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Peter Daniel Loewen
Peter Daniel Loewen, born in south Russia (now Ukraine), had his hopes
for a teaching career dashed by the Russian Revolution. His older brother,
Daniel, was murdered by “revolutionaries,” but Peter managed to escape
with his family to Canada in 1923. For a few years he lived in the prairies.
In 1930 he found a new and beloved home in the Mennonite village of Yarrow:
“..[T]here were places along the road where tall trees on either side met
and formed a natural canopy of green foliage,” he wrote in his memoirs,
“I had this joyous warm feeling of having come home.”
Soon Loewen was both teacher and administrator at the new Yarrow
Elim Bible School. It was, however, as Sunday school superintendent of
the Yarrow Mennonite Brethren Church that he was to make his major contribution
to the life of the community. For twenty-six years he filled this role
efficiently, enthusiastically and innovatively. Loewen was a key confidant
of pastor John Harder during this time, when the congregation was the largest
of its kind in Canada.
Peter D. Loewen, always a man with a lively mind, moved through
his lifetime from a relatively rigid world-view to a kind and tolerant
one. In Windows to a Village, Leonard Neufeldt traces the career and spiritual
evolution of this unobtrusive and devoted community leader.
Peter Loewen: Yarrow Insider
That Peter Loewen could be both insider and dreamer suggests contradiction
in his life, and rightly so. The difference between finite hopes
and delusional infinite hope, however, explains away some of the contradiction.
Loewen’s dreams were tied, in the main, to hopes and commitments that helped
set boundaries but also helped to shape the world of the possible in Yarrow.
In retrospect, it can be said that, despite his service in earlier years
on behalf of a conservative order, his dreams became vehicles of gradual
progress in his community and its Mennonite Brethren Church. Furthermore,
his dreams nurtured a willingness to embrace changes in his own life, notably
in his later years. Occasionally, his dreams also made him a champion
of changes that some others saw as unwelcome possibilities, but which he
saw as signifying the future. Above all, these dreams fuelled, on the one
hand, his desire to be a major figure in Yarrow’s story, and on the other,
his readiness to work in inauspicious and collaborative ways in which personal
triumphs were not the goal and in which encouragement and credit were easily
shared.
Son and grandson of community mayors in Russia, Loewen was not
a pioneer in the sense of first settler. He was a pioneer in helping
to establish much-needed institutions, especially in the domains of religious
education, language instruction, and congregational administration in a
community already of substantial size but short on the kind of training
and leadership he could offer. The Yarrow he adopted as his new home
was comprised of Russian Mennonites with dissimilar interests: working
toward acculturation and assimilation, replicating the culturally distinct
colonial Mennonite commonwealth of Russia, and creating a Mennonite Brethren
centre in British Columbia that would combine the commonwealth ideal with
pietism, rigorous self- and corporate discipline, and evangelistic fervour.
His ambition, boundless energy, dedication to church work, and skills as
a builder of coalitions and forger of consensus presented a good match
for the immediate needs of the community in all of these respects.
The fact that he could continue in later decades to be an influential man
for all seasons in Yarrow, however, depended less on the need for new institutions
and the skills to manage them and more on the nature of the man himself.
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