coeller

The Mennonites are a fairly small group of people. They include somewhere in the vicinity of 1.3 million people and some 60 percent of that number live in Africa, Asia, or Latin America. There are also quite a few different types of Mennonites. Amish, Old Order Mennonite, and Conservative Mennonite represent a few of these variations.

For my research project this semester I am planning on digitizing the Brotherhood Beacon, which is one of the publications of the Conservative Mennonite Conference (CMC). Since this archive will most likely be held on the CMC website I thought it would be interesting to survey how the CMC website compares with other Mennonite conference websites. I would also like to pay special attention to whether or not any other conferences have digitized and made available any of their publications on their websites.

That said, I began my search for other Mennonite conference websites by simply doing a search through google for “Mennonite conference.” This brought up many more websites than I would ever want to search through, but I clicked on a few of the ones that looked like official conference websites of some of the more major groups within the Mennonites. After bringing up these primary ones, I searched through their links and found a few others that the google search had missed (or hidden somewhere far down in the list of results).

There are far too many Mennonite conference websites to include in this review, so I will try to examine a sampling of conference websites ranging from the primary conferences to smaller ones within the Mennonite umbrella. Quality varies drastically over even this small sampling. (more…)