Preservings $20 Issue No. 26, 2006 - Home at Plett Foundation

Colony Church groups, to new homes in
Mexico, Bolivia, Paraguay and in a great many
cases back to Canada again, have left these
people at a tremendous disadvantage. A large
percentage are functionally illiterate. U of M
geographer Leonard Sawatzky estimates as
many as 70 percent or more have been leaving
their schools without an ability to read and
write. Virtually all of their learning has been
rote. Their language skills in the language of
the countries in Latin America that they live
in are so poor that they cannot adequately
deal with the societies around them and their
institutions. The Mennonites of Cuauhtemoc,
one of the most progressive groups among the
Mennonite in Mexico, created a credit union of
which they are justifiably proud. Yet virtually
all of the staff other than the management are
Spanish. Old Colony villages could not supply
the staff. And the culture created in the colonies
would not encourage young Mennonite women
to work in such a setting.
The social problems among the conservative
groups are great. A note in a recent issue of
the Mennonitische Post suggested that as many
as 50 percent of the young people in Mexico
are experimenting with drugs. Alcoholism is
a major problem. The rebellion of the young
people takes forms that indicate the limited
horizons with which the communities struggle.
Racing and spinning circles with half-tons,
drinking, experimenting with drugs, engaging
in sexual activity (incest is a serious problem,
says a well-known anthropologist who knows
the colonies well), are some. The church, on
the other hand, has often discouraged young
people from gathering to sing choruses and
hymns, to conduct Bible studies or to carry on
with organized sports, because these weren’t
done in the past.
Because the church has embraced retaining
the practices of the past as one of its key values,
for many Old Colony churches virtually any
change becomes almost impossible. Though a
good many have already made changes against
church wishes, rubber tires were wrong because
they made travelling into the city easier.
Electricity was wrong because it connected the
community to the world. Anyone who wasn’t
part of the church community was a part of the
world, even other Mennonites. People who left
Mexico for Canada, even if they joined Old
Colony churches here, or went to groups in
Mexico, were excommunicated, causing great
pain and in many cases leaving people here
unable to join anywhere.
In Bolivia, where some of the colonies
have struggled very hard to survive, individual
farmers have had to give up trying to succeed
on their landholdings. A recent issue of the
Mennonitische Post states that “dozens” had
been ex-communicated by their church leaders
for going to work for Bolivians, because that
too is against church teaching. They can’t work
for “people of the world.”
Studies have shown too that because of their
rapid growth (the 7000-8000 who left Canada
in the 1920s now have probably 140,000
descendants) more and more of the people in
Mexico and Bolivia are landless. Their population
has doubled every 15 years and a bit. If
world population had grown at the same rate,
we would have 30 billion people on the planet.
That is part of the reason many have returned
to Canada. Even the land once held by small
landholders is increasingly moving into the
hands of large landholders.
Thus it is curious that even though in numerous
places and in Diese Steine too (pp229,
248) Plett refers to an Abraham F. Thiessen,
who advocated for the landless in Russia and
was exiled to Siberia for his efforts, where
it concerns the landless now, he is curiously
silent. Where Thiessen is concerned, Plett is
quite ready to reproach Mennonite society for
not acknowledging Thiessen’s critique. But he
cannot somehow concede that the Old Colony
church might be contributing to the problem
today. He can’t see how the very attitudes and
practices he praises might be creating the problems
for which he has so roundly condemned
the mainstream Mennonite leadership in Russia.
Indeed, he has even criticized MCC for the
work it has done in Mexico as it has attempted
to address exactly such needs.
Summary of church history
Plett has become so convinced of his own
interpretation of the truth among Mennonites
that he even provides us with a summary of the
history of the church from its early beginnings,
writing it so that it will reinforce his view that
the Old Colony and Kleinegemeinde Mennonites
represent true “evangelical Christianity”
while others somehow represent a corruption
of that faith.
As a result he has arrived at a number of
very strange conclusions. (Again, one would
not be terribly concerned if he wasn’t making
such an effort to feed this into conservative
Mennonite communities in Mexico and elsewhere
where it will only serve to perpetuate
what have been highly damaging perspectives.)
It has many very misleading statements. Just a
few will suffice to illustrate.
For example, he tries to define what he is
says is the “evangelisch-zentrischen Glauben”
[the evangel-centred faith] of the conservative
Mennonites in contrast to the “Evangelikelen-
-einer bestimmten amerikanischen ethnokulturellen
religioesen Bewegung” [Evangelicals-
-a certain American ethno-cultural religious
movement]. The one, he argues represents true
biblical Christianity and the other is something
ethno-cultural and clearly a deviation from the
faith of the early Christian church.
One does not need to argue that everything
about North American evangelical Christianity
is okay in order to see the nonsense in what
Plett is claiming. If anything has characterized
American evangelicalism it has been its
willingness to embrace people of many ethnic
backgrounds. No other Christian movement
worldwide in the last half century has been
as effective in bringing new people into the
household of Christian faith as evangelicalism.
In many places individual churches often have
people of dozens of different nationalities. It
surely takes a huge twist of logic to put people
who have literally fled from those of other
backgrounds forward as a model of evangelical
Christianity while writing off evangelicalism as
a narrow “ethno-cultural movement.”
Another example. Plett picks on the famous
Scopes “monkey trial” of the ‘20s to try to illustrate
the obscurantism of fundamentalism
and its offspring evangelicalism, to which, he
writes, Mennonite groups like the Evangelical
Mennonite Mission Conference and the Evangelical
Mennonite Conference have succumbed,
but the Mexican Mennonites didn’t (p632). The
implication would be that Mexican Mennonites
would have been on the side of the angels in
the Scopes trial, would not have embraced a six
day creation, could have accepted evolutionary
origins, etc., etc.
Many of the criticisms that Plett levels at
contemporary evangelicalism could be accepted
if he had the ability to temper his language or
make distinctions between voices or groups, or
if he had the honesty to acknowledge the serious
problems in his conservative colony Mennonite
backyard. But he constantly demonizes the one
while lauding the other. Targets in the persons
of Jimmy Swaggert, Jim and Tammy Bakker,
Jack Van Impe, Jerry Falwell or Hal Lindsey
and others are huge. But they are only a part of
the story. If some have embraced aberrations
because of their preoccupation with prophecy,
their over-readiness to support Israel, their leaning
toward success theologies and consumerism,
their militarism, or their easy acceptance of
cultural norms, others have moved in quite different
directions. These have given themselves
and their resources gladly for a world in need,
they’ve learned to use the media responsibly
to convey a witness for Christ and the gospel,
they’ve begun countless ministries to respond to
the needs of their world, they’ve built schools,
and they’ve welcomed large numbers of people
into the household of faith.
This balance is missing in Plett’s writings
and notably in Diese Steine too. By haranguing
and assaulting the Pietist, evangelical influences
as he does and in turn exalting the Old Colony-
Kleine Gemeinde teaching and practice, he is
doing the Old Colony people in particular a
great disservice. Their needs are so great and
so urgent that one could reasonably argue that
his flood of publications are harming the Old
Colony people more than they’re helping. They
are obscuring what should be a great concern to
the entire Mennonite church family. And that
is the tragedy.
Last revision:
Harold Jantz
February 6, 2006
The writer is former editor of the Mennonite
Brethren Herald and founding editor of Christian
Week, a national evangelical newspaper. He
also serves on the board of Mennonite Central
Committee Canada.
Response
Since Delbert Plett is gone, and not able to
respond, let me make a few comments.
Harold, in your letter you raise some good
100 - Preservings No. 26, 2006