Kleine Gemeinde History

Mennonite Genealogy with Michael Penner

This article is from the book The Sesquicentennial Jubilee: Evangelical Mennonite Conference 1812 - 1962, p.9-14.

THE SESQUICENTENNIAL JUBILEE OF THE EVANGELICAL MENNONITE CHURCH (1812-1962)

One hundred fifty years is a long period of time when we consider the life span of the average human being. It is made up of six generations of 25 years each. In our Modern Age this period has been a time of more changes and progress in the industrial and economic world than all the thousands of years of human history before this time. This has not changed the basic spiritual values in human thinking very much but it has influenced and changed the practical application of these values to our daily life tremendously. We still believe that we ought to use Sunday mornings to meet for worship and Christian fellowship, but 150 years ago, people walked 5 to 10 miles to the service where today we think nothing of driving 100 miles or more to a service in much less time.

In the world of 1812 we have Great Britain fighting a war with the United States along the boundary lines between Eastern Canada and the United States. At the same time the first white Scottish settlers arrived on the banks of the Red River to carve new homes out of the wild west under the sponsorship of Lord Se1kirk. They were to encounter years of almost unbearable hardships and misfortunes before they succeeded in finally establishing their settlement.

A third world-shaking event of 1812 was the march on Moscow of the Grand Army of the French emperor Napoleon I. This event had a direct bearing on the beginning of the Kleine Gemeinde. The Mennonites of South Russia wanted to show their loyalty to the Russian government by making contributions towards the cost of the Napoleonic War. Klaas Reimer (1770-1837) objected to this. The Mennonites in South Russia had received extensive privileges from the Russian government for local self-administration of their settlements. It amounted virtually to the creation of a state within a state. Political self-administration involved the use of civil force to punish evildoers. In Prussia the Mennonites had been administered by the state. Reimer with a number of followers objected to this change in interpretation of the non-resistance principle. In addition to this, church discipline was rather lax under the leadership of the elder Jakob Enns. Klaas Reimer had strong convictions and the elder was undiplomatic and ill-tempered.

Around the year 1812 the Reimer group apparently began to hold special meetings in private homes. In 1814 the Elder Heinrich Janzen of the Schoenwiese Church of the Old Colony conducted the election of an elder in the group. However, when Klaas Reimer was elected, Janzen refused to ordain him. Cornelius Janzen, a co-minister in the group then preached the installation sermon and Reimer formally assumed the leadership of the new church. The membership was about 18 or 20. Later, in 1822 Janzen left the Kleine Gemeinde again and rejoined the Mennonite Church. However, three other ministers joined the new church in the thirties. Among these we must note particularly Heinrich Balzer, a man with considerable education. The Kleine Gemeinde had very strong ideas on nonconformity, humility and church discipline. The preaching consisted mostly of admonishing to live an honest, humble life of repentance. Card-playing, smoking, excessive drinking, and vain language, as well as boisterous laughing were strictly forbidden. Unfortunately higher education, mission work and musical instruments were also under the ban. Even the children were taught to take life very seriously. Any worldly acts or even expressed sentiment was punished with the ban and strict shunning. This extremely strict discipline often resulted in unhealthy rivalries and jealousies.

Klaas Reimer had been elected a minister in the Mennonite Church of Danzig in 1801 and then migrated to Russia in 1804. The following year he came to the newer settlement of Molotschna with his family. By the year 1812 he was a man of 42 years.

When Klaas Reimer died on Dec. 25, 1837 the male members elected Abraham Friesen for their next elder. Again the elders of the Mennonite Church all refused to ordain this new elder. In 26 years the membership had increased to around 125 calculated from the 61 male votes cast at the election. The Mennonite Church as a whole continued to persecute the new church until Johann Cornies finally forced them to recognize the Kleine Gemeinde as a separate church in 1843. The fact that the members of the group led an exemplary life and also farmed very successfully induced Cornies to this action. In 1847, two years before Abraham Friesen died Johann Friesen was elected elder. At this time the number of votes cast was 91 which probably meant a membership of close to 200 in 35 years. This was only slow but steady growth up to that point. At an election in 1864 the vote increased to 122 which indicates a probable membership of around 250 in half a century.

In the year 1865 most of the church moved out of the villages in the Molotschna to a new settlement of Borsenko where about 120 families settled in 6 villages. With this move they hoped to achieve even more happiness and unity but the very opposite took place. Serious dissention threatened the existence of the whole church in 1866. The elder Johann Friesen excommunicated two ministers, Abraham Friesen and Peter Friesen and two deacons Jakob Friesen and Klaas Friesen because of difference in regards to church discipline. This split the church into two groups and by 1869 in May, 26 male members elected one of these ministers, Abraham Friesen as an elder and the elder Johann Harder of the Blumstein Mennonite Church ordained him. This group went to Janzen, Neb. under Abraham Friesen's leadership in 1874. The larger group elected Heinrich Enns for an elder in 1866 but Enns was removed from his office two years later because of a quarrel about Cornelius Toews who was chosen as a minister in 1868 but was not allowed to preach for the reason of having at one time been under the ban. In 1870 Peter Toews was elected elder of this larger group, who led the church in the migration to Manitoba in 1874-75. The dissensions from 1866 to 1869 led to several more removals of ministers and deacons from office and nearly caused the complete disintegration of the whole church. In the spring of 1869, however, the Kleine Gemeinde elder Jakob Wiebe from the Crimea came to help in the reconciliations but not union of the two groups.

In the years 1874-75 both groups of the Kleine Gemeinde came to America to seek freedom from military service. The larger group of 158 families or 799 persons under the leadership of Peter Toews settled in Manitoba and the smaller group of 36 families under the leadership of Abraham Friesen settled in Janzen, Nebraska. The Manitoba group divided into two groups because one of the delegates, David Klassen, had chosen the Scratching River banks near the present town of Morris for settlement. Two villages, Rosenort, and Rosenhof were founded. In the East Reserve five villages were established, Blumenhof, Blumenort, Gruenfeld, Rosenfeld and Steinbach. Since the elder Peter Toews came only in 1875 the minister Jakob Barkman, my maternal grandfather who settled down in Steinbach functioned as the temporary leader. Unfortunately, death by accidental drowning in the Red River near Winnipeg removed this leader in the summer of 1875.

The two Manitoba groups were served by one elder who lived in Gruenfeld. On one occasion the elder walked the 22 miles to the Red River where some brethren met him to take him apparently by ox cart to the settlement, another distance of 8 or 9 miles to baptize the young converts. Elder Toews also introduced the verbal instructions of the converts in the Ohmsstuebchen before the service. The Catechism was not recited in our churches as was customary in the other Mennonite churches. Since 1829 it has been customary in our churches to practice feetwashing at every communion service.

Elder Toews corresponded with John Holdeman for some time in regards to a deeper spiritual life. Finally in the fall of 1881 Holdeman came to Manitoba where he brought about a great revival in the Kleine Gemeinde settlements. Unfortunately Peter Toews himself, three of the six ministers and between one third and one half of the members now left the church and were rebaptized into the Church of God in Christ. This left, apparently the more conservative part of the church, leaderless and frustrated.

For the next 35 years after this division up to World War I practically no changes were allowed and an increasing number of progressive minded families left the church, particularly around Steinbach area, who mostly joined the newly established Evangelical Mennonite Brethren Church.

However, this division had one good result: after a number of council meetings it was finally decided to invite the Jansen elder Abraham Friesen to come and help them to reorganize. So the great emergency had drawn the two separate groups together again in 1882. The new elder in 1883 was Jakob M. Kroeker who lived in the Morris settlement. He died in 1913. The East Reserve elected Peter R. Dueck as elder in 1901 who proved to be a good leader although he still favoured a conservative approach. He did much during the war to keep the young men out of military service. He died in January, 1919.

The First World War virtually ended the period of conservatism and no-change policy for the Kleine Gemeinde. Automobiles were first allowed in 1920. Two ministers were elected, Henry R. Reimer and Henry R. Dueck, who showed considerable understanding of the new times and who were very helpful in bringing about some changes. Under the temporary leadership of the minister H. R. Dueck, the Steinbach Church got permission to start a Sunday School in January 1926. The old church school teacher Gerhard Kornelsen was chosen as the first superintendent and served faithfully up to July 1927 when he was replaced by a young public school teacher, yours truly, who, served in this capacity for 17 years, until he was called to the ministry in 1944. Singing practice and Christian Endeavor was started first with the young people in the Prairie Rose community in the fall of 1924. Later in 1927 these activities were also started in the Steinbach church in connection with the Sunday School. In the thirties most of these activities became also established in the other Kleine Gemeinde communities. We must add at this point that the closing of most of our church schools and the establishment of the public schools around 1919 and 1921 by the Provincial Government did very much to strengthen the changes in the church.

Naturally a part of the group did not favour these changes and so began to look for an opportunity to move to more favourable surroundings. At first Quebec and even Alaska was considered. Then Mexico was finally chosen after the end of World War II and about 15% of the Kleine Gemeinde moved to Los Jagueyes in 1948-49. Elder P. P. Reimer who had been elected by the whole East Reserve in 1926 moved with the group. To establish a connecting link among the rapidly expanding church a paper, Der Familienfreund, was established in 1935 with, D. P. Reimer as its first editor. Another factor of progress was a ministerial conference held at Meade, Kansas in 1937. This conference agreed on a number of the customs and practices of the church which had not been allowed yet at an earlier ministerial conference in 1901 at Blumenort. In 1938 an interdenominational Bible School Society was organized to take over a Bible School founded by seven brethren of the Mennonite Brethren Church in Steinbach two years before I was the Secretary-Treasurer of this society from 1938 to 1948 and succeeded in interesting the Steinbach congregation to take an active part in the support of this Bible School. More and more of our young people attended this Institute until our conference saw fit to take over the administration of this Bible School. It was done together with the E.M.B. in Manitoba and the Emmanuel Church in Steinbach, in 1961. Today a staff of about 12 teachers and around 200 students work in this institution. B. D. Reimer is the principal.

By the year 1946 the Western Gospel Mission was founded largely by ministers and lay brethren of our church. Young people from our church were trained in our Bible School to go out into the mission field and the pressure within the church became so large that an outlet had to be created. At the same time many of our young people went into various foreign mission fields sponsored by different mission societies. Finally the greater part of the Western Gospel Mission stations were taken over by our Mission Board of the Conference in 1951, which had been established since the early fifties.

The elder P. P. Reimer saw the need in the early forties to give each one of the congregations in the East Reserve autonomy for better local developments. After considerable opposition to this idea had been overcome this became an established fact in 1945. However, in districts like Kleefeld and Steinbach more local ministers and deacons had to be elected first before a local pastor or elder could be chosen. This has worked very well.

In 1946 the Conference took over a private Invalid Home in Steinbach and maintained this successfully. Two years ago a new large "Resthaven" was built with 65 beds in Steinbach and the Rosenort congregation built their own of 26 beds.

In 1952, a decade ago, a very important step was taken when the name of Kleine Gemeinde was officially changed to Evangelical Mennonite Church, later Conference. The Kleine Gemeinde in Mexico and British Honduras officially severed their unity with the Kleine Gemeinde in Canada and therefore did not change their name. In fact the group in British Honduras claims to be the real Kleine Gemeinde. A few years ago a small group in Mexico broke with their mother church and reunited with the E.M.C.

For several years a committee of ministers worked on a constitution which was finally finished and translated into English in 1956. In 1950, I translated our Mennonite Catechism into English together with our 20 traditional Articles of Faith and our Conference published a German-English edition of the unrevised Mennonite Catechism. In 1959 our conference was incorporated and the constitution was again completely revised and partly rewritten and then together with the Charter, translated into German. For several years our Familienfreund is now partly in English and published every two weeks with a circulation of 1200. The Missions Informer has also been founded and sent bi-monthly to all the householders of the Conference. Our conference has taken a very active part in the Canadian Mennonite Relief Committee of Manitoba with George S. Fast as chairman. Finally, our conference has grown to almost 3000 members with about 70 ministers, elders and deacons. From one small congregation of 18 members it has grown to 21 congregations and many mission stations. Especially in Mexico there is a large native church, built up in a few years to over 60 members. Over 50 missionaries are in the field now in many countries of Europe, Asia, Africa, South and Central America and Western Canada.

P. J. B. Reimer

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