The time was August 1944, the place, Goshen College. The occasion was a special session of the Mennonite General Conference called because of conflict threatening the whole church. As World War II was relentlessly altering the rest of the world, it was changing Mennonites, who had had new and broadening experiences in Civilian Public Service and overseas relief.

The problem was how to find unity between the old guard and the new. More specifically, the questions at hand concerned differing definitions of nonconformity and disagreement on whether General Conference should have authority to discipline local conferences noncompliant with its definitions.

Al Keim writes, "Conservatives saw such discipline as a way of placing the burden on conference, and progressives saw it as preemptive and lacking in pastoral and brotherly process. Confusion overwhelmed the delegates. Tension mounted, and the meeting reached an impasse."

Sanford Yoder, for sixteen years president of Goshen College until his retirement in 1940, "quietly rose to the full length of his six feet three," Guy Hershberger, a lay delegate, wrote in 1985. In his gracious, irenic spirit, expressed through his gentle but deeply resonant voice, he pointed to the real reason for the impasse. The reason lay deeper than the rightness or wrongness of any given point of view. It lay in the disintegration of fellowship into mutual distrust, as each side ostracized the other.

"When Yoder sat down," continued Hershberger, "there was deathly silence. Had a pin dropped, you could have heard it - until a brother suggested a time of prayer." The delegates knelt for an hour-and-a-half in that sultry August night. When the prayer was over, the "discussion resumed; but this time it was confession more than discussion. One brother confessed that he had spoken unkind words against Sanford Yoder, and now was asking forgiveness. Ever since that occasion this brother has been a different man."

The next morning when the delegates met again, a softened resolution from each side passed easily. The church was free to carry out the work to which the postwar years called it.

I chose this watershed in twentieth-century Mennonite history for this column not so much for its historical importance - although that was critically decisive - as for the personal and lasting impact it has had on me since as an adolescent I heard of it the next day, and for its usefulness in current Mennonite divisiveness.

Members who are willing to loosen the grip of ego investments in their attitudes and move toward the other side in response to the love and grace of God, can usher in a new day.