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

D.F. Plett Foundation Names Executive Director
The D.F. Plett Historical Research Foundation
Inc. is pleased to announce the appointment
of Dr. Hans Werner as its executive director.
The decision was ratified at the Foundation’s
spring meeting held on May 8 at the Mennonite
Heritage Village in Steinbach, Manitoba.
Werner is a native of Steinbach and past
resident of Winkler where he was part owner
of a farm corporation and served as chair of the
local Credit Union, now resides in Winnipeg
with his wife Diana. Hans and Diana attend the
Bethel Mennonite Church and have three grown
children. Werner who speaks Low German and
High German, has just completed a history book
on Winkler, Living Between Worlds. In 2002 he
received a doctorate degree from the University
of Manitoba with a study of the migration of
Germans from Eastern Europe to Canada and
Germany and their struggle in establishing a
sense of home in new places. Over the past few
years Werner has taught Canadian and Mennonite
history at the University of Winnipeg.
Werner’s duties with the Plett Foundation
will include administering its grants program,
co-editing the Preservings magazine, overseeing
the publication and distribution of history books
on Old Colony and other conservative Mennonite
groups, and general administrative tasks.
Preservings’ mission is to give voice to, and
to study, the so-called conservatives in the Anabaptist-Mennonite
heritage, particularly the descendents
of those who immigrated to Manitoba
in the 1870s. In this issue we are also including
some articles by, and about Hutterites.
Why, you may ask, is it important to give
attention to conservatives’ history and experiences?
Is there any more to tell? Is this not too
narrow a part of Mennonite history to warrant
this much attention?
It is true that considerable research attention
has been given to the conservatives’ history during
the past number of decades. It is our view,
however, that more stories need to be told. We
want to tell the conservatives’ story within the
larger Mennonite story. We want to bring to
light source materials that show the struggles
they face in their everyday faith and life. We
also want to provide a positive interpretation of
the conservatives, not to idealize them, nor to
minimize their problems, but to legitimate their
view of being Christian. From that perspective
we wish to address their successes and failures
like we would those of any other Mennonite
group. And, we want to provide them space to
tell their own stories.
In dealing with the experiences of conservatives,
one of the issues that arises is the
relationship of Christian faith to modernity. For
most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
Christianity in Europe and North America has
been influenced by modernity. Modernity is the
Editorial
belief that progress is good, that the new is better
than the old, that newer technology is better
than the old ways, and that cars should replace
horses and buggies. These preferences are not
neutral, but carry with them value judgments.
These value judgments also carry over into
areas of faith. In Europe, Pietism developed
about the same time as modernity. Both reacted
to, and critiqued, an orthodoxy that had
gripped both Protestant and Catholic churches.
Although there was often tension between
Pietism and modernity, they also reinforced
each other. As modernity inclined people to see
the new as good, the new forms that Pietism
introduced in the areas of worship, missions,
and hymnodies were interpreted as being
more spiritual and more genuinely Christian
than traditional patterns. The old was not only
seen as that which happened in the past, but as
something negative.
In America, the conflict between modernity
and tradition was even greater. The United
States was the first western country founded
on the modern principles of individual rights,
progress, and equality. The American constitution
saw these truths as self-evident to all
right-thinking people. The American form of
government with two elected houses and a
president, but no king, was a rejection of the
traditional European forms of royal government.
The system of election in which each
person had one vote (even though this principle
was not fully implemented until two centuries
The Plett Foundation office will be located at the
University of Winnipeg, 515 Portage Avenue,
close to the historic downtown Hudson’s Bay
store. As his position with the Plett Foundation
is a half time placement, Werner will have
a half time position teaching of Canadian and
Mennonite history at the University of Winnipeg.
You can contact Hans at 204-786-9352.
All correspondence to the Foundation as well
as letters to The Preservings magazine can still
be sent to D.F. Plett Foundation, Box 1960,
Steinbach, Manitoba.
In accepting his new appointment Werner
expressed his enthusiasm for the mandate of the
Foundation. He noted that “I am pleased to be
involved with this important work to recover,
preserve and tell the story of the Mennonites
who migrated to Canada in the 1870s and then
spread to Saskatchewan and Alberta, and from
there to Mexico, Paraguay, Bolivia and other
Central and South American countries, with
many descendants returning to Canada.” We are
very pleased that a person with Hans’s range of
abilities and interests, and his energy and sense
of integrity, will administer the foundation’s programs.
We are confident that the Foundation’s
mission to further a respectful approach to the
history of conservative Low German Men-
Dr. Hans Werner
nonites of the Americas will be significantly
enhanced with Hans’s appointment.
Royden Loewen, President
D.F. Plett Historical
Research Foundation Inc.
John J. Friesen
later when African Americans were finally allowed
to vote) was a rejection of the European
assumptions of nobility and privilege. When
modernity was tied to a capitalist economic
system, it became a powerful force for challenging
old–world values.
This spirit of modernity pervaded all aspects
of American life, including the religious. The
continued on page 96
Preservings No. 26, 2006 -