Canadian Mennonite
Volume 10, No. 02
January 23, 2006


WiderChurch

Membership baggage, homosexuality fuel ‘provincially active only’ desires

Winnipeg

Baergen

The desire of some congregations across the country to be “provincially active only” has led MC Canada’s General Board to make this issue a top priority of its newly formed Faith and Life Committee. The group is working to have a recommendation available for delegates at Edmonton 2006—the next time representatives from congregations across Canada will meet.

The urgency was prompted, in part, by the expiry this year of a five-year agreement between Mennonite Church British Columbia and Mennonite Church Canada to offer provincially active only status on a trial basis. As well, the B.C. conference is into the second year of its own discernment process on the controversial matter.

Rudy Baergen, chair of the Faith and Life Committee, wants to apply theological rigour to the question. A significant part of the committee’s work will be studying and discerning what Scripture says about followers belonging to a wider discerning community of believers. There is much biblical evidence to support the notion of being one body and holding on to unity, if not official membership, he believes. Referring to Christ’s prayer for the church in John 17 and the Conference of Jerusalem in Acts 15, he says, “Unity has been an important issue from the very beginning.”

‘Membership’ baggage

One of the screens the committee will apply to its discernment process will be to identify parallels between congregational and wider church membership.

But even the word “membership” has baggage, says Lorin Bergen, pastor at Living Hope Fellowship in Surrey, B.C., a congregation that is predominantly under age 50. “With [our] demographic, we have clearly seen a hesitancy to become a member ‘on paper’ of the church. There is a question of, ‘Why is membership important? I am coming here; I am putting myself under the authority and accountability of the church. I’m going to a small group regularly. I am ministering and using my gifts.’ We’ve got people who aren’t members who are more committed than members.”

George Hoeppner, pastor at First Mennonite Church Greendale, in Chilliwack, B.C., concurs with Bergen. He says that while some older members in his congregation lament the loss of being connected to a wider church body, “the younger generation is not tied to anything as far as denomination goes.”

But there are practical reasons for belonging to a wider church body at the denominational level: employment benefits for pastors and congregational staff, teaching resources, Sunday school curricula, and opportunities to engage in international ministries.

Rudy Baergen believes the discernment of a wider church body also offers individual congregations some comfort. “I’ve seen that in Colombia, [where] independent churches run into serious difficulties because they are drinking from so many different wells they get this total mixture of theological understandings within their congregation, and when they develop a problem or crisis, it’s really difficult to resolve because you’re just not unified in anything and you don’t have any common ground to stand on,” he says.

A deeper disillusionment

Lorin Bergen considers the homosexuality issue as symptomatic of a deeper disillusionment with the denomination and its polity. “I think there is an incredible lack of trust in leadership and a real dissatisfaction with the polity that we have in MC Canada,” he says. “We find it fairly alarming that our MC Canada leaders can’t approach a church…about a clear break in our Confession of Faith because that would be stepping on the toes of MC Eastern Canada….”

“We have structures, but nobody has any authority,” Hoeppner maintains. “And so the [advantage] of stepping out [of the denomination] is so that we could have more structured leadership.”

Witness to the world

Last February, Mennonite Church Saskatchewan culminated a two-year season of discernment with a covenanting service at which the vast majority of area congregations agreed formally to be in communion with one another. The Faith and Life Committee will study what it means when congregations covenant together.

It is hard and sometimes painful work, whether churches leave the wider communion or commit to stay with a long view of working at disagreements. Finding respectful ways of dealing with both circumstances is another part of the challenge.

And then there is the concern over the church’s witness to the world when there is disagreement. “A major part of the good news is the theme of reconciliation,” says Rudy Baergen, adding, “It is the church’s challenge to witness to its ministry of reconciliation. Our task is to find ways of working with one another that transcend our disagreements, so that we can be a witness to the world.”

—Dan Dyck

Mennonite groups oppose land speculator

Zaporozhya Region, Ukraine

Willms

A speculative land deal in the works in the southern Ukraine is causing consternation among North American Mennonite groups with ties to the former Soviet state.

Paul Willms, formerly of Leamington, Ont., and now an American resident, is asking Mennonites on both sides of the border for $1 million to begin the process of reclaiming a half-million acres of land in the Zaporozhya Region of the Ukraine that were once Mennonite farmland. If successful, Willms’ Delaware-registered Caobo Company would establish a land trust and begin developing a variety of agribusinesses and real estate developments.

At this point, Willms has mailed more than 15,000 glossy proposal packages to Mennonites across Canada and the U.S., asking them to invest at least $1,000 US each in his company in an effort to raise a million dollars in total. Those who invest must also sign a waiver giving up their own claim to any land the Ukrainian government might give the company.

The packages were mailed out to families with seven last names found in the historical records of the village of Kleefeld in the Molotschna Settlement: Dyck, Enns, Epp, Freisen, Janzen, Thiessen and Willms. But Willms told Canadian Mennonite that “all Mennonites are invited to participate in Caobo’s restitution claim.”

Willms is hoping that investment by Mennonites in his venture will not only give him the needed capital to move ahead with the first phase of the plan (in part to make the Caobo Company a publicly traded enterprise), but also give it some legitimacy with the Ukrainian government. Caobo has requested that the land—now owned in part by individual Ukrainians—be turned over to it in the name of those Mennonites it was expropriated from by the former Soviet government nearly a century ago.

In the information package, Willms wrote: “In order to establish a credible claim to such lands, it is likely that the company will need to have a substantial number of equity holders who are among the descendants of the prior owners of such lands.” According to Willms, though, the project already has the support of some high-level Ukrainian government officials.

Land restitution worries Mennonite agencies

It is this goal to have the land turned over to the Caobo Company as a way of restoring it to Mennonite ownership—even more than the speculative nature of the request for investment—that has Mennonite organizations upset and worried.

“Even if Caobo is able to sign up the thousand investors of Ukrainian Mennonite descent that they are hoping for, I certainly don’t think it’s ethical for a private company to negotiate with the Ukrainian government for the return of ‘Mennonite’ lands to a small, and perhaps only nominally, Mennonite group, and then to claim that justice has been done to the Mennonites,” said Pam Peters-Pries, Mennonite Church Canada’s Support Services executive secretary. “It should acquire land the same way any other private company has to—by buying it.”

Willms’ own Mennonite lineage has impacted him significantly. “My father, Henry Willms, instilled within me from childhood that I am Mennonite,” he said, adding that his heritage “took on new meaning…when I visited the Ukraine this past summer and found the birthplace of my father, aunts and uncles. This experience precipitated deep reflections about what it means for me to be Mennonite.”

Erwin Warkentin, the general manager of the Mennonite Foundation, shares Peters-Pries’ views. “The main question that I have is the ethical question, ‘Can this company claim to speak for all Mennonites that have suffered loss as a result of leaving the Ukraine?’ And secondly, ‘Is this really the Mennonite way of looking at this, to claim restitution?’”

The charity Friends of the Mennonite Centre Ukraine (FOMCU) certainly doesn’t think so.

David Suderman, a Friends’ board member, told Canadian Mennonite that “FOMCU vigorously opposes large-scale land restitution to the Caobo Company on historical-moral grounds,” noting that “the lands and property of other ethnic groups…along with those of the Crimean Tatars, were also unjustly seized under communism.”

Will private development hurt humanitarian aid efforts?

What bothers FOMCU most, however, is the damage the Caobo Company plan might cause their humanitarian efforts, along with those of other organizations such as the Zaporozhye Family Centre (see “Respite centre expands to 12 beds,” Canadian Mennonite, Dec. 19, page 27).

“My concern is that the work and reputation of Mennonite social agencies in the Ukraine…are potentially at risk,” said Walter Unger of Toronto, Friends’ board chair.

But Willms sees his company’s efforts as being of benefit to impoverished Ukrainians. One of his goals is to “provide the opportunity of local residents having access to good jobs working for Caobo Company, in turn, improving their living conditions by helping them build new homes up to European or North American standards.”

And he said that “this message is well-received” in such areas as Zaporozhye Oblast.

But Victor Penner, a Mennonite living in Zaporozhye, sees things differently. In an e-mail to Unger, who forwarded it to Canadian Mennonite, Penner wrote, “Once the information on Mr. Paul Willms and his project will penetrate into Ukrainian mass media, the attitude to foreigners in former Mennonite areas will worsen substantially. Ukrainian communists and other pro-Russian political parties insist that [current president Viktor Yushchenko] came to power using ‘American money’…and that ‘Americans will come to Ukraine and buy everything here and we will turn [into] serfs.’”

Although Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) works on a variety of health care and social service initiatives in the Ukraine, it has chosen not to enter the debate. “MCC does not feel it’s our arena to comment,” said Rick Janzen, the co-director of MCC’s Europe and Middle East Programs, commenting that other Mennonite organizations were already addressing the matter.

A good investment or not?

“If you go through [the information package], it does say this is a risky investment, but you have to look very carefully at it,” Erwin Warkentin said, pointing out, “One industry he is targeting is a winery. Do we want to get involved with that?” He has no plans to invest. “I would not personally get involved,” he said.

Likewise, David Suderman cautioned potential investors against assuming “that a $1,000 subscription will serve a charitable purpose, that subscribers gain any rights to the lands of their ancestors, [or] that their investment will yield dividends.” He noted that the fine print in the information package describes shares sold to Mennonites as “extremely speculative,” and that the company has no plans to pay dividends to its subscribers in the near future.

The information package indicates that Willms (as CEO) and his partner will collectively own 73 percent of the company’s 8.2 million offered shares if all million new shares are purchased by Mennonite investors. If that happens, the new investors will then collectively own about 12 percent of Caobo’s outstanding stock.

Willms has chosen not to work with other Mennonite organizations in his land claims effort. “The land in question is not church land,” he said. “For this reason, the Caobo Company has intentionally gone directly to individuals, and not to any institution, religious or otherwise. As with any sound business endeavour, Caobo seeks to connect directly with decision-makers,” he said.

When asked by Canadian Mennonite what would happen to investors’ money should the project be turned down by the Ukrainian authorities, Willms didn’t answer directly. As for the legality of his stock offering in Canada and the U.S., Willms said the company’s attorney followed American Securities Exchange Commission guidelines that permit a company to sell up to $1 million US in unregistered stock to the American market and that “registration is being processed for applicable jurisdictions.”

With conflicting perspectives on the matter of redressing past injustices, how should Mennonites respond?

“Mennonites returning to Ukraine to provide humanitarian assistance is the best example anywhere of Mennonite reconciliation,” said Paul Toews of Fresno, Calif., a Friends’ supporter. “Going back to embrace the sons and daughters of those who participated in the fateful activity of the early Soviet Union…is a powerful witness and embodiment of the best of the Mennonite ethic.”

Willms, on the other hand, hopes those who received his information package will consider it carefully; he is willing to talk with them directly if they have any questions. “Some might contend that giving 15,700 people my personal cell phone number and e-mail address is crazy,” he said. “However, I feel it is important that people have direct access to me.”

Willms said that of those who have already responded, “the majority…have been very supportive and enthusiastic. We are very pleased with how this project is progressing.”

Victor Penner isn’t, though. “I can only pray that Mr. Paul Willms’ idea of ‘Mennonite land restitution’ will die right where it was born—in North America.”

—Ross W. Muir and Tim Miller Dyck


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