The Johann P. Kehler family in front of their house and barn in the village of Blumenfeld, near Nicopol, Ukraine, 1905.

Ever since the early Christians' time, earnest believers have wanted to know about one another. This has been true, in particular, of Anabaptist (Hutterite, Mennonite, and Amish) groups. Usually their interest in one another has been helpful and friendly. Even though issues of culture and language may stand in the way of close fellowship, humble, sincere believers quickly find common ground. Respect for one another, in Christ, overcomes their differences, and out of respect grows brotherly, sisterly, love.  
 
Anabaptists from southern Germany and Switzerland moved, by the thousands, to America during the eighteenth century. One hundred and fifty years later, during the 1870s, they began to hear of more on the way. But these people, the Mennonites from Russia, were different. They spoke Plattdeutsch (a north German dialect). They ate and dressed differently. Even more remarkably, the ones that settled in western Canada insisted on settling in colonies -- large tracts of land, owned by the Gemeinde (the church community). On these colonies they divided the land into strips that got partitioned out for the use of families living closely together in villages with beautiful German names -- Rosengart, Blumenheim, Schoenwiese, Friedensruh, Neuhoffnung (Rose Garden, Flowery Home, Beautiful Meadow, Peaceful Rest, New Hope), and many more.  
 
From the beginning, the Swiss and South German Anabaptists in North America got along well with their new friends from Russia, many thousands of whom entered Canada through the St. Lawrence River and arrived first in southern Ontario. The Ontario Mennonites gave them large amounts of money, plus seed, tools, and good advice on how to get started in a new land.
 
That close friendship between the old and new Mennonites of Canada has continued. When many more refugees arrived from Russia during the 1920s and the 1940s (after the World Wars) they likewise received a warm welcome -- my hometown, Kitchener, Ontario, becoming home to several thousand of them.
 
My parents, Anson and Sarah Hoover, became deeply involved in the settling of Russian Mennonites in Canada, and later in Mexico and British Honduras (Belize). I well remember waking up, as a little boy, to find the house full of newly arrived immigrants, children sleeping all over the floor, grown-ups filling every spare bed. On winter nights, by lamplight, we sat with wide eyes listening to stories of Russia, the KGB, the flight through China and Hong Kong to Paraguay and Brazil.
 
Then, as a 21-year-old I married into a family of Russian Mennonite background, my parents-in-law born and raised in Durango, Mexico. Susan and I moved to Mexico in 1981, where we settled, eventually, in the Mennonite village of Gnadenfeld, in Chihuahua state. There I learned Plattdeutsch, was ordained a minister, and preached in German as well as Spanish until we took up new assignments in Central and South America.
 
What do I think of Russian Mennonites? I admire them and love them deeply. (Shouldn't any group that is capable of producing a person like my wife, be held in highest regard?) I teach my children as much as I can about their grandparents, born and raised in Mexico, and their cousins throughout Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina. I teach them about their great-grandparents that moved from Saskatchewan to Hochstaedt, Durango, in 1924, both dying young and leaving their orphaned children in the care of the Waisenamt, the ministry of the church that cares for those in need. (Out of eight children in that family, only two survived to grow up in those  difficult years, right after the Mexican Revolution.) Then I teach them about their great-great-grandfather, Peter Krahn, who left the Chortitza Colony in Russia as a young married man, settled on the treeless prairie in Manitoba, moved on to Saskatchewan, and got on the first train to Mexico (with his third wife and the last of his 23 children) in 1922.

 
My wife's first cousin, Katherina (Reddecopp) Wiebe, with her eleven children, after their move from Mexico to eastern Paraguay. Her husband, Peter Wiebe, was the shopkeeper at Blumenhof in the Nuevo Durango colony at the time we visited them and took this picture in 1984. In six years' time that colony had cleared over ten thousand acres of virgin rainforest, laid out half a dozen villages, and built eighty kilometres of road to connect themselves with the nearest government highway (also unpaved).   
 
Do the Russian Mennonites have their failings? Of course. Pretty serious ones, at that -- like we all do. But before you get fired up about going to convert them, to do mission work among them and get them to scrap their "colony ideas" and join your church, I invite you to read what follows.
 
No, I do not expect many of you to read it all (I will mail this series to you in four instalments). But you may look at the pictures if you like, and from now on, if you hear any wild "Russian Mennonite stories" or see garbled documentaries and mission reports coming out about them, you may know there is another side -- a more balanced realistic side -- to the story. The long story of fallible men and women, like us, seeking to find their way with God.
 
May God have mercy on us and fill all of us with . . .

The Jesus-Fire

Church and Mission Among the Mennonites of Eastern Europe

What happened after Pentecost happened again after thousands of believers saw the Light and found Christ in Europe during the 1500s. Fierce persecution drove them from the place where the revival began (from Switzerland, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands) into every direction at once. But as in the days of the first Christians, this scattering was no disaster. Like the scattering of sparks from a fire, it simply spread the light and brought the Kingdom of God to people and places before unknown.

From Switzerland and southern Germany, believers fled west to America. From the Netherlands and northern Germany they fled eastward, into Poland and eventually to Russia. And as they—Anabaptist people from the Netherlands, by now called Mennonites—made their way east, they gradually lost their Dutch language and became Low German (Plattdeutsch) like the people among whom they settled. The reason for this being the continual stream of new people, both Low Germans and Slavs, that saw their way of life, got converted and joined the church community. In the space of not too many generations, nearly half the family names of the Dutch Mennonites, settling in the east, were new Low German and Slavic ones.  

One young seeker, Heinrich Heese, [1] who found the Lord and got baptised by the Mennonites in what is now northern Poland (the Vistula Delta area), described what he found:

Quietly and without complaint they [the Mennonites of the Vistula Delta] prayed for their enemies in accordance with the will of God, who helped them out of all difficulties. The evil done them by those who denounced them before the government was repaid with good, heaping coals of fire on their heads, thus bringing them to repentance. Not infrequently such an accuser would come to the leaders of the church by night, ask for forgiveness and express the heartfelt wish to be received into their fellowship. . . . After having been instructed in the articles of faith, the church would hear their testimony and receive them. Through the addition of such Polish and German converts, the church gradually increased. Its members also worked diligently to support themselves in natural things. But with even greater care and zeal they nourished their souls with the bread of life. God the Father and the Son dwelt in their midst, filling their homes with heavenly peace.

Besides the instruction provided by the church, fathers and mothers taught the Bible to their children, especially on Sundays, holidays and during long winter evenings. Frivolity, the smoking of tobacco and the drinking of brandy by the youth they considered very serious sins. While the believers’ sons and daughters could all read and write, the education of the children of the rural population around them lagged far behind. . . . The believers sang songs of thanksgiving to the loveliest of melodies at their morning and evening devotions. Their worship meetings were serious-minded and beautiful. Instead of using organ music, as the state churches did, the Mennonites sang with so much feeling that all hearts would soften to the blessed joy in Christ and even the angels in heaven would join in praising and honouring God our Saviour, Jesus Christ. . . . Many visitors, Germans as well as Poles, even though they could not understand the content of the praises, were so impressed with the godly harmony of the meetings that they could neither remove the impression from their hearts nor come to rest until they too belonged to the number of the believers.

The Mennonite congregation in the marshlands of Prussia [the Vistula Delta] still retained visible traces of piety and love for one’s fellow-man into the years of my youth, of which I could give many touching examples as I experienced them in that time of trouble. [2]

Because Heinrich Heese had no Anabaptist background, Prussian authorities would not exempt him from military service and he fled, as a young man to the Chortitza Mennonite settlement (the “Old Colony”) in Russia. There he served for many years as the colony secretary and taught school in the villages of Chortitza and Einlage until his death, six years before the big emigration of Old Colony Mennonites to Canada in 1874.

School Children in Gnadenthal, Baratov Colony, Ukraine, in 1910, a generation after many Old Colony people had left for Canada.

One problem the believers of the Vistula Delta faced, however, was that of the divisions they had brought with them from the Netherlands, generations earlier. Most of them belonged to the large Flemish group, but there were also the Frisians, and some smaller groups such as the Groninger Old Flemish of the Neumark, the “fine” and the “loose” Frisians, etc. For many years these petty divisions marred their witness for Christ. Especially so since they claimed to love peace and refused to take part in war. “What sense does it make to refuse warfare,” their neighbours asked, “while you fight and divide among yourselves?”

It didn’t make sense, and thankfully, after all the hardships they faced in settling in faraway Russia, the Mennonites overcame their divisions. Not just one, but all of them!

True, the main Flemish group built the large central meetinghouse of the Old Colony (Chortitza) in Russia. But the Frisians who built two meetinghouses in the same colony soon forgot their differences and everyone began to work and worship together. In the new Molochna colony, established fourteen years later, not only the Frisians and the Flemish, but even the Groninger Old Flemish joined hands and lived one with another in relative peace until new troubles arose.

The central meetinghouse of the Old Colony, in the village of Chortitz, with its balconies and upstairs rooms (from which people could listen through open holes), could seat around a thousand people.

The first elder from the Vistula Delta to visit the new Chortitza settlement in Russia was Cornelius Warkentin, in charge of the large Flemish congregation at Rosenort (near the present day Polish city of Elblag). Not only did he teach, baptise, and hold blessed communion services in all the Old Colony villages, he even visited the Hutterite community at Vishinka, north of Kiev.[3] This is what he recorded in his diary:

We arrived at Vishinka on Saturday, 26 July 1794. They received us cordially. Since it was harvest time most of the people were in the fields. In the evening we attended the Gebetsstund (prayer meeting) they held every day toward evening. I preached on Luke 13:23-24 concerning the necessity of true conversion and how everyone must arrive at such a new birth. The audience was most attentive. . . .

The next evening, at the request of the community, I spoke at their Gebetsstund again. From Romans 12:1-2, I pointed out the Christian’s reasonable service, and how it should be offered to God in the Spirit and in truth. At the conclusion of the meeting I noticed the brothers and sisters had been greatly moved. After a stay of three days we continued our journey. Even such a short stay had bound us together in love and fostered a mutual trust to one another to such an extent that nearly everyone begged us, amid tears, to stay a while longer. . . . The elders Johannes Waldner and Heinrich Stahl [4] came with us for quite a distance from there.[5]

Eleven years earlier, the Hutterite servant, Joseph Mueller had travelled with Christian Hofer to the Vistula Delta and spoken in the Mennonite churches of the area with equally moving results. Moravian pilgrims, from Herrnhut in Saxony, visited both the Hutterites and the Mennonites in Russia, and got visited in return.

Although the Mennonites of eastern Europe did not use modern terms to describe conversion, revival, or personal experiences with God, they knew Christ and how to walk with him. When Isaak Penner, a young school teacher in the Old Colony village of Rosengart had questions about his soul’s salvation he wrote to Jakob Dyck,[6] the leading elder of that settlement, who lived in Neu-Osterwick at the time. Elder Dyck wrote back:

The first thing the Holy Spirit does, after he begins to work with us, is to convict us of the worldliness in us.[7] That is, he reminds us of our sins, a remembrance that in turn produces repentance unto salvation.[8] Thus we are humbled, and Peter says that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.[9] God shows us this grace by forgiving all our sins through Christ and by planting a real hatred for sin and lust inside us. Many times, however, he temporarily hides the assurance of his grace to us. . . . At such times one has to pray for the will to do and to accomplish that which is good, but also to learn to wait patiently until Christ has been formed in us and enables us to do good works. . . .

If you wish to commit yourself to the Lord for time and eternity you must take into account that many a contrary storm and much adversity, temptation and anxiety will come your way. . . . As soon as you wish to pray the devil will initially risk everything he can to keep you from it. Nor can you be saved from this unless you sink yourself more deeply each day into Christ and into his satisfying work on the cross through believing prayer. Then your faith will take a hold of Christ and all his salvation treasures. Then Christ will be in you and you in him, and he himself will say, “If anyone abides in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit.”

Then Christ will also destroy the works of the devil in you.[10] You will overcome the devil, the world and sin through his indwelling presence. . . . But do not be deceived into believing the error that God will only be kindly disposed to you when you have reached a certain level of godliness and virtue. Oh no! As soon as the sinner senses his sinfulness, sorrows over his sins and calls on God for mercy and grace, the loving heart of God the Father looks upon him in mercy. The righteousness of Christ is granted to the contrite sinner freely through grace and apart from the works of the law.[11]

Nevertheless, a thorough conversion must eventually result in a way of life that will allow everyone to see who dwells within us and whose spiritual children we are. With Paul we say, “I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” But before one reaches this point, many a person cries out with Christ, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I cry but you do not answer me.” Only he that endures to the end will be saved. . . .

If, by God’s grace, we have entered upon the narrow way of the cross, if we have accepted the decision to follow him, and because of our love to him have decided to relinquish everything displeasing to him, then the evil one becomes our determined enemy. We will also be hated by all that are still outside of Christ. . . . If we commit ourselves unreservedly to Jesus, and if the evil one realizes that we are absolutely serious about following Jesus alone, he vexes and hinders us, as much as he can. . . . Therefore, seek to love Jesus Christ above all else and to obtain forgiveness of sins through the merit of his blood. Pray for the gift of the Holy Ghost, who grounds your heart in God, and seek to order your whole life in accordance with your calling. We will not lay a good foundation if we rely too heavily upon the advice of others. . . . Do not bare your heart to everyone that seems to be pious. It will only bring you more unrest. . . . Submit yourself wholeheartedly to Jesus! You will never regret it, and if we endure to the end we shall reign with him.[12]

The first wave of immigrants from the Vistula Delta to respond to the Empress, Catherine the Great’s, invitation to Russia in the 1780s, included no church leaders but an alarming number of unconverted people, poor folk (some of them alcoholics and quarrelsome fellows) that only came along for the free land. They quickly became discouraged and made a lot of trouble.[13] But as more and more godly people came, the church got established and the trouble-makers dealt with, both the Chortitza and Molotschna colonies became a shining light to the world.

Many who visited the colonies (eventually including the Czar himself) took with them a spiritual blessing and the story of the Mennonites’ faith and industry under great hardship at the beginning became known through all of eastern Europe.

In this, the church found its mission and fulfilment, as it had ever since coming from the Netherlands to the Vistula Delta three centuries earlier. Modern mission terms, or the idea of missions as an institution, staffed by career missionaries, was to them unknown. The Mennonites thought of mission only in the context of Gemeinde (church community), and for them every member of the Gemeinde was a missionary, called by God to build on earth a working model of the Kingdom of Heaven. A signpost pointing to the rule of Christ in new heavens and a new earth to come.

Yes, the Mennonites visited and travelled and sought out seekers near and far. They were not afraid of moving into the remotest wilderness to set up new Gemeinden as the Lord opened doors. But they understood the Great Commission as a corporate, never as an individual or institutional, calling. Johann Wiebe,[14] who settled with a group of Old Colony Mennonites in a new Gemeinde on rented land near Melitopol in Taurida, in 1864, and later led them to Manitoba, Canada, wrote:

From the beginning of the world God has kept and guarded his visible Gemeinde, his beloved people, and he will preserve them to the very end. God’s Gemeinde on earth began with Adam and Eve in Paradise. Then, for a time, it consisted of faithful households like those of Noah and Abraham with whom he made his first covenants, and through whom he gathered his chosen seed.[15] This seed of Abraham, the family of Isaac and Jacob, was the Gemeinde of the Old Testament.

Then, in the fullness of time, when the Lord Jesus came with his Gospel, full of grace, he sent his disciples into the whole world to call his Gemeinde together from all races and tongues of the earth. All those that get converted, from the heart, all that trust in God and in his son Jesus, come together in one faith, in one baptism.[16] All that believe in Christ get baptised into one body. In this way we all become united with Christ, through the faith that lives in our hearts [17] — faith that brings about the fear of God and compels us to do what is right.[18]

In this way all believers become members of one body (einverleibt), received into the communion of the saints, all becoming one in heart and soul. Everyone carries the other along in love and all support one another through intercessory prayer. This is the Gemeinde that God, according to Acts 1, has called together from all people and tongues, all that fear him, love him, and do what is right.

The Lord Jesus bought the Gemeinde with his blood, washing her with the Word, so she might stand in beauty before him, without spot or wrinkle, holy and without blemish.[19] This is the Gemeinde he calls the temple and dwelling place of the living God.[20]

The Gemeinde stands on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the cornerstone.[21] And as such, she is known by her Scriptural teachings demonstrated in the love her members have one for another,[22] by her blessed and good way of life in fellowship here on earth, and by how she keeps the commands of Christ.

Jesus said he will stay with his Gemeinde, as he will stay with all that believe on him with a true heart, unto the end of the world. Neither Satan in all his power, nor the gates of hell shall withstand her advance [23] and we pray that through knowing and following Jesus, his entire Gemeinde may stand in true fellowship (Gemeinschaft) with God.[24]

Christ’s visible Gemeinde, the Mennonites of eastern Europe believed, was to stand as a city on a hill, its light shining far and wide, drawing all that seek salvation like a shining light draws insects on a summer night. And as long as their Gemeinschaft (fellowship) with Christ and with one another flourished, that is exactly what happened.

One example of Gemeinde as mission, was the Groninger Old Flemish group in the Neumark, west of the Vistula River. Even though they were somewhat isolated and more conservative than the rest, they kept attracting a steady trickle of converts, among them the Lange, Lenzmann, Klatt, and other families that would have a major influence on all the Mennonites of eastern Europe.

Because there were no other Anabaptists in the Neumark, the Groninger Old Flemish, for thirty years before they emigrated to Russia, stood under the oversight of the Unity of Brothers (the Moravian Church) at Herrnhut, 200 km to the south. This influence, and the enlightened leadership of the convert, Wilhelm Lange, who led them to Russia in the 1830s, brought much zeal and vision to the village of Gnadenfeld where they settled on the Molochna Colony.

Long before the coming of the Groninger people, other Mennonites of Russia had enjoyed a warm relationship with the Moravians at Herrnhut and their mission work throughout the world. The elders Bernhard Fast of the large Flemish congregation on the Molochna Colony, Franz Goertz of the Frisians at Rudnerweide, and Peter Wedel of the Old Flemish at Alexanderwohl,[25] all corresponded regularly with Herrnhut. Only one letter, written to Russia by a Moravian elder in 1827, will give a picture of what was happening:

On 22 June, this year, I received your kind letter, together with the offering money for our missions, which the giver of all good and perfect gifts may bless, as well as all who contributed to it, and allow it to become a fund which will continue to bring forth new gifts. . . . We greet the elders Fast and Goerz, most warmly and heartily.

Our mission work progresses with God’s blessing. The new field in Friedrichsthal on the southern tip of Greenland, the new field at Kopenton in the heart of Jamaica, the new field Tabor in Barbados, and the revived mission there require a great deal of work as well as inevitable expenditures. Last year we saw messengers from the heathen of Greenland and Labrador here. Missionaries from the West Indies, Labrador and Greenland also returned to Herrnhut with stories that grip the heart and mind. . . .

We are celebrating two centennials here in the brotherhood, one on August 13’th to remember the great communion service in Berthelsdorf of 1727, and in the same year the revival among the children. Oh, that fire would proceed from his mouth to purify his temple at this time! The leaders of the community here greet all the loved ones in Ohrloff and the surrounding areas, and bless them in the Lord. Pray for us as we pray for you! We remain bound through the blood of Jesus.

Gottlob Martin Schneider
Berthelsdorf [Herrnhut], 30 June 1827 [26]

Not only did the Moravians at Herrnhut stand as an inspiration and example to the Mennonites, they opened the door for them into Russia itself.

Fifteen years before the Hutterites, and twenty-four years before the Mennonites came to Russia, Moravian pilgrims interviewed the empress, Catherine the Great, in St. Petersburg, and got permission to establish a church community on the lower Volga. At first the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church opposed the plan. It was illegal in Russia for Orthodox people to convert to any other religion, or for missionaries of another group to try to convert them. The Moravians had a long record of missionary activity. Would they refrain from working among the Orthodox? Was it legal for them to bring Asiatic tribes into Moravian communities instead of into the Orthodox Church?

Catherine the Great settled the matter at once. “The Brethren [the Moravians] do not need to fear that they will be prevented from converting the heathen,” she informed them. “To the contrary, I should be very happy if all my heathen subjects would become Christians!”

So, even though the ban on converting the Orthodox remained in place (also for the Mennonites), there were no more restrictions on evangelising among the non-Christians of Russia. And this the Mennonites soon made use of, in amazing ways, for the glory of God.[27]

By the 1850s the first generation of Mennonites in Russia had organised a mission society to bring the Gospel to the heathen. Working closely with their fellow-believers in the Vistula Delta and the Netherlands, they prepared their young people for mission service at home and abroad, and began to move, for the first time from the concept of mission as Gemeinde to more conventional Protestant methods. In 1854 the Mennonites of Russia sent 300 German Reichsthaler with this letter to the  Doopsgezinde Zending (Anabaptist Mission Society) of Amsterdam:

With real joy we have been reading reports of your work, sent to us from Germany. Above all, we rejoice that the Lord, who has bought us with his blood, also has followers among our brothers and sisters in the Netherlands. Brothers and sisters that confess with us the same faith, and who as living branches, united with Christ, the true vine, draw their sap from him and bear fruit.

Since we also have the undeserved privilege to stand under the gracious influences of the Holy Spirit, who shows himself powerfully among us, we wish to show our gratitude to the Lord, who is dear to us, by serving him. As a result, a missionary society has been organised among us several years ago.

Since we have learned to know you and the work you are doing, we now want to extend to you the hand of brotherhood. Until now we gave the money we collected for missions to a number of societies in Germany. But we hope, from this point onward, to support you as we are able, and as you let us know of your needs. So now, beloved brothers and sisters, accept us in the Lord. Pray for us, that the Lord may expand his Kingdom among us, and that he keep us in his truth.[28]

Heinrich and Agnes Dirks, newly married, travelled as the first Russian Mennonite “career missionaries” to Sumatra in 1869. Johann Fast followed, and after them came Nikolai Thiessen, Johann Huebert, Peter and Emilie Loewen, Johann and Maria Dyck, Nikolai Wiebe, David Dirks, Abram and Maria Friesen (the first to leave from the Old Colony), Johann and Helena Wiens, Anna Peters, Katherina Reimer, Heinrich and Anna (Peters) Unruh, and many others.

Not only to Java and Sumatra did the missionaries go, starting new works among Muslims and Hindus, baptising thousands within the space of twenty years, but also to India. And while this was happening, much had begun to happen at home.

Both the Molochna and Old Colony people, especially those that moved to newer branch colonies, had extensive contact with their Lutheran and Württemberger Pietist neighbours from the beginning. By the 1850s, when the second generation of Russian Mennonites had begun to take on the leadership of the colonies, these contacts had grown into weekly fellowship, joint prayer meetings, and the beginnings of a massive revival that would change the life of the Mennonites in Russia forever.

Not only did German Protestant and Anabaptist people suddenly find themselves praying and preaching the Gospel together, both of them found kindred spirits among their Russian[29] neighbours at once. Many Russians worked on the Mennonite colonies. When prayer meetings began to take place anywhere, during the day and in the evenings, in Mennonite factories and mills, and in Mennonite village homes, first dozens, then hundreds and eventually a truly awesome flood of Ukrainian and Russian villagers found the Lord. “Stundisten,” the Orthodox authorities called them in scorn, after the Gebetsstunden of the German colonists, and terrible persecution broke out.

Not only many converted Russians got dragged from their houses and thrown into unheated gaols, the Mennonites that baptised them did too. Much confusion broke out as some pulled this way and others that, even on the Mennonite colonies, but the power of Light triumphed and overcame all obstacles. New fellowships of believers sprang up like mushrooms. The Scriptures, once printed and readily available in Russian, got passed out from Mennonite colonies scattered thousands of kilometres along the Trans-Siberian Railroad, until the revival had spread to the Arctic Ocean, all the way to the northern border of Manchuria and the Russian border with Japan.

Was it still illegal to bring an Orthodox church member to conversion? Yes, it was. But the second-generation Mennonites, speaking Russian fluently, doing business with them all the time, and holding annual missions conferences after the 1860s (in both the Molochna and Old Colony settlements) could do nothing else. The Gospel leaked out everywhere, and everyone (the Mennonites, the Russians, the German Lutherans, the Tsarist government) stood back in amazement at what happened before their eyes.

Entire villages, entire regions went “Stundist.” The more the government and the Holy Synod tried to stop it, the faster the movement spread. Officially, the Mennonites still retained their status as autonomous German colonies. Certainly, their worship meetings and their schools were still solidly German—the Russian believers organising their own congregations alongside. But nothing could stop awakened Mennonites, Lutherans, and Russians from praying together when they met at the mill, from reading the Bible or singing one with another on winter evenings at home.  

Nothing could stop the Jesusfeuer (fire of Jesus), once the Spirit had kindled it in hearts that stood open to welcome him.

When Heinrich Dirks, the brother sent to Sumatra by the Groninger Old Flemish of Gnadenfeld, returned after many fruitful years on that island, eager churches throughout the Russian colonies waited their turn to hear him preach. In a great Missionsfest (missions conference) attended by earnest believers from both the Mennonite and Pietist villages he began with Jesus’ words:

“I came to cast fire upon the earth, and oh how I would it were already kindled!”[30] Certainly, the fire Jesus came to kindle on the earth was not a natural one. No, it was a supernatural, spiritual fire—the fire of the knowledge of God. The fire of truth and love. The fire of eternal life and the Holy Spirit.

Take the knowledge of God, take truth and love, take eternal life and the Holy Spirit together, and the Jesus-Fire breaks out! This fire burned within him before the foundation of the world. This fire brought him from heaven to earth. It drove him, while here, to spark it and fan it to flame in the hearts of his fellowmen.

Jesus’ fire already burns in many believers’ hearts. But oh, may it burn in our hearts as well! For it goes without saying that the one whose heart the Jesus-Fire has kindled, will burn with zeal to kindle it further and further afield. Yes, he wants it to start burning in the hearts of non-Christians, in the hearts of Muslims and Jews as well!

Fire spreads quickly. It blazes up and send showers of sparks high into the air. Then, wherever a spark comes to rest it sets off a new fire. That is how it goes when the Jesus-Fire lights up our hearts. If it blazes brightly it lights up many more. . . . To speak without a metaphor, it will drive us out, with the Jesus-Fire in our hearts and the torch of the Gospel in our hands, to the uncivilised, the pagans and the Muslims. And no parents, no brothers, sisters, or friends, will dissuade us or keep us back. . . .

The Saviour wants the fire that burns in us to flare up and throw out many sparks. If we love him, none of us will fail to take part in the work of missions, one way or another. For the one that refuses does not love the Saviour, or at least not very much. . . . And oh, how much needs to be done around the world until the fire that Jesus has kindled will burn everywhere among all the peoples of the earth! They now estimate the world’s population at one billion, four hundred million people. Of these only a very small part are Christian believers. . . .

Through the work of our churches in the Dutch East Indies, on Java and Sumatra, the Jesus-Fire has started to burn in the hearts of more than 2,500 heathen and Muslims. Even though it may not burn too brightly in some, it is burning, and our missionaries are stirring it up so that it may burn all the more strongly and well. Oh, what a marvellous work, this work of missions, to spread the Jesus-Fire throughout the world! [31]

In the face of incredible adversity, great challenges from within and without, the flight of the Mennonites to eastern Europe had spread the fire and light of Jesus’ Gospel. But their adventures in Russia, by Heinrich Dirks’s time (he was the son of refugees from Prussia), had barely begun. Other events, apostasy, turmoil, revolution, famine, war and mass emigrations already stood on the horizon.

In the next article we shall look at what brought them about and what happened then.

Peter Hoover

Rocky Cape Christian Community
19509 Bass Highway
Detention River, Tasmania 7321
Australia
www.thecommonlife.com.au

Notes:

[1] Heinrich Heese (1787-1868) devoted his entire life to improving conditions on the Chortitza (Old Colony) in Russia through education, better farming methods, planting trees, improving relations with Russian workers, and through teaching the Russian language to Mennonite colonists. He believed schools should promote the idea of community through having students work, learn and live together. He ran a boarding school at Einlage on the Old Colony until his death. Most of his students, by the time he died, were the sons of Russian noblemen.

[2] From Peter M. Friesen’s massive work, Die Alt-Evangelische Mennonitische Bruderschaft in Russland (1789-1910), first published in Halbstadt, Molochna Colony, Russia, in 1911. The entire work has been translated to English, The Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia, in which Heinrich Heese’s report may be found on pages 110-111.

[3] The Hutterites, Austrian Anabaptists fleeing from what is now Slovakia and Romania, had come to Russia nineteen years before the first Mennonites. They came as refugees from the south, with Russian troops returning from war with the Ottoman Turks.   

[4] Elder Warkentin seems to have made an error here. No Hutterite brother with the name of Heinrich Stahl is known to have existed.

[5] From Peter M. Friesen’s work (hereafter referred to as Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia, with page numbers given of the English translation), pg. 164.

[6] Jakob Dyck (1779-1854) served as elder of the Chortitzer (Old Colony) church until his death. Widely known as an upright, godly man and wise counsellor.  

[7] John 16:8

[8] 2 Corinthians 7:10

[9] 1 Peter 5:5

[10] 1 John 3:8

[11] Romans 3:14

[12] Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia, pages 123 to 127

[13] Some going so far as to build a tavern near the Mennonite villages in which drunkenness, debauchery, and even a murder took place.

[14] Johann Wiebe (1837-1906) married Judith Wall and was ordained a minister at the Fürstenland Colony in 1865. Ordained elder in 1870, he moved to Canada in 1875 with 1,100 members of his congregation, and served the church there until his death in the village of Rosengart, on Manitoba’s West Reserve.

[15] Genesis 17

[16] Ephesians 4

[17] Ephesians 3:17

[18] Acts 10

[19] Ephesians 5:26-27

[20] 1 Corinthians 3

[21] Ephesians 2:20

[22] John 13

[23] Matthew 16

[24] Von der Gemeinde Gottes, published in Glaubensbekenntis der Mennoniten in Nordamerika, by Johann Wiebe, first edition, Reinland, Manitoba, 1881.

[25] This eagerly mission-minded congregation settled as a body in nine villages in Kansas, USA, in 1874.

[26] Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia, page 142

[27] Read the story of the Johann Peters family, Johann Kehler and others in the far north, witnessing to Arctic tribes, in The Russians’ Secret, by Peter Hoover, pages 212 to 218.

[28] Letter from Gnadenfeld, to Doopsgezinde MS , 1854, Friesen, pg 660

[29] In most places, Ukrainian.

[30] Luke 12:49

[31] Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia, pages 670-673.