The Mennonite Brethren in Christ Church of Pennsylvania (became the Bible Fellowship Church in 1959) was the body which continued the denominational name after the General Conference of the Mennonite Brethren in Christ on 3 November 1947 changed its name to United Missionary Church. The group, formerly the Pennsylvania Conference of the Mennonite Brethren in Christ, had a continuing organized existence since 1857, when it separated from the Oberholtzer (General Conference Mennonite Church) group and called itself the Evangelical Mennonites. Although the 1947 MBC General Conference voted a paragraph of the name-changing resolution which said, "One Annual Conference, the Pennsylvania, did not concur in the necessity for the present change in the church name, and was voted full and unqualified relationship to the General Conference of the body, while it continues to use the name Mennonite Brethren in Christ," the separation was in fact complete and the Pennsylvania Conference no longer sent delegates or exercised any fraternal relations to the General Conference of the United Missionary Church. Thus one of the component parts of the UMC body, which had merged with the United Mennonite Church (at a special conference on 6 November 1879 at Upper Milford, Pennsylvania, when it had nine congregations with 175 members) to form the Evangelical United Mennonites, withdrew after 68 years of collaboration and reverted to independent status. The basic causes for the separation in 1947 were differences in polity and administration, but there was apparently also a doctrinal difference. The Pennsylvania Conference had gradually accepted a degree of Calvinist theology, particularly the doctrine of eternal security, whereas the rest of the United Missionary Church continued on its original Arminian basis, with the emphasis on the "second work of grace." However, for some years the fellowship had become increasingly less close, with practically no interchange of ministers. The Pennsylvania Conference had long had its own independent foreign and home mission boards and Bible school.

At the time of the separation in 1947 the Pennsylvania Conference had 38 congregations (officially called "appointments"), each with a responsible pastor, organized into two districts with district superintendent, the Allentown and Bethlehem districts, with 2,340 and 2,177 baptized members respectively, in addition to work in six appointments under the Home Mission Society and 22 missionaries, with 88 additional members, for a total of 4,605 members. In 1955 the Conference had 4,635 members. All of the congregations were in Eastern Pennsylvania except three in New Jersey (Jersey City, Newark, and Staten Island), which had a total of 337 members.

The Conference had an extensive series of subsidiary organizations: Board of Foreign Missions (which supported Mennonite Brethren in Christ missionaries under other boards but operated no foreign work itself), the Board of Home Missions and the Home Missionary Society, the Board of Publications and Printing, the Board of Education, which operated the Berean Bible School in Allentown, PA after 1950, the Beneficiary Society, the Home and Farm at Center Valley, Pa., the Laymen's Benevolent Society, the Ministers' Retirement Fund, the Menno Youth General Committee, and several annual Camp Meetings, Sunday School Conventions, and an annual Ministerial Convention.

The conference was thoroughly organized, was aggressively evangelistic, fundamentalistic, and premillennial in doctrinal emphasis, and emphasized a warm type of piety. It recognized the nonresistant position, but not many of its young men took the conscientious objection position and there was no conference discipline on this point. It maintained the practice of feetwashing and baptism by immersion in the 1950s.

The Conference never had its own periodical organ, but beginning with 7 March 1953 it had a four-page weekly news supplement to the Gospel Herald published by the Union Gospel Press at Cleveland, Ohio. The Conference has long had a friendly relation to this publishing house and its periodical, the publishing house having been founded by a leading minister of the Conference, W. B. Musselman. The Conference long used its Sunday-school helps. The Conference published a yearbook of approximately 120 pages with comprehensive reports.

Candidates for the ministry in the Conference served a probationary period of three years under license, must pass a three-year reading course, and served one year successfully as pastor before being ordained. In 1953 the Conference supported 35 foreign missionaries, with receipts of $52,361.25.

On 11 April 1959 the conference adopted the name, Bible Fellowship Church, at the same time adopting new articles of faith. These included dropping the practice of feet washing. The vote for the new name in the congregations was 1,580 for and 507 against the proposition, while in the conference 56 approved it and 6 opposed it. In 2006 the conference had 63 congregations in nine states (Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, New Mexico, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Texas).

Bibliography

Adapted by permission of Herald Press, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, and Waterloo, Ontario, from Mennonite Encyclopedia, Vol. 3, pp. 603-604, v. 4, p. 1066. All rights reserved. For information on ordering the encyclopedia visit the Herald Press website.

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