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

or Paraguay and again for safety in Bolivia?
What has their flight into more and more remote
areas been but an attempt to escape to a place
where they might be protected from the world
in which so much evil exists. And if one is to
judge such flights by the number of deaths
they caused, the flight of the Old Colony and
Kleine Gemeinde people led to far more deaths,
since the numbers were far greater. Moreover,
whenever Plett writes about the conservative
Mennonites they are “pilgrims,” but when it
concerns people like the Claas Epp or Abraham
Peters’ followers they are misguided fanatics.
Even though in the case of those who went to
Paraguay in the ‘20s, 170 out of 1700 died while
waiting to get onto their land and over three
hundred returned disappointed to Canada soon
after, from Plett nary a word of judgment.
One could cite numerous illustrations of
this kind from Diese Steine, some of them quite
outrageous. For example, he places a picture of
a conservative minister, Abram Friesen (p339),
into the book and notes that he was the uncle of
the historian Peter M. Friesen, who produced
the most important history text in Russia. Yet
P.M. Friesen never mentions him in his book.
Plett uses this to illustrate the shame that he
claims many evangelical or pietist Mennonites
have toward their conservative Mennonite
relatives and who thereby show their “limited
and impoverished worldview and their cultural
hostility.” Does Plett run pictures of all his relatives
in his publications? If not, why not?
Story of Gnadenfeld
The community of Gnadenfeld in the Molotschna
colony was clearly a powerhouse of
renewal within Russian Mennonite life, spiritually,
educationally and through the openness it
generated toward new ideas, economically. It
was a village that came about through the immigration
of 40 families in 1834 from a place
in Prussia called Brenkenhofswalde-Franzthal.
Now it’s important to note that ten of those
families were from Lutheran background, but
were now Mennonites. Plett won’t recognize
them as Mennonites--in fact he barely recognizes
the community, giving less than a page of
text to it. About the former Lutherans, however,
he says that since the group couldn’t come up
with enough Mennonites, they allowed some
Lutherans to join the company. Plett doesn’t
mention that the entire group was actually led
by Wilhelm Lange, who had converted to their
faith from Lutheranism years before and was
their elder and leader at the time of the move,
nor does he note that August Lenzmann, another
former Lutheran, became their elder some years
after coming to Russia, or that Johann Klatt,
still another new Mennonite, became one of
the leaders of educational reform among Russian
Mennonites. Instead he says that the lack
of enough Mennonites to complete the group
accounts “for the non-Mennonite (sic) names
in the group, names like Lenzmann and Lange
and others” in the group. It appears that unless
the names were right, they could not be
Mennonites.
Plett has taken his information from a
modest work by Agathe Loewen Schmidt of
Kitchener (entitled 1835-1943, Gnadenfeld,
Molotschna), who in turn got her information
from P.M. Friesen. Schmidt indicates that 10
Lutheran families “who in the meantime had
become Mennonites” joined the trek to Russia.
While she indicates their origin, she is
nonetheless clear that they had already become
Mennonites when the move took place in 1834.
P.M. Friesen, however, is very clear. He says
that under the leadership of Wilhelm Lange,
a former Lutheran teacher who embraced the
faith of the Mennonite flock in Brenkenhofswalde
and eventually became not merely its
minister but its elder, people of other faiths
“streamed to his preaching.” When the decision
was made to move to Russia a number of
other evangelical families joined the church
“by baptism upon their confession of faith”
(Friesen, p80) “with the permission of the royal
Prussian government”. Such a shift did not
happen easily, since both the state church and
the government normally refused to allow it.
Friesen adds that “these were all families who
had long attended the church and long expressed
the wish to join.”
This point is an important one because the
Gnadenfeld church represented a new openness
to others instead of the insularity which
had led many to believe that being Mennonite
meant belonging to a narrowly defined ethnic
community. A strong case can be made that
Gnadenfeld more than any Russian Mennonite
community of that time encouraged openness to
other Christians, openness to learning, openness
to renewal of the faith, and openness to people
of other cultures.
Thus, while Gnadenfeld played an unusually
important role in the eventual transformation
of Russian Mennonite life, especially because
of its openness to spiritual renewal and to improved
education, Diese Steine gives virtually
no attention to it and the new Mennonites who
were part of it are dismissed as not worthy of
carrying the name.
Another example. Because he places a
highly negative interpretation upon “Pietism,”
Plett cannot resist the temptation to insert an
explanatory phrase behind his co-editor Adina
Reger’s account of her great-grandfather Aron
Reimer, who she said had in 1899 moved to
Orenburg and “served as a minister within the
‘church’ Mennonites and in the same year both
he and his wife had been converted.” Unwilling
to let her description stand, Plett inserts an
editorial note, “Presumably what is meant is
they had been converted to the separatist-pietist
faith.” He doesn’t respect even his co-editor.
Written vs off-the-cuff sermons
One might cite other examples of where
Plett’s hostility to Pietism takes him. The following
appears in an essay on the Bergthal
Colony, the first of the daughter colonies created
in Russia (Diese Steine, pp333-346). In describing
the life of the colony he contrasts the solid
teaching in the schools and the rejection of the
end-time “fables” of the separatist-pietists by
the Bergthal preachers with the acceptance of
such ideas by people like historian P.M. Friesen
and other preachers who had gone to “European
Bible schools” and elsewhere.
“Fortunately,” writes Plett, unlike the
conservative ministers who “carefully put together
and re-wrote” their sermons, because the
Pietists preached their sermons “off-the-cuff,”
no records remain to continue to do damage.
One hates to disabuse Plett of his notions, but
plenty of sermons and sermon outlines remain.
Anyone familiar with the work of Mennonite
Brethren itinerant ministers knows this. There
are hundreds, if not thousands of such sermons
extant. Many of these preachers carefully prepared
sermons that they preached, sometimes
memorizing the content, since they did not want
to read them as they had observed it done for
generations with deadening effect.
Furthermore, neither P.M. Friesen nor
many others bought the millennial notions of
Jung-Stilling, with which Plett seems so determined
to tar everyone who embraced Pietist
influences.
Still in the section on the Bergthal Colony,
Elder Gerhard Wiebe is described as being “like
a Moses” as he led his people out of “the danger
lying ahead of them” in Russia to a new home in
Canada. This is a theme that Plett has touched
on in numerous places. Presumably, it was the
faithful, true followers of Christ who left for
the Canada in the 1870s and the ones willing
to make compromises who stayed behind. In
some ways such an interpretation would not be
too problematic if it was simply coupled with a
clear recognition that compromise and failure
are possible for any group, even when it appears
they passed some tests well. One outcome of
Plett’s stance is that he appears to show little
sympathy for the history of suffering and martyrdom
which the Mennonites who remained
in Russia endured. On the other hand, again
and again his writing conveys the sense that
the suffering and hardship that the conservative
Mennonites embraced in the Americas was a
consequence of genuine faithfulness to Christ,
even though there are many instances that might
put such an interpretation into question.
To cite one example which you will not
find in his book: a few years ago the entire
collective spiritual leadership of the Durango
Colony in Mexico and a small group of followers
abandoned the colony and moved further
south, taking the Armenkasse (treasury for
the poor) with them and leaving the colony of
some seven thousand people entirely without
spiritual leadership. The main point of tension
dividing the colony concerned whether it would
be right to allow the colony to be tied into an
electrical grid.
Why should we be concerned?
Why should one be concerned about the
interpretation Plett is placing upon the conservative
Mennonites? Perhaps there is no need to
be troubled by the many forced interpretations
which are rife throughout his work.
One should be concerned because the
beliefs which have carried the conservative
Mennonites, especially those within the Old
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