Northern and Southern Mennonites – Helping Each Other
by John L. Ruth
         (from a talk at Abbotsford, October 16, 2005, edited by Henry Neufeld)

Tonight we recall two faith communities.  We invoke their parallel narratives that begin with the birth of Anabaptist fellowships in Switzerland and Friesland in the 1520s and ’30s. Both beginnings, emerging among proverbially conservative people, were paradoxically radical, and both ensuing peoplehoods settled into conservative mentalities.
I’ll call these Anabaptists “northerners” and “southerners.”  Both spread -- the northerners from the Netherlands to Prussia, Russia and the Americas; the southerners from Zurich and Bern to Alsace and southern Germany, then to Pennsylvania.  The latter arrived in the USA about a century before the northerners moved to Russia. Most of you here at Abbotsford represent the northern tradition; I, the southern.

I’m here as a son of the Swiss-originating community in Pennsylvania, the oldest continuing community of Mennonites outside of Europe.  I’ve come not as a professional historian, but to tell a few stories representing the flavor of that parochial, devout community.  Specifically, some perceptions they had of the fellow-believers they helped during the migrations from Russia in the 1870’s and again in the postwar 1920’s, following the tragic imposition of communism.

One note I’ll strike is a difference between the two communities in regard to what we might call the life of the mind.  My Swiss ancestry was of a very utilitarian stripe.  An old folk-saying from Bern starkly discouraged would-be artists:  Malen und sudeln sind nicht fein/ Versäumt die Zeit, und sollt nicht sein. (Painting and scribbling are not fine/They should not be – a waste of time.)  We Pennsylvania Swiss “Old” Mennonites certainly did not produce, then or now, the literature or art on the scale of what has come through the Dutch-Prussian-Russian-Winnipegian “northern” wing of Anabaptists.

Over the years leaders among the northerners and southerners have remained more or less aware of each other as spiritual siblings.  There were various attempts, beginning in the 1550’s, at formal covenant.  All were unsuccessful, but meaningful.

In parallel manner, both northern and southern traditions had major divisions in the 17th and 19th centuries.  Nevertheless, there was a historical series of helping each other, and some major joint projects.  Even so, there was never a major joining until the beginning of the 21st century in America at Nashville, Tennessee at the formal inauguration of a grouping called “Mennonite Church USA.”  A similar coming together had occurred in Canada, though not involving the Mennonite Brethren congregations.
 
When my southern ancestors moved from Switzerland to the Palatinate around 1650, they took on the northern name – Mennist.  A decade later they signed on to a northern Confession of faith (Dordrecht, 1632), and reaffirmed it in Pennsylvania in 1725.  Two centuries later, I was baptized under it.  Both wings in America sing the words of the northern Menno Simons:  “We are children of God’s peace.”   Both northern and southern Anabaptists have been imprinted from the moment of their people’s awakening with the Christian motif of mutuality.  That was a central feature of their spirituality. This parallel is more than a footnote to our shared story: it is an insight into how the gospel was understood in the very birth of our fellowship.

When the southern Swiss Geschwister were in deep trouble with their governmental regimes in the 1600s, the liberal Dutch reached out to them with material and spiritual and even political aid.  It was with that encouragement that my Swiss ancestors came to Pennsylvania 150 years before the first Russian Mennonites followed them to the New World.

Over the centuries, it was of course difficult for my southern group to visualize graphically what was happening with the northern picture in Prussia, Volhynia, south Russia, and later the diaspora of colonies from the Crimea to Siberia.  By the time the Russian Mennonites began to look abroad for a new home, the Pennsylvanians were in their third generation.  Even after this long time, when the name “Mennonite” was heard, the charter motif of mutuality that was engraved on the hearts of both northerners and southerners awakened, and in mutual aid, they found each other’s hearts – and stomachs.  Our meal tonight, is an appropriate remembering, a kind of sacrament recalling that sharing.

After 1773 there was very little cross-fertilization between the “southerners” of eastern Pennsylvania and the “northern” Dutch-Prussian-Russian wing. Then, in the early 1870’s our Indiana-based Herald of Truth began publishing news and even appeals from a group of Russian Mennonite colonies in Volhynia (Polish Russia).  Too poor even to buy passage to America, they wrote earnestly to America:
 We feel compelled, beloved brethren, to beg and pray of you in the name of the whole Church, to manifest toward us, for heaven's sake, your kindness and Christian love ... and beseech you ... to furnish us with ... a loan ... [of $40,000].

This plea awoke the original Anabaptist sensitivity among the insular Pennsylvania Old Mennonites.  The spring 1874 session of the Lancaster Conference appointed a "Mennonite Executive Aid Committee of Pennsylvania for the Mennonite Congregations in West Prussia, Poland and South Russia."   The Secretary of this eastern Committee, John Shenk, sent the Herald of Truth a heartfelt admonition for Mennonites in general. Theology and mutual aid were one:
 Dear reader, should we not love Jesus, who has done so much for us, as we love ourselves?  Should we not try to show our love to him in every possible way?  I dare say you would all answer, Yes, certainly.  How can we show our love to him?  We have just now a glorious opportunity ....
This is the original ingrained logic of both our “northern” and “southern” Mennonite ancestries.  It goes beyond marveling at Christ's suffering on our behalf to giving it concrete expression in every possible way.  ‘Our religion,’ as editor John F. Funk chimed in, ‘requires of us a common sympathy for all our brethren in the faith....’

At one point, the Eastern Committee found itself accused of heartlessly dumping Russian Mennonite refugees on the frigid open Kansas prairie, and ‘censored,’ complained the secretary, ‘as if we were some of the most inhuman people living.’  This was because some immigrants, arriving at Hutchinson, Kansas with only bread to eat after a five-day train-ride, found the temperature well below zero, and the town’s officials refused to allow them into several empty buildings.

The earlier-arriving Mennonite Bernard Warkentin, who came from Kansas to St. Louis to meet the newcomers, was quite angry that the eastern Mennonites had not taken better care of these confused immigrants, and that they did not send more money immediately.

The memory of the 1870s migration from Russia to the United States has not remained vivid in the historical imagination of  the Pennsylvania “Old Mennonite” community.  This is perhaps partly due to the disappointment my community felt on finding that most of the Russian Mennonites they had helped financially had opted to join the General Conference (founded in 1860 among a small group of progressive Mennonites) rather than the much larger and older Old Mennonite fellowship.

There were positive individual stories.  One is of a baby born on an immigrant-filled ship several days before it docked in Philadelphia in 1875.  On landing, the parents, John and Anna Dirks, were taken in by a Mennonite farm family near Souderton.  Shortly thereafter, John became ill and died, and after a while Anna took her children to live among her relatives in Kansas, only to receive a letter inviting her to come back to Pennsylvania and marry the man for whom she had been washing floors in Bucks County.  Thus it was that Annie Dirks brought back to my community her two children, including the baby whose full name commemorated the ship they had arrived in:  Susanna Freudenport Illinois Dirks.

 A great-grandson (Willard Swartley) became an influential Bible professor at the Associated Mennonite Biblical seminaries at Elkhart, Indiana.  Doubtless not one of his students was aware of this background, an example of the blending of “northern” and “southern” Mennonite stories.

Cultural differences between Russian and Swiss Mennonite hosts were memorably subsumed in the case of Jacob Huebert, who found a permanent home in his adopted community.  After several years of working on the farm of his original sponsor, Elmer Shank of the Old Mennonite Midway congregation, the one-time aspirant to the Moscow Symphony from Chortitza worked on road gangs.  He had escaped to America with no expectation of ever again playing the cello.  But after his parents came to Canada, his musical father insisted that he again get an instrument.”  So I saved my money,” Jacob remembered, “and bought one."    Persuaded to play one night at a local Reformed church, he found his evident gift profoundly affecting his audience.  Four years after coming to the community, the “Little Symphony” of nearby Youngstown, Ohio called on him when their first cellist failed to appear at a banquet where they were scheduled to play.  That night in 1927 marked the beginning of a 33 year career with the Symphony.

Much as in my own community, the Old Mennonites of Ohio did not sanction instrumental music in public.  So Jacob brought to the congregation he joined no connection with his more sophisticated art.  Yet, he felt spiritually at home among the folks who were probably unaware that he sometimes played his cello for silent movies they were forbidden to attend.
Ten years after his arrival, after long observing a young member named Grace Lehman, Jacob cast the die of his spiritual future and married her.  While her family was of a much simpler culture than he had musically imbibed at Schönwiese, he felt that “It was the direct leading of God that I met her.” Together they raised four children, and lived together for thirty-six years until Grace’s death in 1969.

His talent won the attention of New York booking agencies, and he was offered a position with the Cleveland Orchestra.  For twenty-eight years he made his living as a piano technician.  Though he generally worked from 8:00 a.m. until 6:00 o'clock in the evening, he never missed a concert.  The conservative Swiss congregation at Midway held its Russian member and son-in-law in lifelong respect.  The feeling was mutual, even as few in the Mennonite fellowship ever heard him play anywhere.  What they saw of him up front was his serving, like those before him at Midway, as a simple song leader, striking a tuning fork and beating time.  The details of his prior life were little known.

A granddaughter found that though he had the reputation of being a man of God, his “righteousness and faith” were framed by a “meaningful silence” regarding cultural themes.  Never during a service in the church he loved did he play the cello.  By virtue of his attitude, the “north” and “south” of our two narratives flowed parallel without clashing.  It was left to a granddaughter, inheriting both stories in one person, to present, in a Ph.D. thesis, a manuscript of choral songs once sung by her ancestors at Schönwiese, and brought to rural Ohio by her immigrant grandfather.

In evoking the mixture of Mennonite caring and scruples that have flavored the convergence of  “northern” and “southern” stories, the practice of mutual aid, so deeply ingrained in the Mennonite soul, must emerge whenever history requires.
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Photo at left: Sara Snyder Friesen’s DVBS class