Canadian Mennonite
Volume 11, No. 01
January 8, 2007
Singing the focus of 75th anniversary celebration
Morden, Man.
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Morden Mennonite Church chose to celebrate its 75th anniversary by singing.
“We sing because we believe,” said pastor Harold Hildebrand Schlegel. “Music has always been such a central part of the life of this congregation…. Those songs stay with us, sustain us in times of difficulty.”
And music was a central part of the daylong celebration on Nov. 12. The mixed choir that began nearly 75 years ago, and still sings today, extended an invitation to all who had at one time been choir members, to sing at the anniversary.
The Morden Mennonite Church Male Choir was led by Jake Zacharias for most of its 33 years. In his 80s now, Zacharias brought the choir out of retirement for the anniversary concert.
“It was a very high priority,” said member Al Ens, when asked about how he found time every week to come to choir practice over the years. “We would leave family and even visitors to come. It was quite a clique in the better sense of the word. It drew people into the church.”
“We gave up hockey and other activities. We would stop the field work. There was a willingness to serve, and this put us in demand in the community,” said male choir member Isaac Hoeppner. “We sang in the seniors home, hospital and the penitentiary.”
The male choir made seven recordings and toured North America, Mexico and Germany, often at the invitation of other churches. It disbanded in 2000.
“Too many people going different ways, and Jake was tired,” said Hoeppner.
The choirs rehearsed in the afternoon while borscht simmered in the church kitchen and old friends became reacquainted while poring over photo displays.
After a borscht and pie supper, the sanctuary filled with people and music. Betty Petkau, who was three years old when the church was formed, recalls being asked to join the choir at age 14 and she sang in the choir until recently. For her, the music and the choir were a huge part of her church experience.
“The choir used to be all young people,” noted Erna Bergman. “Now, we are almost all seniors.”
“Morden is becoming a relocation centre for seniors,” Schlegel acknowledged. “I don’t know if we have taken full advantage of that resource. So many young people leave for college or work, and they may or may not return.”
The Morden Mennonite congregation, with 320 members and an average Sunday attendance of more than 200, has always used music to express its faith and it used music to express its gratitude to God for these 75 years.
“We sing because it is good practice,” said Schlegel. “The Book of Revelation reminds us that our eternal vocation will be to sing praises to our God.”
From dogmatism to mindless tolerance:
Mennonites in the last century
Abbotsford, B.C.
On a rainy fall evening at Abbotsford’s Bakerview Mennonite Brethren (MB) Church, more than a hundred people gathered to hear two elder statesmen from Canada’s largest Mennonite groups reflect on the faith communities that nurtured them and the changes they have seen in recent decades.
John Neufeld, a former Winnipeg pastor and president of Canadian Mennonite Bible College, drew on his experiences growing up in a relatively closed community in the Fraser Valley where conformity and tradition were valued, and where home, school and community together helped internalize values.
“Outsiders were viewed with suspicion or disdain,” said Neufeld. Biblical admonishment to “not be conformed the world” and to be “in the world but not of it” were common.
Neufeld recalled the contentious issue of transition from German to English and the pressure to be able to identify a specific personal conversion time, observing that there is an increasing biblical illiteracy in Mennonite congregations.
Secularization, pluralism, relativism, individualism, affluence, mobility and the impact of the media describe the current Mennonite cultural context, he said. “Our culture has left its mark on each of us, probably more than we realize.”
“We have moved from certainty to ambiguity, from dogmatism to mindless tolerance, from clarity about nonconformity to ambivalence, from separation from the world to unthinking and unchallenged assimilation,” Neufeld stated.
Ethical issues are no longer black and white. “People were utterly sincere, but in retrospect they were sincerely wrong on a number of counts,” he said, wryly adding that 60 years from now people might say the same thing about him. He blamed past rigidity on a dogmatic certainty that claimed to know exactly what the Bible taught on any issue for the church’s newfound tolerance.
In the future, Neufeld suggested that Mennonite thinking about morality and ethics might need to be more oriented to Jesus’ teaching rather than focused on cultural traditions. “The Bible as the inspired word of God is more important to me than earlier,” said Neufeld, calling on pastors and teachers to “share what we know and believe about the Bible as a whole with congregations.”
In responding to Neufeld, Columbia Bible College faculty member Gareth Brandt noted that the plagues of individualism and biblicism continue to this day. He also suggested that churches are not speaking out enough about Canada’s culture of violence.
Relying largely on official MB documents, well-known MB New Testament scholar David Ewert focused on significant changes in MB theology and ethics in the past half-century. Scripture is unchanging, he said, but church understandings of Scripture change. “We have come through a rather stormy half-century,” he said, referring to such issues as science and creation, the changing role of women in church, and the inerrancy of Scripture.
Of the latter, Ewert stressed that Mennonites “should not get hung up on definitions of interpretation,” rather they should be challenged to live under the authority of the Word of God.
Responding to Ewert’s presentation, Bruce Guenther from ACTS Seminary in Langley, B.C., wondered why Mennonite Brethren theologians have been absent from the development of an Anabaptist theology. “We focus on personal ethics, not social ethics…. Why can’t MBs name the idolatries, the principalities and powers?” he asked.
The event was organized by the B.C. Mennonite Historical Society.