Everything New is Old Again

 “18 Jesus asked, “What is God’s kingdom like? To what can I compare it?19 It’s like a mustard seed that someone took and planted in a garden. It grew and developed into a tree and the birds in the sky nested in its branches.”

20 Again he said,“To what can I compare God’s kingdom? 21 It’s like yeast, which a woman took and hid in a bushel of wheat flour until the yeast had worked its way through the whole.” (Luke 13:18-21, CEB)

I’m reading a collection of essays edited by Delbert F. Plett, Q.C., called Old Colony Mennonites in Canada, 1875 to 2000. Today’s thoughts arose there.

In the 1870’s, Mennonites from Fuerstenlandt, Bergthal and Chortitz colonies in Russia emigrated to Canada, onto a large block of land reserved by the Canadian Government for what would be a mass migration of agriculturalist settlers. Before making the big move, a privilegium was signed with Canada that guaranteed them freedom of religion, freedom from military service and the right to educate their children in their own language. Not being totally of one mind on questions of music, for example, and the approach to “worldly influences,” they settled more or less in groups: the more-conservative Rheinlaender and the slightly-less-conservative Bergthaler.

Manitoba became a full-fledged province in the meanwhile, and education fell to the provinces generally, and in time and with changing governments, yesterday’s privilegium became today’s scrap paper. Some of the Rheinlaender moved to the Hague, Osler, Warman area where another reserve had been set up for them in the 1890s, but both in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the noose on public, English education geared toward ensuring responsible Canadian citizenship was tightening around the communities. In the 1920s, many Rheinlaender (Old Colony) church communities packed up and moved to Mexico, where a new privilegium remains in effect to this day.

Much as we moderns like to think of groups like the Amish and Old Colony Mennonites as ultra-conservative, ultra traditionalist and—in some cases—living anachronisms, the impulse of clinging to deeply held convictions to the point of uprooting and moving, enduring ridicule and persecution probably has something to teach us. What does it mean, after all, to be salt and light in the world if the salt is no longer salty?

To already-settled American Mennonites, the Old Colony/Bergthal communities in Manitoba were a mission field. General Conference and Mennonite Brethren traveled among the villages and preached a new gospel, one heavily influenced by the American pietistic, individualistic stream by which much of Anabaptist North America had been influenced. To Old Colony leadership, this was “the world” coming to lure their people away from true faith. It was seen as a liberalism that carried on its clothing the bacteria of worldliness, of accommodation to an apostate alien culture. The effect would have been foreseen by bishops and elders in Old Colony villages; the cropping-up of dissident churches, the alienation of neighbours along denominational lines and the eventual weakening of established Christian communities.

What I find interesting is that what was seen in that environment as liberalism has in our time and place become conservatism. It’s not so much that the two have switched places, it’s that the dynamics surrounding both our cultures and our faith are progressive: doctrinal movement is more like climbing stairs than going back and forth between rooms; every new step becomes an old step in time.

I have no argument with those who say that their spiritual liberation, their rebirth occurred in the model of the “sinners’ prayer” and a sudden, emotional release into a spirit-filled, new life. Neither can I judge the relationship to her Christ of an Old Colony woman in a long black dress and a kruschelmetz whose assurance of salvation lies in the hymnbook in her lap and the orderly progression of community life. I personally did not find my release in either, but rather in the abandoning of certainty for the reliance on the “goodness” inherent in a multi-faceted, miraculous creation in which every facet finally responds with joy to the experience of love, the force that is God.

I mourn for those who can only find peace in the prison of doctrinal certainty. That is, after all, an imprisonment with many tortures.