Paoli Mennonite Fellowship

Paoli Mennonite Fellowship A covenanting community following the way of Jesus by: seeking peace; striving for understanding of each other and the world around us; sharing love.

Service Times:
Sunday 9:30 AM Worship Hour
Education Hour following

This year, for the first time, we are publicly recognizing Pride Month.Not because our values have suddenly changed, but...
06/04/2026

This year, for the first time, we are publicly recognizing Pride Month.

Not because our values have suddenly changed, but because we’re realizing that people can’t know who we are if we never say it out loud.

For many years, people have walked through church doors wondering whether they would be accepted, welcomed, or fully included. We know that some have experienced hurt, rejection, or silence from faith communities. Perhaps some have experienced that here in the past. We grieve that reality. We cannot rewrite the past, but we can be clear about who we aspire to be today.

We believe God’s love is for everyone.

We believe every person is wonderfully created in the image of God.

We believe there is room at Christ’s table for all people.

And we believe our community is stronger when everyone is able to show up as their authentic selves.

We strive to be a community where all people are treated with dignity, welcomed with love, and invited to participate fully in the life of the church.

This June, we celebrate our LGBTQ+ siblings and give thanks for the diversity of God’s creation.

❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

As our congregation moves into a season of transition, we are taking time to reflect on the faithfulness of God that has...
06/03/2026

As our congregation moves into a season of transition, we are taking time to reflect on the faithfulness of God that has carried us through the years and continues to guide us forward.

Throughout this worship series, we created a tree together—a visual reminder of our shared journey. In the roots, we named the people, experiences, and gifts from our past that have grounded us. In the trunk, we reflected on the values that sustain us today. And on the branches, we imagined hopes and possibilities for the future God is calling us toward.

Rooted in God’s faithful love, we trust, imagine, and grow together. 🌳💚

What is one thing that has helped root you in God's faithful love?

This Sunday May 24 is Pentecost Sunday. We’re reading the texts for Pentecost with Acts 2:1-21 and Philippians 4:4-7. We...
05/23/2026

This Sunday May 24 is Pentecost Sunday. We’re reading the texts for Pentecost with Acts 2:1-21 and Philippians 4:4-7. We consider the connections between Christian Pentecost and Jewish Shavuot, both commemorating the establishment of a new relationship with God following an act of dramatic liberation.
We notice the democratization of the Holy Spirit in this first passage, which pours out on all people, so that everyone—young and old, rich and poor, male and female, of all languages and cultures—become prophets and visionaries of the kingdom of God.
And we linger over the idea that the Spirit brings not only cataclysmic change to the world but also a deep peace that passes understanding, inviting us to engage the world with gentleness even as God’s kingdom is breaking into the world.
We welcome you to join us for worship at 9:30 am. Christian education classes follow for all ages at 11. Join us in a lively conversation about God’s love for the world and about wanting to join that movement of abundant, tender, and fierce love, in the midst of our troubled times.

This week we’re finishing our study of the Gospel of John with the story of Thomas as told in John 20:19-31. Thomas is r...
04/18/2026

This week we’re finishing our study of the Gospel of John with the story of Thomas as told in John 20:19-31. Thomas is remembered in our tradition for his disbelief. In fact he is the first person in the Gospel of John to confess that Jesus is God – making him a model of belief rather than doubt.

But for Thomas to reach that conclusion, both he and the other disciples had to remain committed to one another, despite the tension between their belief and Thomas’s doubt, until Thomas, too, could see Jesus.

This text also calls us modern Christians to an even higher bar—belief without seeing, relying only on the testimony of others. It is those believers, each of us here and now, whom Jesus sends into the world as God first sent him: Sent to love the world and not to condemn. Sent as light in the midst of darkness. Sent to lay down our lives for those who have lost their way. If only we can believe.

We welcome you to join us for worship at 9:30 am. Christian education classes for all ages follow at 11. Join us as we listen to this text about Jesus and Thomas and belief and doubt and our calling.

This week is Holy Week in the Christian calendar, and we are having services on Maundy Thursday April 2 at 6 pm and on E...
04/04/2026

This week is Holy Week in the Christian calendar, and we are having services on Maundy Thursday April 2 at 6 pm and on Easter Sunday morning April 5 starting at 8:30.

Our Maundy Thursday evening service will be worship and a meal, with Jesus’ last supper with his disciples according to the Gospel of John in mind. We will share a simple meal, Communion, and ‘foot-washing’ inspired by John 13:1-17. This ritual of ‘foot washing’ has been important to Mennonites and other Anabaptist-related denominations for centuries, and we will explore this practice – with no pressure, one can just sit and watch, or exchange hand washing with someone. It is a practice of egalitarianism, of mixing up the social status of members, we are all equal in God’s eyes here.

On Easter Sunday we begin at 8:30 am with a pitch-in breakfast, and our worship service starts at 10 after we wash the dishes. Our Easter Scripture text is John 20:1-18, about Mary Magdalene discovering an empty tomb and then being the first to see a resurrected Jesus. Mary and Jesus have a really tender (and mysterious) encounter...it’s a beautiful rendition of grief and connection, of showing up exactly as ourselves in the face of great mystery and trusting that's all that's needed. And then Mary becomes the “apostle to the apostles,” the first to tell of Jesus’ resurrection.

We welcome you to join us for worship. We will have no Christian education classes on Easter. Join us as we listen to this text about an empty tomb and Jesus and Mary M and wonder about the meaning of the resurrection. We recognize that we modern Christians are called to a high bar – belief without seeing, relying only on the testimony of others. How indeed does Jesus save us from the powers of the world, in the midst of our troubled times?

This week, for Palm Sunday March 29, we are reading two Scripture texts, set less than a week apart, but with what feels...
03/28/2026

This week, for Palm Sunday March 29, we are reading two Scripture texts, set less than a week apart, but with what feels like an eternity between them: Jesus’s celebrated entry into Jerusalem in John 12:12-27, and his crucifixion later that same week, in John 19:16b-22.

Both texts are powerful, but the juxtaposition of them holds each in new light. We feel the jubilant joy and hope in John 12, but we notice now that this joyful text also has Jesus warning that his calling is hard and calling us to follow and not to be afraid.

We notice how the idea of kingship floats atop both texts, once in the mouths of Jesus’s followers, once written by the hand of Pilate – but what do they mean?

And we see how doing the hard thing – the right, hard thing – in any given moment, can pay dividends of good into the world, into the future – but it’s not always the Disney movie-ish kind of good. Don't be afraid indeed!

We welcome you to join us for worship at 9:30 am. Christian education classes follow for all ages at 11. Join us in an ongoing conversation about God’s love and concern for justice for the world and our struggle to be re-formed in Jesus’s example of the nature of ‘kingship’ and the nature of power and the nature of being saved from the powers of the world, in the midst of our troubled times.

This Sunday March 22 we’re reading a painfully difficult text, the continuation of Jesus’s trial before Pilate as told i...
03/20/2026

This Sunday March 22 we’re reading a painfully difficult text, the continuation of Jesus’s trial before Pilate as told in John 19:1-16a. Here we find the religious leaders coercing Pilate into executing Jesus by accusing him of disloyalty to the Empire. “We have no king but Caesar” — “we have no king but the emperor,” they say, betraying the very essence of their religious faith: this is a direct contradiction of the traditional Jewish claim, “We have no king except the LORD.”

Our Scripture reading serves as a caution for us about the ways proximity to power can corrupt religious faith. It can tempt us Christians to hand over Jesus ourselves in pursuit of our own interests, whether motivated by ambition or fear.

Our Jewish friends also remind us of the particular dangers of this text for the Jewish community. They caution us to tread lightly with its anti-Semitic tropes, which have caused such harm through the centuries. Understanding properly and paying heed to this text is a difficult but urgent task we have before us today.

We welcome you to join us for worship at 9:30 am. Christian education classes follow for all ages at 11. Join us in an ongoing conversation about God’s love and concern for justice for the world and our struggle to live in that big love and to be re-formed in Jesus’ example of God’s power, in the midst of our troubled times.

This Sunday March 15 in worship we read about Jesus and Pilate as told in John 18:28-40. In this passage Pilate famously...
03/13/2026

This Sunday March 15 in worship we read about Jesus and Pilate as told in John 18:28-40. In this passage Pilate famously (and cynically, I believe) says, “What is truth?”

Jesus is brought to the Roman authority by the religious authorities, and all the authorities mostly seem eager to make this situation go away. The story makes us wonder - why is it so very hard to speak what is true? How can it be that the intersection of religion and political power in this story seems to make it even harder? We might think that in a criminal case, one would focus on establishing the facts. And that in a religious system, getting to the truth of things would be first and foremost on everyone’s mind.

But in this story, this is not what's true. And we can only wish this bore no resemblance to the world we know.

We welcome you to join us for worship at 9:30 am. Christian education classes follow for all ages at 11. Join us in an ongoing conversation about God’s love and concern for justice for the world and our struggle to live in that big love and to speak what is true, in the midst of our troubled times.

This Sunday March 8 in worship we’re reading Peter’s denial of Jesus as told in John 18:12-27. We will discuss the moral...
03/07/2026

This Sunday March 8 in worship we’re reading Peter’s denial of Jesus as told in John 18:12-27. We will discuss the moral injury that accumulates, for Peter and for ourselves, when we face the gap between who we thought we were and who we turn out to be in life’s most challenging moments. We think about the incremental decisions that lead Peter to denying both Jesus and his own true self. The well-meaning denials that seem to start out innocently enough but build until Peter has rejected Jesus altogether.

We will make space for lament in our worship, for the grief that many of us feel in relation to our country and world events right now and the inability to make a difference for good that we feel. We will sing “If the War Goes On” and “Kyrie eleison” from our hymnbook.

We notice that when the rooster crows in John’s version of this story, Peter doesn’t even notice, so little has he even realized what he has done. When the rooster crows for us, we wonder, what will we notice?

And we will remember Jesus post-resurrection welcoming Peter back in, and how Peter went on to courageously lead in Christianity’s birth. And we may remember the hopeful vision for our world that our faith holds, and the promise of God’s Spirit sustaining us...

We welcome you to join us for worship at 9:30 am. And during adult ed hour, Evie Schellenberger continues teaching about Mary Magdalene, Mary “the Tower,” who is a model of an ideal disciple of Jesus. Join us in a lively conversation about God’s love for the world and our struggle to trust and live in that abundant love, in the midst of our troubled times.

This Sunday March 1 in worship we read John 13:1-17, the story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples before they ea...
02/28/2026

This Sunday March 1 in worship we read John 13:1-17, the story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples before they eat a meal together. This story is just steeped in relationship – Jesus's relationship to God as he prepares to return to God, and Jesus’s deep connection to the people here with him on earth.

What does it mean that Jesus, who is their teacher and who they see as master of the universe, stoops to wash their dirty feet? When Jesus washes their feet, he enacts both the role of the host (who offers the washing) and the role of the household slave (who carries it out): what might that mean?

What might it feel like to have “the Word become flesh” stoop to wash your feet?

What does it say about Jesus that he is willing to wash the feet of Judas his betrayer?

After washing their feet, Jesus says “I have given you an example” and “you should do as I have done to you.” What does it mean today to ‘”wash each other’s feet?” Are their ways you try to carry out Jesus’ instruction to wash others’ feet, whether metaphorically or literally? Are there ways in which you allow others to wash yours?

We welcome you to join us for worship at 9:30 am. And during adult ed hour, Evie Schellenberger will teach about Mary Magdalene, Mary “the Tower,” who is a model of an ideal disciple of Jesus. Join us in a lively conversation about God’s love for the world and our struggle to trust and live in that amazing love, in the midst of our troubled times.

Address

2589 N County Road 100 W
Paoli, IN
47454

Opening Hours

9:30am - 12pm

Telephone

+18127232414

Website

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