Philadelphia biennial

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Stay connected and learn about the latest news and events in our community! Find us on. The World Cup debate has overshadowed an ongoing review of the FIFA-managed International Match Calendars which mandate when clubs must release players to national teams.

It requires players to travel for matches in separate windows at least four times during each domestic season. FIFA has proposed streamlining the calendar with smaller tournament qualifying groups, potentially playing all matches in a single block in October. He has suggested decisions could be made by December.

Thus, by , some four thousand Mennonites and two hundred Amish , a closely related group, had settled in eastern Pennsylvania. Between and , many Mennonites followed broader patterns of American migration and moved west, establishing settlements in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Iowa.

By the dawn of the twentieth century Mennonites had formed communities as far as Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Texas, Oregon, and California. This photograph depicts Main Street in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. Germantown, established by Quaker and Mennonite immigrants in , continued to maintain a sizable Mennonite community in the early twenty-first century. Library of Congress. During this period of Mennonite migration and resettlement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a variety of forces—religious, economic, and social—began to change Mennonite faith and practice.

Cities, including Philadelphia, played a key role in these transformations. For instance, beginning in the s and s, some Dutch- and German-speaking Mennonites embraced the experiential faith of English-speaking evangelical Protestants, as well as their practices of revivalism, religious education, and missionary activity. These practices ultimately drew some Mennonites into major American cities, including Philadelphia, in hopes of finding converts to Christianity.

These adaptations laid the groundwork for major changes to Mennonite faith and practice in the mid-twentieth century. Additionally, during and after the American Civil War, changes in industry, transportation, and communication also propelled some entrepreneurial Mennonites into cities in search of new economic opportunity. Working and living in the urban crucible compelled some Mennonites to conform to the pressures of assimilation, including the pressure to speak English rather than German or Dutch.

Later, in the years following World War I, the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern cities and towns also challenged Mennonite theology and practice.

For example, Philadelphia Mennonites contributed to the racial segregation that accompanied the migration of African Americans into the city in the interwar period. In the early s, several African Americans began to attend services at the Mennonite mission near Norris Square in the Kensington neighborhood.

Within a year, amid fears of racial mixing, mission leaders approved a petition to start a separate congregation for these new African American attendees. In this new church, originally known as the African Mennonite Mission and then renamed Diamond Street Mennonite Church after its move to West Diamond Street in , members were expected to conform to the dress expectations of their white Mennonite counterparts even though they could not participate in services with these fellow believers.

According to one scholar, many African American Mennonite women embraced plain dress as a way of showing their equality with white Mennonites and challenging racial hierarchies within the church; others balked at these practices, resulting in tensions with missionaries and other church leaders. Even as Philadelphia Mennonites faced these and other particular tensions, a century and a half of religious, economic, and social change propelled Mennonites across North America to alter, adapt, or even discard some elements of their religious beliefs and practices.

Despite regional and cultural variations and differences, especially between urban and rural communities, three major transitions occurred during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Around the same time, many leaders began to view plain dress, nonparticipation in politics, and other practices as ethnic conventions, rather than biblical or theological mandates, and subsequently ceased to require them of new members.

And during the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War in the s and s, some Mennonites stepped outside the ethnic enclave and translated their convictions about peace and justice into overt activism in support of the antiwar and black-freedom causes.

The congregation eventually moved from its original location, shown in this photograph, to a community center at E. Howell Street. Among Philadelphia Mennonites, these broader changes paralleled an explosive period of church growth. By the s, different Mennonite groups had established a mere five separate congregations in the city, in addition to the many rural congregations scattered throughout Bucks and Montgomery Counties; one congregation in Greenwood, Sussex County, Delaware; and one congregation in Oxford, Warren County, New Jersey.