Skip to main content

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).





Print Friendly and PDF



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Vaccinations in Chortitza and Molotschna, beginning in 1804

Vaccination lists for Chortitza Mennonite children in 1809 and 1814 were published prior to the COVID-19 pandemic with little curiosity ( note 1 ). However during the 2020-22 pandemic and in a context in which some refused to vaccinate for religious belief, the historic data took on new significance. Ancestors of some of the more conservative Russian Mennonite groups—like the Reinländer or the Bergthalers or the adult children of land delegate Jacob Höppner—were in fact vaccinating their infants and toddlers against small pox over two hundred years ago ( note 2 ). Also before the current pandemic Ukrainian historian Dmytro Myeshkov brought to light other archival materials on Mennonites and vaccination. The material below is my summary and translation of the relevant pages of Myeshkov’s massive 2008 volume on Black Sea German and their Worlds, 1781 to 1871 (German only; note 3 ). Myeshkov confirms that Chortitza was already immunizing its children in 1804 when their District Offic...
Post a Comment
Read more

"A Small Town near Auschwitz” – Chortitza Mennonite Refugee/ Resettlement Camps

Simple proximity to a place of horrors does not equal knowledge or complicity. Many Gnadenfeld-area Mennonite refugees were, for example, temporarily housed 20 km. away from the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp where 15-year-old Anne Frank died ultimately of typhus ( note 1 ). The day after liberation by British troops on April 15, 1945, camp survivors began to flow through neighbouring villages. “What a sight they were! They had been tortured and starved, and were swollen from lack of food. … We could hardly believe that the glorious country of Germany could commit such crimes against people,” Susanna Toews wrote ( note 2 ). My mother was only seven, but she remembers overhearing shocking descriptions given by their host family’s teenaged girls forced by the British to clean some of the camp buses. What about the much larger death camp at Auschwitz? There is a book entitled: A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust. It is about an administrator living near the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

“Operation Chortitza” (Part II) – Resettler Camps in Danzig-West Prussia, 1943-44

Waldemar Janzen, my former German professor and advisee, turned eleven years old in 1943. He and his mother and 3,900 others from Chortitza and Rosenthal (Ukraine) were evacuated west to the ethnic German resettler camps in Gau Danzig-West Prussia in October that year (see Part I; note 1 ). Years later Janzen could still recall much from this childhood experience—including the impact of the visit by Professor Benjamin H. Unruh a few weeks after their arrival. “He was a man who had extended much help to his fellow Mennonites ever since they began to emigrate from Russia during the 1920s” ( note 2 ). Unruh was a father-figure to his people, and his arrival at their camp in West Prussia signaled to the evacuees that they were in good hands ( note 3 ). Unruh’s impact on 7,000 other Chortitza District villagers in Upper Silesia would be the same some weeks later ( note 4 ). Surprisingly Unruh’s West Prussian camps visit left an equally indelible impression on the Gau’s Operations Commande...
Post a Comment
Read more

What is the Church to Say? Letter 4 (of 4) to American Mennonite Friends

Irony is used in this post to provoke and invite critical thought; the historical research on the Mennonite experience is accurate and carefully considered. ~ANF Preparing for your next AGM: Mennonite Congregations and Deportations Many U.S. Mennonite pastors voted for Donald Trump, whose signature promise was an immediate start to “the largest deportation operation in American history.” Confirmed this week, President Trump will declare a national emergency and deploy military assets to carry this out. The timing is ideal; in January many Mennonite congregations have their Annual General Meeting (AGM) with opportunity to review and update the bylaws of their constitution. Need help? We have related examples from our tradition, which I offer as a template, together with a few red flags. First, your congregational by-laws.  It is unlikely you have undocumented immigrants in your congregation, but you should flag this. Model: Gustav Reimer, a deacon and notary public from the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp, 1942: List and Links

Each of the "Commando Dr. Stumpp" village reports written during German occupation of Ukraine 1942 contains a mountain of demographic data, names, dates, occupations, numbers of untimely deaths (revolution, famines, abductions), narratives of life in the 1930s, of repression and liberation, maps, and much more. The reports are critical for telling the story of Mennonites in the Soviet Union before 1942, albeit written with the dynamics of Nazi German rule at play. Reports for some 56 (predominantly) Mennonite villages from the historic Mennonite settlement areas of Chortitza, Sagradovka, Baratow, Schlachtin, Milorodovka, and Borosenko have survived. Unfortunately no village reports from the Molotschna area (known under occupation as “Halbstadt”) have been found. Dr. Karl Stumpp, a prolific chronicler of “Germans abroad,” became well-known to German Mennonites (Prof. Benjamin Unruh/ Dr. Walter Quiring) before the war as the director of the Research Center for Russian Germans...
Post a Comment
Read more

What is the Church to Say? Letter 1 (of 4) to American Mennonite Friends

Irony is used in this post to provoke and invite critical thought; the historical research on the Mennonite experience is accuarte and carefully considered. ~ANF American Mennonite leaders who supported Trump will be responding to the election results in the near future. Sometimes a template or sample conference address helps to formulate one’s own text. To that end I offer the following. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mennonites in Germany sent official greetings by telegram: “The Conference of the East and West Prussian Mennonites meeting today at Tiegenhagen in the Free City of Danzig are deeply grateful for the tremendous uprising ( Erhebung ) that God has given our people ( Volk ) through the vigor and action of [unclear], and promise our cooperation in the construction of our Fatherland, true to the Gospel motto of [our founder Menno Simons], ‘For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.’” ( Note 1 ) Hitler responded in a letter...
Post a Comment
Read more

1929 Flight of Mennonites to Moscow and Reception in Germany

At the core of the attached video are some thirty photos of Mennonite refugees arriving from Moscow in 1929 which are new archival finds. While some 13,000 had gathered in outskirts of Moscow, with many more attempting the same journey, the Soviet Union only released 3,885 Mennonite "German farmers," together with 1,260 Lutherans, 468 Catholics, 51 Baptists, and 7 Adventists. Some of new photographs are from the first group of 323 refugees who left Moscow on October 29, arriving in Kiel on November 3, 1929. A second group of photos are from the so-called “Swinemünde group,” which left Moscow only a day later. This group however could not be accommodated in the first transport and departed from a different station on October 31. They were however held up in Leningrad for one month as intense diplomatic negotiations between the Soviet Union, Germany and also Canada took place. This second group arrived at the Prussian sea port of Swinemünde on December 2. In the next ten ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sesquicentennial: Proclamation of Universal Military Service Manifesto, January 1, 1874

One-hundred-and-fifty years ago Tsar Alexander II proclaimed a new universal military service requirement into law, which—despite the promises of his predecesors—included Russia’s Mennonites. This act fundamentally changed the course of the Russian Mennonite story, and resulted in the emigration of some 17,000 Mennonites. The Russian government’s intentions in this regard were first reported in newspapers in November 1870 ( note 1 ) and later confirmed by Senator Evgenii von Hahn, former President of the Guardianship Committee ( note 2 ). Some Russian Mennonite leaders were soon corresponding with American counterparts on the possibility of mass migration ( note 3 ). Despite painful internal differences in the Mennonite community, between 1871 and Fall 1873 they put up a united front with five joint delegations to St. Petersburg and Yalta to petition for a Mennonite exemption. While the delegations were well received and some options could be discussed with ministers of the Crown, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What is the Church to Say? Letter 3 (of 4) to American Mennonite Friends

Irony is used in this post to provoke and invite critical thought; the historical research on the Mennonite experience is accurate and carefully considered. ~ANF Mennonite endorsement Trump the man No one denies the moral flaws of Donald Trump, least of all Trump himself. In these next months Mennonite pastors who supported Trump will have many opportunities to restate to their congregation and their children why someone like Trump won their support. It may be obvious, but the words can be difficult to find. To help, I offer examples from Mennonite history with statements from one our strongest leaders of the past century, Prof. Benjamin H. Unruh (see the nice Mennonite Encyclopedia article on him, GAMEO ). I have substituted only a few words, indicated by square brackets to help with the adaptation. The [MAGA] movement is like the early Anabaptist movement!  In the change of government in 1933, Unruh saw in the [MAGA] movement “things breaking forth which our forefathe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Diary of Johann Jantzen, 1843-1903

Johann Jantzen was born in 1823 in Neuteichsdorfsfeld, West Prussia, resided in Neuendorf near Danzig, and migrated late to Russia (1869), then Central Asia, and finally in 1884 to Nebraska, USA. He died in 1903. Decades later his descendants translated his diary of notable annual highlights, entitled: Accounts of various Experiences in Life. A Diary begun in the Year 1839 ( note 1 ). The little West Prussian villages he names regularly are familiar place to many with Russian Mennonite family history: Schönau, Neu Münsterberg, Schönsee, Lakendorf, Neuteicherwalde, etc. While most Russian Mennonite families left Prussia much earlier than Jantzen, his diary offers a picture of the typical rhythm of life that Mennonites lived in West Prussia over generations. It also offers something I did not expect. The revolutions across Europe in 1848 had a local impact which he mentions, and he gives us a hint as to the other political highlights and episodes of civil unrest that were on the mind...
Post a Comment
Read more