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Molotschna Elder Heinrich Dirks and tensions with Mennonite Brethren

Russian Mennonites were not always kind to each other—and nowhere is this seen better than in the tensions between “old” Mennonites and the “separatist” Mennonite Brethren, who had their beginnings in Gnadenfeld, Molotschna in 1860.

Heinrich Dirks (1842-1915) was the first Russian Mennonite overseas missionary and later long-time Gnadenfeld, Molotschna (note 1). Everything about Dirks’ life suggests that he would have joined the Brethren in 1860. He too was influenced by the "powerful and gripping” conversionist ministry of Eduard Wüst in his youth. Dirks was a young adult in the Gnadenfeld congregation in South Russia where the Mennonite Brethren /separatist movement began. Shortly thereafter, he was trained in the German pietist Barmen Mission School (1863-67), and famously travelled to Sumatra (Indonesia) where he started a mission outpost and school. The Mennonite Brethren too would later connect the global mission imperative with the impending return of Christ as did Dirks. Dirks was a passionate and evangelistic preacher of conversion. He remained a missionary at heart and tireless fundraiser for overseas missions until his death in 1915.

However Heinrich Dirks was genuinely disturbed or even spooked by the “generally unhealthy, sick symptoms” (his terms) that accompanied the early Mennonite Brethren movement which he witnessed first-hand (note 2). According to Dirks,

"… their gatherings degenerated quickly after this, for they would hear nothing about growth in grace and holiness, [or] the struggle against the lusts and desires of the heart … but instead claimed that they had become perfected children of God with their conversion, and could only rejoice and thank God for their blessed condition. They went so far as to arrange competitions in their gatherings to determine who could shout the loudest for joy and jump the highest in delight (Freudensprünge)—on account of which they were given the names “leapers” (Hüpfer) and “cheerful brethren” (lustige Brüder). And more: they fell so deep into their fanatacism, that in three locations—Rudnerweide, Liebenau and Einlage—they collected and burned edifying Christian literature that they had used up until their conversion." (Note 3)

Heinrich Dirks was in this regard a classic Russian Mennonite—it was important to keep a sober and balanced perspective in all things, including faith.

Already by 1866 when the young historian P. M. Friesen joined the secessionist brethren, the new church was institutionalized—“more like the Kleine Gemeinde (more puritanical in attitude, somewhat melancholic, and formalistically-ascetically pious) rather than like the “Hüpfer” [Leapers] … Mennonite to the core, in temperament,” according to Friesen (note 4). But for those very reasons the new church was positioned not to fade after emotions settled, but to have a lasting place within and impact on Russian Mennonite life. In the end the Brethren movement was not simply an extreme Pietistic withdrawal into the inner life of the soul, nor “such a radical break with the social or religious world which had existed before 1860” (note 5).

The Mennonite Brethren were not the only ones to receive sharp rebukes from Dirks. From Sumatra (Indonesia) where he was converting, baptizing and teaching in the 1870s, Dirks wrote a strongly worded letter counselling his fellow Russian Mennonites against a mass migration to the United States and Canada (this was over alternative service): Mennonites who wish to be separate from the world will soon discover that even in the most distant places—and he should know—the fallen world will one day find them out (note 6)! Also from Sumatra Dirks wrote in 1878:

“Our friends in Europe should not think that a missionary in a heathen country can establish a congregation without spot or wrinkle right away; influenced by the Gospel, only during the next generations will the Spirit and meaning of Christ become apparent in a purer form.” We are not yet at that point; therefore, “the merit and blood of Christ will have to cover up much in this respect. Anyway, where in the world does one find an absolutely pure congregation?” (Note 7)

Much later in 1910 when the state was imposing significant restrictions upon Mennonites and other Protestants, Elder Dirks was convinced that the “zealous but ignorant” proselytization by the Mennonite Brethren “where the Lord had not yet opened the door” (namely to nominally Orthodox Russians) was the cause of government harassment (note 8). Mission yes, but only where God opens a door.

In the 1890s, some thirty years after their beginnings, the Mennonite Brethren were experiencing strong growth in colonies. Heinrich Dirks’ 1892 book on Jesus’ parables of the Sower (Matthew 13) and of the Growing Seed (Mark 4:26-29) was written to give an account of the nature of the church and ultimately to address the “spiritual muddled-ness” of his context. Wholly representative of the bitter feelings Dirks used the book to deliver a stinging judgement of the Mennonite Brethren movement and the type of “morbid epidemic” they represent in the colonies!

"Whoever is not satisfied with the mixed- and external form of the Christian Church, whoever wants to have a church made up only of true believers and of those born again, a congregation in which everything is the best and most perfect, and therefore separates---he thereby gives evidence that he is animated by an over-the-top, pathological zeal, and that he rejects what the Lord Jesus calls the Kingdom of Heaven. Separation is not permitted where the Christian church still has the shape and structure provided for in the parables of the Lord, as is still the case, for example, with that part of the Christian church that is made up of our Mennonite congregations. This separation melee among our people, this obsession to separate yourself from the congregation which you first joined, this Christian sentimentalism, this silly playing with baptism and its external form, this propaganda-making for a certain type of congregation, this one-size-fits-all view of conversion, this judging-the-speck-in-your-brother's-eye, and so on: it is something very unhealthy and pathological and is the result of an incorrect understanding of what the Lord Jesus wanted to tell us in the parables. And in the long run, every congregation that has been so created--illegitimately through separation will not--at least in the long run--remain a completely pure community. It will also take on a mixed form and thus suffer shipwreck with its overly high expectations. Oh, that the right understanding of what the Lord Jesus wants to tell us in these parables, and the true knowledge of the Kingdom of God among our people would spread more! Because only then could the morbid desire for separation, which is spreading like an epidemic, be brought to a standstill." (Note 9)

Of course there is another side to this story as well (note 10). But this is enough to help us understand a key debate with which these Anabaptist-Mennonites were obsessed with for decades.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Heinrich Dirks, Das Reich Gottes im Lichte der Gleichnisse in Ev. Matth. Kap. 13. und Ev. Marci Kap. 4, V. 26–29 (Gnadenfeld bei Halbstadt: P. Janzen, 1892), 102, https://books.google.ca/books?id=v3UTAAAAYAAJ&dq. On Dirks, cf. the newer biography by Hermann Heidebrecht, Unmögliches wagen! Heinrich Dirks, 1842–1915 (Bielefeld: Christlicher Missions-Verlag, 2019).

Note 2: Heinrich Dirks, “Ein Abschnitt aus der Gnadenfelder Gemeindechronik mit Nekrologie des ‘alten Cornies,’” Mennonitisches Jahrbuch 1907 5 (1908), 52–65; 52, https://chortitza.org/kb/mj1907.pdf. On the Wüst movement after he death, cf. Jakob Prinz, Die Kolonien der Brüdergemeinde. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien Südrußlands (Pjatigorsk, 1898) 84f., 90. http://digital.slub-dresden.de/id369529960. Cf. also Jacob P. Bekker, Origin of the Mennonite Brethren Church (Hillsboro, KS: Mennonite Brethren Historical Society of the Midwest, 1973), 29f., https://archive.org/details/origin-of-the-mennonite-brethren-church-ocr.

Note 3: Heinrich Dirks, “Abschnitt aus der Gnadenfelder Gemeindechronik,” 53; also E. H. Busch, ed. Ergänzungen der Materialien zur Geschichte und Statistik des Kirchen- und Schulwesens der Ev.-Luth. Gemeinden in Russland, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Gustav Haessel, 1867), 258, https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_V9IMAQAAMAAJ. Books burned included Johann Starck’s Tägliches Handbuch, Halle Pietist Johann Arndt’s Wahres Christentum, and Ludwig Hofacker’s Predigten für alle Sonn-, Fest- u. Feier-Tage—and other Christian books other than the Bible with pictures. Cf. Heinrich Epp, Notizen aus dem Leben und Wirken des verstorbenen Ältesten Abraham Unger, dem Gründer der “Einlager-Mennoniten-Brüdergemeinde (Halbstadt, South Russia: Self-published, 1907), 4, https://chortitza.org/Buch/MJ/AU-01.htm. ET: “Historical Notes” (part 1), Direction (Fall 1990) 127–139; https://directionjournal.org/19/2/historical-endnotes.html. Dirks’ account is consistent with Elder A. Lenzmann’s 1862/1863 telling of these events: August Lenzmann, “An den Herausgeber: Die Separatistischen Bewegungen an der Molotschna betreffend,” March 16, 1863 [July 21, 1862], Mennonitische Blätter 10, no. 3 (May 1863), 31–35. https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/newspapers/Mennonitische%20Blaetter/1854-1900/1863/DSCF0293.JPG.

Note 4:´Peter M. Friesen, The Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia 1789–1910 (Winnipeg, MB: Christian, 1978), 438, https://archive.org/details/TheMennoniteBrotherhoodInRussia17891910/.

Note 5: James Urry, “The Social Background to the Emergence of the Mennonite Brethren Church in Nineteenth Century Russia.” Journal of Mennonite Studies 6 (1988), 32, https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/292.

Note 6: Cf. George K. Epp, Geschichte der Mennoniten in Rußland, vol. II (Lage: Logos, 1997), 232.

Note 7: In Alle Hoekema, ed., Dutch Mennonite Mission in Indonesia: Historical Essays (Elkhart, IN: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 2001), 88, https://archive.org/details/dutchmennonitemi22alle/.

Note 8: Cf. H. Dirks, “Fortsetzung der Geschichte des Mennonitenvölkleins in Rußland im Jahre 1910,” Mennonitisches Jahrbuch 1910 8 (1911), 7–17; 9, https://chortitza.org/kb/mj1910.pdf. The phrase “open doors” is language used by the Apostle Paul (1 Cor. 16:18), but may also be a play on the name of a new missions periodical Offene Türen (1909–1913) from Barmen.

Note 9: Dirks, Das Reich Gottes im Lichte der Gleichnisse, 101f.

Note 10: See previous post (forthcoming).





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