A chance discovery of a log book of sermons by grand-uncle and Evangelical Mennonite Mission Conference minister Cornelius G. Stoesz led Donald Stoesz on a fifteen-year odyssey in which he identified four hundred and fifty-seven Scripture texts used by seventeen Mennonite ministers in Canada over the course of one hundred years (1874-1977). The extensive, yet selective, use of the Lutheran lectionary by these ministers illuminates an aspect of Mennonite church life that has seldom been recognized. Known as the Anweisung der Lieder and located at the front of the German-language hymnbook (Gesangbuch), this lectionary was in use by Mennonite congregations in the 18th and 19th centuries in Prussia and Russia. Stoesz details Scripture usage and arranges sermon texts according to method of selection and topic. Included in this analysis are biographies of three pastors and several translated sermons from 1 Peter.
A chance discovery of a log book of sermons by grand-uncle and Evangelical Mennonite Mission Conference minister Cornelius G. Stoesz led Donald Stoesz on a fifteen-year odyssey in which he identified four hundred and fifty-seven Scripture texts used by seventeen Mennonite ministers in Canada over the course of one hundred years (1874-1977). The extensive, yet selective, use of the Lutheran lectionary by these ministers illuminates an aspect of Mennonite church life that has seldom been recognized. Known as the Anweisung der Lieder and located at the front of the German-language hymnbook (Gesangbuch), this lectionary was in use by Mennonite congregations in the 18th and 19th centuries in Prussia and Russia. Stoesz details Scripture usage and arranges sermon texts according to method of selection and topic. Included in this analysis are biographies of three pastors and several translated sermons from 1 Peter.
A comparative global history of Mennonites from the ground up. Winner of the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize by the Canadian Historical Association, Nominee of the Margaret McWilliams Award by the Manitoba Historical Society Mennonite farmers can be found in dozens of countries spanning five continents. In this comparative world-scale environmental history, Royden Loewen draws on a multi-year study of seven geographically distinctive Anabaptist communities around the world, focusing on Mennonite farmers in Bolivia, Canada, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Russia, the United States, and Zimbabwe. These farmers, who include Amish, Brethren in Christ, and Siberian Baptists, till the land in starkly distinctive climates. They absorb very disparate societal lessons while being shaped by particular faith outlooks, historical memory, and the natural environment. The book reveals the ways in which modern-day Mennonite farmers have adjusted to diverse temperatures, precipitation, soil types, and relative degrees of climate change. These farmers have faced broad global forces of modernization during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from commodity markets and intrusive governments to technologies marked increasingly by the mechanical, chemical, and genetic. Based on more than 150 interviews and close textual analysis of memoirs, newspapers, and sermons, the narrative follows, among others, Zandile Nyandeni of Matopo as she hoes the spring-fed soils of Matabeleland's semi-arid savannah; Vladimir Friesen of Apollonovka, Siberia, who no longer heeds the dictates of industrial time of the Soviet-era state farm; and Abram Enns of Riva Palacio, Bolivia, who tells how he, a horse-and-buggy traditionalist, hired bulldozers to clear-cut a farm in the eastern lowland forests to grow soybeans, initially leading to dust bowl conditions. As Mennonites, Loewen writes, these farmers were raised with knowledge of the historic Anabaptist teachings on community, simplicity, and peace that stood alongside ideas on place and sustainability. Nonetheless, conditioned by gender, class, ethnicity, race, and local values, they put their agricultural ideas into practice in remarkably diverse ways. Mennonite Farmers is a pioneering work that brings faith into conversation with the land in distinctive ways.
This book displays how the nonviolent Word of God made visible in Jesus Christ is expressed in the contemporary idiom of the peaceable grain of the universe. Moving between historic Anabaptist understandings of Jesus as revealing the “Word of God” and more recent expressions of Jesus as disclosing the “grain of the universe,” the book invites a reading of Scripture centered in Jesus’ life and teachings as told by the narratives of the New Testament. This approach to the Bible discovers there a persuasive witness to the power of nonviolent action in both historic movements and contemporary settings. Beginning with the radical wing European Reformation, the book explores how new understandings of biblical authority expressed in the language of that era have relevance now over five centuries later when stated in a contemporary language for evangelical, ecumenical, and anti-racist Christian witness. To that end, chapters in Part One explore how Reformation-era Anabaptists expanded or went beyond the received understandings of Scripture and Word in confronting their crises. In Part Two the chapters apply this expanded understanding of the Word to contemporary understandings of the Bible and theology, dialogue across black-white lines, and in nonviolent witness and activism.
Covers the 435-year history of the faith, life, and culture of Anabaptists in Europe and Mennonites throughout the world. Presented are people, movements, and places in their relation to Mennonites.This Encyclopedia was jointly edited by historians and scholars of the Mennonite Church, the General Conference of Mennonites, and the Mennonite Brethren Church. More than 2,700 writers contributed articles.Volume V includes updates on materials in the first four volumes plus nearly 1,000 new articles edited by Cornelius J. Dyck and Dennis D. Martin.
