accumulate, love enemies when everyone else is drawing battle lines, and follow Jesus when it costs us something.”