Anabaptist Vision and Mennonite

The text which follows is the record of a long conversation with my brothers and colleagues in the task of denominational theological education.

The main body of the text as reproduced here, with the exception of minor editorial changes for clarity, is in the form in which it was written in January, 1969. It was than presented in lecture form and made the. subject of discussion in three contexts: before students and faculty of the AMBS at Goshen, Indiana on February 6, before students and faculty of the Eastern Mennonite Seminary at Harrisonburg, Va., on May 13, and before faculty members of Mennonite seminaries and colleges at Aspen, Colorado on July 16,1969.

It would not be true to that process whereby it came into being if I were to rewrite early in 1970 a text with the structure and the coherent flow of a newly written essay. The reader's conversation with the text will best be served by my recording the conversation of the text with its first listeners. Therefore the format of original text, further remarks and marginal notes have been retained, despite the jerkiness and lack of elegance which this imposes upon the literary project.

The beginning text in full column width, representing the February 1969 presentation, is unchanged except for minor editorial clarification. Supplementary comment made at Aspen in August 1969 is appended as a second section of the text proper. Segments inserted in the text with reduced column width [in this font] are elements prepared for the February presentation but omitted because of excess length. Segments with still further reduced column width [in this font] are clarification added in 1970. A few times here will be slight overlap in substance between additions made at different times.

That I have no written text to put into your hands today [February 6, 1969] is not the result of lack of preparation. I have been drafting, putting notes into a folder and organizing them since this assignment was given to me almost a year ago. The reason that I do not have a final text is that this presentation is just at the beginning of a process of study which is to include listener reactions, in more than one session, before more than one audience. Both seminary students and faculty here and in three other schools are to be part of this process.

If my topic were the New Testament, or some systematic way of putting thoughts together, or some 16th century theme, then I could do a more objective job and it would be less subject to change from the critique of the audience. But my subject is the present and recent Mennonite reality. All of you, be definition, know as much as I do about the present, although each of you has his own particular slice of it. Some of you know more than I do about the details of the recent past. So my tentative conclusions are subject to all kinds of judgment and correction.

The way I have chosen to seek to interpret the present is through its recent history, i.e. through the last century. This history is not recorded for its own sake; it may not be correct in detail. It is told the way recent history often functions, as a backdrop or a mirror to aid our understanding of the present and our self-understanding. What I have to recount here will not be really new except perhaps in the way of synthesizing the observations.

I seek to speak here as an amateur concerned observer of modern history and sociology. I do not speak from the perspective of my normal assignment in seminary to teach a “normative” position in Christian doctrine, not from my marginal time participation in the preparation of a series of pamphlets called Concern, which project a vision for possible renewal in Mennonite churches. Nor do I speak from my fractional time portfolio as consultant to the Mennonite Board of Missions in which it is my responsibility to represent a "Mennonite witness" in relation to Christians of other traditions. The assignment of the present paper is to be as descriptive as possible describing the "lay of the land" without prescribing a remedy or even evaluating whether the reading I take is a "favorable" one or not.

The particular form in which I deal with this history is taken from Old Mennonite experience. Reference to the Mennonite Brethren or to the General Conference Mennonite experience would call for some significant differences in the details in the stating of certain developments, or in their precise form. Such amplification from those experiences would change the structure of the outline but I do not think it would change the substance of the thesis that comes through the outline, and therefore, is not really needed for the present part. Toward the end I will again comment on the relationship of this report to the other sister communions. We are looking at the Old Mennonite experience as a paradigm or model of something that I would suggest is, with some variety in the detail, representative of the self-understanding of other Mennonite groups as well.

Today, specifically, February 6, another disclaimer is needed. This material was not prepared with the intention that it should speak to conversations going on right now in this seminary about what some people call "the institutional church"--whatever that is. It was not prepared from the perspective of my own personal convictions as a teacher with courses in history and theology of the nature and mission of the church. My assignment here is more descriptive and less precise than would come from any of those perspectives. This means that I will perhaps be leaving a more inconclusive or even negative first impression in terms of questions sane people are asking today about, the "institutional church," than I would give from some of those other perspectives, or if my assignment were a different one. My assignment is to present a kind of diagnosis.

What the Anabaptist vision is, you are supposed to know. For our purposes I shall rephrase it structurally, in order to be able to use it as a criterion as we look at the recent history and present reality. This is a simplification and a centering down on a few aspects, which can be justified. The Anabaptist vision calls for a Believers' Church. With reference to the outside, this means that the church is by definition missionary. The church--the faithful church, the church according to the will of God as perceived in the "Anabaptist vision"--is a church which invites men into fellowship. Men and women who were not born into that fellowship are invited to enter it by free adult decision in response to the proclamation of the Love and suffering of God. On the inside the Believers’ Church means that the adhesion of a member is his own personal responsible, conscious, mature, adult choice and cannot be made for him even by someone who desires to make that decision for him for his own good. Thus we have two criteria: the Believers' Church in its meaning to the outside (what we call mission) and to the inside (what we call voluntaryism). The other criterion, the “way of the cross," means for the outside a reconciling nonconformed impact upon the tensions and power struggles of this world, refusing to share in the world's wars, insisting on sharing in the world's sufferings. On the inside, the "way of the cross" means that within the community of the covenant there is a renunciation of the use of power and the reduction of persons to things in the making of decisions. So this double or quadruple criterion will be what we will use to look at history.

	Believers` Church	Way of the Cross
Inside	Free Choice	Fraternal process, renunciation of power
Outside	Mission	Refusal of war, reconciling intervention

It was clarified in the conversations at Aspen that what is meant here by the label "Anabaptist" is not a century but a hermeneutic. It is represented for certain types of discussion by the 16th century movement, but it can be valid apart from that particular period.

In the Aspen discussions it became clear that this clarification just stated had become necessary because it was felt by some critics that use of the term "Anabaptist" meant a backward looking concern to proclaim the permanently normative character of certain events and decisions of the 16th century, rather than remaining free to find the path of faithfulness in every age. It even seemed to be assumed by some that the appeal to the 16th century put a premium on the institutional continuity of organized Mennonitism in such a way that the Mennonite Brethren beginnings of the 1860's would be somehow declared out of the apostolic succession. No such implications were ever intended in the use of this typology. The fact that they were nonetheless assumed by critics to be in the text is a demonstration of the ambiguity of the "Anabaptist vision" approach to Mennonite renewal, which will be described later in this text. It established for protagonist and critic alike the assumption that reference to the forefathers was meant for apologetic and defensive purposes.

To be Anabaptist meant, in the 16th century, to claim that the recourse to Scripture was an authoritative guide for church renewal, to be applied not only to certain evident abuses but even to the basic structure and identity of the Christendom which had been inherited from the centuries before. To take seriously this kind of recourse to Scripture means many other things as well, but structurally it means giving special attention to the dimensions of power and voluntaryism.

What was the Mennonite reality of the century ago or a little more? Except for the Netherlands and the North German societies, which do not belong in our story, Mennonite reality had changed very little in these basic respects while surviving from the latter part of the 16’th century to the latter part of the 19th. Little had been lost of the position to which Mennonites held and there had been little loss or gain by way of membership. These churches had maintained for three centuries the central marks of Anabaptist conviction about the New Testament church. They had maintained a refusal of military service, even at the cost of suffering and repeated migration. They had maintained a refusal of infant baptism even at the cost of continuing ill treatment by Catholic and Protestant majorities all over Europe, and in some places this ill treatment was still continuing in mild ways even in the late 19th century. But the inner meaning of this Mennonite identity had changed. Although infant baptism was rejected, there were now no people being drawn into the churches the proclamation of the love of God to the people who were not “born in." There was not really much freedom on the part of those who were "born in." The majority of those who were born into the group assumed that they would stay within. There is a rejection of military service which, although it had not been a part of American experience for quite some time, came to the surface with real vitality and integrity in the time of civil war both in the North and South; but there is no longer a conscious rejection of the use of power and persons within the life of the church, nor is there any sense of missionary reconciliation in the midst of the wars of the world.

So what we have is not an Anabaptist community when measured by the criteria which we have stated. It is rather a small Christendom. You are acquainted with the Latin phrase Corpus Christianum, which is used to describe the medieval synthesis, or the medieval concept of a synthesis, which obtained, or was thought to obtain, in Europe between church and culture Mennonitism has become a Corpuscle Christianum a small Christian body, a Christian corpuscle. It has reproduced within this very small population of several tens of thousands of people the mentality of the Corpus Christianum. If you were born in it, you stayed in it. This Christian community was a bit smaller than Christian Europe, but it operated as if it were a small Europe with regard to our criteria.

This is not like the New Testament church and it is not like the Anabaptists. Yet Mennonites a century ago were not aware of this. They still—especially in the Amish tradition--read the book of Acts all the way through in their church services once a year, because they thought they were the church of Acts. They did not have the historical, cultural sophistication to see that in their sociology they were not being the church of Acts but a Christian Corpuscle. They did not apologize for their not being the Anabaptists because they thought they were. There was at this point a handle or point of contact for possible renewal, in the sincerity with which they assumed they were still the Anabaptists and the New Testament Church.

Now the bulk of our story, and the story that I would tell at greater length with more time, can be most simply described, taking off from this point, as a series of borrowings from the surrounding Protestantism in an effort to renew the Mennonite reality. Each epoch of borrowing was related symbolically with a man, or a few men, or an institution. For simplification purposes, we will use one man. This one man in each epoch represents and symbolizes, and in fact did a good bit of what happened, although of course he was not the only person doing it,

John F. Funk went from his native Pennsylvania to Chicago to make his fortune and then came under the influence of Dwight L. Moody. He moved to Elkhart and established a publishing business which was to be the major instrument of the developing self-awareness of Mennonites between 1860 and 1900. He published both books and periodicals in both English and German. He had a large part to do with the renewal of nonresistant conviction at the time of the Civil War and a major share in the establishment of contacts with Mennonites from Russia as they prepared for the migration of the 1870's. His leadership had much to do with the introduction of the Sunday School into Mennonite churches, The Sunday School had in the Moody movement been a tool of evangelism; now it becomes as well an agency to teach music and the German language.

John S. Coffman began just a bit later a ministry which likewise borrowed from the evangelical Protestantism of the frontier. As a gifted itinerant evangelist he brought revivalism to the Mennonite churches. He was one of the earliest sponsors of organized missionary activity and of the church college

The impact of Coffman and Funk in time from 1860 to 1910 enabled Old Mennonites, especially in the Midwest, to complete the move into English speaking culture, and to create a style of piety and worship which merged elements of historic Mennonitism with elements of frontier evangelicalism. They did this before evangelicalism was shaken and harrowed and hardened by the fundamentalist movement.

It might be suggested in passing that the other immigrant Mennonite groups who entered somewhat later into the English speaking Protestantism found themselves borrowing the forms of a more militant conservatism. This difference still distinguishes Old Mennonites from some of the conservatism of the Mennonite Brethren or General Conference constituency. Old Mennonites as a whole are just as "conservative" and just as "evangelical," but without the particular polemic orientation which many borrowed from later Fundamentalism.

Daniel Kaufman marked with his character and his vision of Mennonitism the period between the two world wars. As editor of the Gospel Herald he defined the contemporary meaning of Mennonitism with great moral authority. He was the major architect of the series of mergers between Amish and Old Mennonite conferences in the 1920's, making a sober conservatism the unifying factor between the two groups. His part in the Garden City statement of faith of 1921 and his authorship of doctrinal books made him the undisputed authority in matters of doctrine. He closed and reorganized and reopened Goshen College in the early 1920's to keep it from being a source of confusion and hasty modernization in the denomination.

As a result of this unification and tightening down, the denomination suffered between 1920 and 1940 from significant emigration on the part of its more acculturated younger elite, including a small number of congregational divisions. The denomination as a whole was however, preserved from any major division down the middle and preserved as well from any significant expansion of theological liberalism in its midst.

One of the major contributions of Daniel Kaufman to Old Mennonite doctrinal understanding was his extensive development of the concept of "ordinances". The concept was borrowed from traditional Baptist usage, as a designation for those practices which Christians carry out because they have been ordered by Christ, but which are not to be understood as "sacrament." There are seven such ordinances, and they include the wearing of the devotional covering. This gave to a traditional Mennonite practice, which had much in common with ordinary decency as understood in wider Catholic and Protestant circles as well, a particular additional theological weight and made of it a denominational or "sectarian" distinguishing trait.

The movement for which I have made Daniel Kaufman the symbol would hardly have been possible without the supportive literary work of John Horsch, another person whose commitment and career fit the pattern already shown. John Horsch both borrowed from and contributed creatively to non-Mennonite Fundamentalism. These two men linked the fear of cultural accommodation with the fear of theological liberalism, in such a way as to reinforce the ethnic identity of Mennonites with theological self confidence. The defense of the culture was linked with the defense of the faith. For years the motto of the Gospel Herald was, "for the defense and confirmation of the Gospel."

The next stream of borrowing is not of the same proportions as those listed above; it moved by and large only in the eastern portions of the denomination, but it was just as original and specific in its character as the others. This movement is probably less narrowly identifiable with one particular man, but we might group together J. B. Smith, the first president of Eastern Mennonite College, and his successors A.R. Wenger and John L. Stauffer. Here the new impact upon Mennonitism was brought from Bible colleges of the dispensationalist tradition, with their special flavor of piety and unique techniques of biblical interpretation. The predominance of the dispensationalism which they introduced is now somewhat waning, but there remains of their impact a strong emphasis upon evangelism, on personal conversion, on a strong conception of biblical authority, which are correlated in a particular way with the cultural expressions of eastern Old Mennonitism.

Harold S. Bender brought into the denomination, first as a college teacher and then as an extremely active leader in denominational agencies, the resources of his education in the Protestant mainstream. He was one of the few younger persons of great leadership capacity who remained within the denomination when the consolidation of the 1920's under Daniel Kaufman led considerable numbers of enterprising young men to leave the denomination.

One tool of Bender's redefinition of Mennonitism was his historical study. Although the renewal of Anabaptist studies had been underway for over a generation in Europe, and some of the fruit of that work had been brought to the United States by his father-in-law John Horsch, it was Harold Bender who brought to its culmination the rediscovery of the Anabaptist vision. We owe it to him that Mennonites of many groups take it for granted that "Anabaptist" is a fitting label to apply to their own ideals.

Harold Bender developed college and seminary education as a way of leading the denomination to greater faithfulness and effectiveness. It was primarily he who made of the Mennonite World Conference what it is today; he is also one of the major architects of the cooperative programs of Mennonite Central Committee and its Peace Section. He is one of the fathers of the concept of Voluntary service.

First a few summary statements which would apply to the work of each of these men:

A. Each of these men was in a sense at the border of the Mennonite population. He did not begin his career as a representative Mennonite. In fact, these men were emotionally relatively independent of the Mennonite population. Most of them, sometime in their early adulthood or late youth were outside the Mennonite population and could have stayed outside. They could have become significant leaders in some other denomination or in some other profession. That he then chose to return was a very significant part of what made each man just what he was. He did choose to return to the Mennonite "people," and led it with such strength and originality that by the time of his death he was in his person right at the middle of the denomination. The borrowings that he brought into this denomination from outside he synthesized so creatively with what had been there before, that by the time the next generation came along, they could not tell the difference between what he had brought to it and what had been there before. He had become in a sense "Mr. Mennonite;" yet he had begun by choosing, from the margins, to come back to this community to which he was not tied.

B. Now what he led with was what he borrowed. John Funk got the idea of a periodical and the idea of Sunday Schools from the Moody movement. John Coffman got the idea of revivalism from the Moody movement and the idea of the church college from the Protestant establishment within American frontier society. Daniel Kaufman got the idea of a conference discipline from conservative Protestantism; Harold Bender got the idea of the Seminary and of reformation studies from Presbyterianism. But in each case this integration was so creative, so powerful, and came into such a vacuum, that by the end of this man's career, the next generation thought that what he had done was the Mennonite tradition. So that in each generation young people think is the Mennonite tradition, is not what was there two generations before, but it is the fruit of this creative synthesis made by the Great Borrower.

C. When this man returned to the Mennonite people, he perceived his relation to that people as a free choice. It was free for him but it was not for most of the people who grew up within it and especially not for the rebellious youth or for their defensive parents who were all the more defensive because they too had been rebellious when they were young. This meant that the synthesis that he created was for him a genuine new free reality--for him it was in this sense Anabaptist--but for the population which the led, which he in a sense took over through the quality his leadership, it was still a Christian civilization, the Corpusculum Christianum, which for most people was not a matter of free choice or of mission.

The fact that for the great man himself his reaffirmation of Mennonite identity as he recreated it was a free choice led him to misperceive the effect of his ministry in the denomination. He tended to assume that those who followed his lead did so with the same genuineness of voluntary commitment which this position had had for him; but many of them were using his reaffirmation as a prop for their own security or as a new handle on their own children. He was thus by his own experience, i11 equipped to be aware of the difference between psychology of those who followed him and the shape of his own leadership.

D. When we look at this borrowing and synthesizing process with an awareness of social structures, we can distinguish chronologically two stages but also two types of borrowing or synthesis. The literary work of John Funk, the revivalist work of John Coffman and the Bible courses of the Bible college men, went to the churches. The elements that they brought from wider evangelicalism, when received into the Mennonite culture were received congregation by congregation because these men went to every congregation and they ^"sold" what they had ^"imported.^" They convinced the people of the validity of what they were bringing in every place. Their leadership went to the grass roots, whether it be the journalism of John Funk which had to be sold through the mails, or the revivalism of John Coffman who won his way over the pulpit. Everything they imported, planted, and grafted became part of the culture of the Mennonite population at large. But then there comes a shift. The new central institutions since the turn of the century--colleges, mission boards, stronger conference structures, still later the MCC---did not in the same way go to the churches. These did not in the same way itinerate or ride circuit. They set up a center, to which the more mobile elements of the population would move, leaving the whole church behind. The youth would come here and change while the home church did not change. This could be analyzed at much greater length, but in summary, we simply note that there is a new problem here. There is a new polarization in the relationship between the "center" and the "roots."

Instead of the quality of leadership of John Funk, who went to every church with his message, there is a different kind of social structure for leadership now, one to which the church comes for special services. This does not mean that the churches at the grass roots no longer move or change; but it means that the way they are moved or changed no longer has the same relationship to Mennonite identity. They borrow in a less discriminating way. They borrow especially the modern equivalent of John Funk, namely from the new mass media, which means PNBI or WCMR, the new channels whereby mainstream thought through the mass media comes into the grass roots. They, of course, increasingly borrow as well from that part of our surrounding society which we would call "secular," keeping up with the Joneses, making a good living, getting your children through high school and college.

Since it was the central institutions which carried the flag of Anabaptist identity (as contrasted with the grass roots impact of Funk and Kaufman), the bulk of the ethnic constituency was free to move along in its drift into the American cultural mainstream by way of participation in the economy and the acceptance of television. The "normative" updating and redefinition of Mennonite identity and its outworking in programs of missions, service, and education, came increasingly to be focused in the special leadership ministries of central agencies and their personnel at Scottdale and Elkhart, Goshen and Hesston, Harrisonburg and Salunga. Increasingly the ability of these central agencies to feel confident in their definition of Mennonite faithfulness became less dependent upon whether they were being followed by the bulk of the constituency congregations. It does not suffice to say that the locus of renewal has moved from the grass roots to the center, leaving the grass roots prey to other forces. Very soon there will be more than one center projecting competing visions of renewal. Each center can claim, each with some sincerity and accuracy, to be speaking for the constituency, since its way of ascertaining constituency support is its success in drawing funds and persons to the center, and more than one center is able to do this.

Either because the persons who led in a particular borrowing concentrated on one of these centers (as was somewhat the case for the Bible college men referred to above) or because of cultural differences between the several regional constituencies to which they come to be particularly loyal, the separate centers can very soon tempted to accuse one another of marching to the wrong drum. The fact that each claims to live up to the idea of making Anabaptism contemporary makes that reproach more cutting than if ouch were trying to serve only its own constituency or to minister to the contemporary world.

E. Generally we have been taught to read history progressively, as continuing movement in a given direction. Old Mennonite experience has however been complicated by shifts in directions. From 1890 to1920 the visible institutional leaders moved toward acculturation faster than the bulk of the constituency could follow or trust them. The contribution of Daniel Kaufman in the l920's was a reversal of this movement, stiffening the separate identity by defining nonconformity in terms of garb, the fuller theological interpretation of the devotional covering and the other "ordinances," and by working for a greater degree of uniformity of practice in these matters. Yet the instruments used for this reaffirmation of the traditional identity were new instruments, in the creation of an unprecedentedly effective conference structure applying a stated discipline (the 1921 Garden City Confession), in a way new to Mennonite experience.

F. All of these borrowings were borrowings from the Protestant mainstream. There should then be no surprise that Mennonite reality, after this borrowing had been assimilated, synthesized, after the graft had "taken, was no more Anabaptist than before.

The borrowings were of the two types of Protestantism which were prevalent in this epoch. On the one hand there is what we may call "spiritualist" Protestantism, according to which renewal centers at the point of the individual's coming to a personal faith and authenticity. This spiritualist or pietist conception of renewal presupposes the Corpus Christianum as the wider social context. It can presuppose that the people you preach to are uncommitted Christians, and it calls these individuals to get right with God. They knew about God before, they knew they were not right with Him, and revivalism helped them to get right with Him. This theological type which we call spiritualist was in the message of John Coffman as a revivalist and that of the Bible college men. It was in the English hymnology which came into the church in this period. It has been changed; it is not like traditional pietism at the point of the strong ethical demands with which this getting right with God is linked; but that does not make it truly a "Believers' Church" either.

The other strand of renewal concern within Protestantism is that which we technically call "puritan" or "theocratic." That approach which accepts the social order as seeking to be Christian, and tries to make it as a whole, more Christian, is quite distinct from the Catholic sense of the Corpus Christianum in which you take things as they are and baptize them, with a long view of how long it takes to make things better. The theocratic approach expects to make things better pretty fast with good education and good leadership techniques. This is the meaning of the Sunday School movement, the college movement, and of Daniel Kauffman^'s reform of church polity and control. Thus there are two kinds of borrowings, and both were borrowing from sources which were Anabaptist neither in denominational character nor in structure. These are the sources from which we got the present structure of Mennonite reality.

Listeners to the early presentations of this text seemed uniformly to respond as if a pejorative moral judgment were unavoidable in the term "borrowing," The most frequent defensive response was to point out that (a) the borrowings were not all bad, or that (b) when certain elements of the practice of other Christian groups were borrowed they were at the same time creatively transformed and given a new meaning. Or it could also be pointed out that (c) the borrowing went the other way as well, with. Mennonites providing creative models (especially in service programs) which other churches could follow.

The defensiveness of this kind of response does not keep its arguments from having weight. Nothing in the present paper is intended to deny the three points just made above. But the defensiveness nevertheless demonstrates a misunderstanding of the purpose of the present paper. To assume that a record of borrowing is either good or bad presupposes a prior clear understanding of the identity of the borrower; not only of the clarity with which the borrower knows and holds his identity but also a moral evaluation to the effect that what he has is better than whet other people have, so the borrowing is a betrayal of his distinct identity. Such a normative judgment is not intended in the present description. I would have opinions of my own about which elements of Mennonite cultural identity were good, which dangerous, and about which elements of borrowing from the wider society were most fruitful and which most confusing, But the assignment of the present paper was not to project that kind of evaluation but rather to describe what is going on while taking sides as little as possible.

G. The agencies of the Mennonite church created by these great borrowers have not really generally been representative agencies, reflecting the shape of the constituency. They have been, or always meant to be, until very recently, agencies of renewal. They were minority movements. During the most active career of each of these men, what he was doing, was a minority movement. They used the Mennonite peoplehood, the constituency, as a legal and financial base, as a. kind of court of appeal, as the population to which they spoke, But they did not representit. They were dedicated to changing it. The change they wanted included the revitalization of some of the traits of the Anabaptist vision, and they actually attained some of this. But the forms that they used were borrowed from the churches of the American establishment, and in the second generation form determines substance. So the Mennonite reality is no more Anabaptist at the base than it was before.

What are some of the contemporary observations to support this reading? Here, of course, everything I say will have to be unfairly brief.

A. The agenda of the grass roots church is often not the Anabaptist agenda of mission and social change in reconciliation, but the acculturation agenda: 'when do we get an organ," "what do we do about the covering," "when do were get a seminary trained preacher," and "when do we get a church building that does not look like a barn?" That is the agenda of transition from the separate subculture in the middle class ministry.

B. The agenda of denominational organization right now is focused on the realignment of structures, and on not jeopardizing constituency confidence, rather than operating as did John Coffman or John Funk or Sanford wider in a lonely, inner-directed, costly advocacy of change.

This is true not only of the organizational mainstream but also of its critics. The reaction to ^"the direction in which the church is going^" is also not a congregational phenomenon but is rather stirred up and propagated and ridden by a series of communication centers quite parallel to the earlier institutional developments; they concentrate upon the mass media and upon publications seeking to develop a constituency through the mails.

C. We assume that our colleges and our service agencies are for our children. We do not have church colleges whose form is dictated by our missionary theology, but serving a constituency all of whose ^"birthright^" children we are ready to serve.

A more pointed index, a kind of parable to conclude my reporting, is the analysis of what happened to Old Mennonites on the morning of September 10, 1967 at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time. The Columbia Broadcasting System broadcast a half hour film entitled ^"Mennonites and the Peaceful Revolution.^" Thousands of Old Mennonites, perhaps tens of thousands, whose preachers as recently as ten years before had condemned watching television as wrong for the Christian, on this Sunday morning postponed Sunday morning services--in some congregations the first time that this had happened in living memory--or even brought receivers into the sanctuary to watch as the network editors played back to them what they had seen in a week of filming.

This film did not mean to cover only Old Mennonites, but theirs was the dominant role. The adviser to CBS was an Old Mennonite, a Goshen College communications teacher, assigned to this function by the broadcast arm of the denomination. (We talked before of the age of John Funk and Daniel Kaufman: now we have to talk about the age of Dan Hess.) All but one of the persons interviewed were Old Mennonites and the exception was a Goshen alumnus.

First we should ask what the film editors saw. Let us remember that this was not sensationalistic journalism like some of the Sunday picture supplements that like to get Amish pictures, but a very sensitive piece of editing by a man who was professionally qualified to edit religious documentaries. Editing films and interview material gathered by very sensitive, competent journalists and camera directors, the pattern into which the editor saw the pieces falling which the reporters had gathered was, therefore, a very significant reading. What he saw was stated in the title, "A Peaceful Revolution^" in Mennonite culture. He saw Mennonites as a group with a very strong cultural, ethnic unity, which until recently had been maintained by avoidance of the city and by a strongly disciplined pattern of social life. This isolation is now breaking down so rapidly that it must be spoken of as a revolutionary change. The question which arises is then whether the denomination can maintain its identity or even its existence when the form in which it had survived has to be abandoned: The answer 6f the film was a guarded "yes.^" Probably (to judge by the college students whose buzz session seemed to be the editor's answer) there will be an effort to respect, in the urban context whose forms and values Mennonite young people will be accepting without much question, some of the continuing traits of Mennonite convictions. Just what those traits are, and how one can maintain them at the same time that one goes wholeheartedly into urban society with all of its jazz, the careful observer of the film could not tell. It had to do with "doing the work of God"--that phrase was in the film--but just what that work is was not reported. There was no significant reference to the service activity of Mennonites, with the one exception of mental health. Nor was it apparent anywhere in the film that what Mennonites stand for might have any relevance for anyone else. There was no one in the film who was not born Mennonite. The adjustment problems described are those of children growing up and tending to move away from their heritage, not of converts to Christian faith in a Mennonite context. There was no reference to missionary activity, no evidence that anyone had ever joined the group from the outside. Even Glen Zeager, who certainly meant that his presence as a taxi operator in New York City "where all the people are" was for evangelistic purposes, was reported. in such a way to leave off that aspect of his motivation. It was said several times that he wanted to be where the people were, but only Mennonite listeners could imagine why. For all the secular television viewers might know, it was because he got tired of being where all the cows were, or because a population center is the only place you can make money running taxis. That he wants to be a. witness to Jesus Christ, in a very serious and pious and simple way, was not communicated by the film, nor was there any indication of the possibility that there might be Mennonites named Harding, Djojodihardjo, Harischandra, or Yovanovich (as there are). Nor was there any indication that what sets Mennonites apart is their attitude toward Jesus, or toward the Bible, or a position which they would comment to others as well on solid grounds. Mennonite identity (we are asking what the editor saw) is completely explained by a particular cultural history. When observed by a sympathetic competent outsider, Mennonitism is still today fundamentally what it was a century ago when john Funk set out to change its character by borrowing concepts and techniques from D. L. Moody. Mennonitism is still a group which has been very effective in maintaining a separate cultural identity through a particular mode of life. It made the transition to the English language in the latter part of the last century and now it may even be able to make the transition to the acceptance of education, and maybe even. of the city, but the identity which it is trying to maintain is still that of a cultural ethnic sect. Neither the borrowings from Moody, nor the later borrowings from Princeton, nor the still more recent borrowings from the 16th century Anabaptist tradition have sufficient impact upon the empirical givenness of the Mennonite population to have any impact on what the television camera saw. Old Mennonites are still the self preserving cultural entity with a particular theological overlay. But the cultural identity, after years of stability has now begun to shift faster than the theological leadership.

The other question is how Mennonites reacted to how they were seen. They were very concerned about the whole matter. The initial report to the effect that this film was going to be prepared called forth a very wide attentiveness. The number of Old Mennonites who gathered that morning to watch the electronic mirror, in order to see what image it threw back to them, was probably the largest number of Mennonites who ever in four centuries of history were caught doing the same thing at the same time. What they were doing was watching with great concern what picture of themselves other people were likely to have. This is a sign of the inferiority complex of a group which maintains a separate identity after having lost the convictions which used to be self evident about the mandate for that separate identity, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and Pentecostals are also concerned about what people think about them, because they have a message which they want others to accept but they reckon with mockery and rejection from the bulk of the wider society and the mass media. Mennonites are not like the Jehovah's Witnesses, thinking the larger society is that badly on the wrong track. We wish we could join it at many points, if only we could be free to do so. So we are very concerned to be loved by the public. The first concerned question with which we watched was whether the CBS editors were going to project for us a favorable image or whether there would be Amishmen and buggies shown. This preoccupation with how well one's identity is being respected is a trait of our present attitude toward the surrounding world. We want to be accepted within it. We want to take a place within it, and yet still cannot bring ourselves fully to be absorbed there.

A second observation about how Mennonites reacted to the film was that they thought it was pretty good. They thought it projected a picture which. Not only was not unfair but was actually favorable. In none of the several group evaluations of which I heard was there any regret that we had projected predominantly the image of a social group threatened by social change. No regret that there was nothing said explicitly or implicitly about the meaning of discipleship or service or mission or that there had been no reference to `.Jesus except by the seminary teachers who were interviewed. Mennonites are thus people who are happy to be known through this ancient image, as long as it is not made fun of. We are not humiliated to observe that we are being described as a group which no outside would think of joining, and which our own youth have trouble respecting, as long as our sincerity is given some compliments.

Perhaps what was told above along the line of a narrative outline could be now restated in another way. It is now possible to understand more clearly what it was that Jesus came to do and did, what the New Testament reports and interprets about that work. What His message is about can. be known today as clearly as it ever could be before, for a number of historical reasons. We have available better tools of scholarship for linguistic and cultural questions there is the collision of creeds which undermines dogmatic approaches to the reading of the text and there is the collision of world views which forces us to restate the questions with which we approach the scriptural text.

In this refreshed encounter with the message of the Bible about Jesus we discover that He represented a pattern of life and thought, personal and social, different from all the available options which men had been committed to before and since.

When I say what Jesus represented is different not only from what went before but also from Christians since then, this is to point to the fact which we technically call "apostasy." Since the followers of Jesus never remain strictly faithful to His command, their concern must repeatedly be not simply for continuity in following but for renewal, judgment and realignment to return to His path. Judgment and renewal rather then gradual reform and nurture, is the pattern which is most fitting when one observes how different the call of Jesus is from what His disciples have done with it.

Now the best picture of this renewal according to the model of Jesus is the radical reformation or the Anabaptist vision.

Mennonitism as a population stands under this kind of judgment. The past century has seen major repair efforts, borrowings here and there undertaken in order to revitalize the movement. These borrowings have helped Mennonitism to survive with some sense of mission, but at a price. Part of the price is on the surface: the series of borrowings have brought into the movement several kinds of superficial conflict between those who borrow this and those who borrow that. Those who borrow from liberalism find themselves in conflict with those who borrow from fundamentalism; those who borrowed early (the Gospel songs) find themselves in conflict with those who borrow late (the guitar). Both parties tend to forget that when revivalism began it was not old time religion, but a new and menacing movement.

But behind this kind of superficial clash which arises between people who have borrowed at different places or from different epochs, there is a deeper clash. There is the structural hypocrisy of saying that we are the Anabaptists when we are not. This becomes the clearest in our seminaries, because it is here that we have the assignment to be thoroughly and rigorously conscious of what we are doing. It, however, also comes to the focus in the seminaries because the seminary is itself an especially effective instrument of borrowing from the outside world. Is that not its very purpose?

To say it yet another way: each stage of creative adjustment was a response to a threat from outside, by accepting and integrating that which threatened. The Sunday School movement in the "English" Protestant society threatened to draw off Mennonite young people; so Mennonites created their own Sunday Schools and used them to teach German. Revivalism threatened to draw Mennonite young people away into the United Brethren and other German--oriented Pietist groups, so it was integrated by Mennonite revivalists who added to it an element of moral earnestness which was not found in some of the other tent and camp-meeting preachers. When the identity of Mennonitism was threatened by young people going off to college, we made our own colleges. When we were threatened by conscription we took a stand; but as a reaction, not as an initiative, and we created service agencies as an alternative to conscripted service, Today our youth ask, because their neighbors taught them to ask, whether we are changing the world, so we adopt the language of social change,

In each case the leader of this borrowing took over the form of the threat to make the key to an affirmation of identity. In each case this meant that although a minority person at the age of 30, he was the establishment when he reached the age of 60. If we were to be very positive‑minded we could say, "This proves the power of spiritual leadership. The creativity of the great man really won its way. All of Mennonitism became a new thing every thirty years.'' Yet the new Mennonitism is still defensive and is not genuinely that new thing except in certain institutional centers.

If we were to be negative-minded, we could say that this great creative borrower sold out, sacrificed or diluted his original creativity by letting himself be coupled by the old establishment. But this will not do either. There was in the leadership of these men no dishonesty and no strategic scheming. The picture is rather one of a shift in midstream in response to the leader.

The survival-oriented churches, defensive about the inherited identity, came to the point where they saw that the inherited identity would be more threatened by the threat from outside than it would be if they accepted his innovation. His
innovation, in„ other words, came to be in their eyes the key to survival. Whereas for him it was a free and costly personal discipleship commitment, for the constituency which followed his lead it was a path of self-preservation. When the majority joined his party and followed his lead, they changed the character of his leadership by making it the "establishment" often with out his knowing it.

There are now two challenges which my entire analysis must face, after having been laid out thus summarily and bluntly. First of all: did I not pass too rapidly over the novelty of the innovations linked with the name of Harold S. Bender? In his work, for the first time, the renewal concern reached all the way back to the sixteenth-century sources. The vision was freed from the late colonial Pennsylvania-Dutch cultural identity and could reach back to a distinct theologically responsible, biblical relevant view of discipleship in the church. In this vision nonresistance is no longer simply. "not going to war" but comes to be seen again as an ethic of discipleship and service. The same is true of the Believers' Church vision.

Certainly this is correct. Here something was brought back to consciousness which was qualitatively new, in the sense that the innovations of Funk and Coffman and Kauffman were not. The Bender renewal was not on the same scale with the other borrowings at this point. In fact, it is only because of this that we can ask our question. It is only because of the originality of the Anabaptist concept of the church of believers, as over against the Zwinglian concept of the church-of-a-population; it is only because of the originality of the concept of discipleship as over against pietism, that we can ask the question we are asking now. Yet this truth, that we discovered Anabaptism was not on the same scale with the other borrowings, does not change what was said above about that form. It only brings to a head.our problem. If the heritage uncovered had been a Lutheran heritage or a Catholic heritage then there would not have been this same conflict between what was rediscovered and the fact of being a small Corpus Christianum. This is why the Christian Reformed and the Missouri Synod Lutheran churches, although they have acculturation problems, do not have the same self-image problem. The identities that they rediscover in their vision of theirhistory are those of a distinct population group with an established church. They have adjustment problems but they do not have the same sense of demoralization or inner crisis.

The verification of my claim that this is nevertheless one more borrowing is to be found at the point of the relation between form and substance. I said before that in the second generation form dictates substance. The substance of the Bender revival was Anabaptism. At a few points this created new and fitting forms, of which perhaps the most viable was voluntary service. But the more institutional forms, the vehicles which carried the freight, spent the budget, and hired the staff, were still the borrowed forms. They were still special agencies distinct from the grass roots churches. It was the Presbyterian vision of the seminary trained men, with the right theology, who will introduce this right theology to the churches by^. preaching and teaching and competently leading. Even a concentration of study on the history is itself a Presbyterian kind of approach. To find your identity in your founders, in your history, in original Anabaptism, is itself already a reformation stance and not a radical free church stance. So this Anabaptist renewal makes the conflict more precise. It makes it come to the surface, makes us able to see it, but it also makes it more difficult to resolve.

There was a period when it was assumed that we are the Anabaptists. A generation of the young people who came to their intellectual maturity in the 1940's saw the peak of this identification. It has held on longer away from Goshen and Elkhart. In the Mennonite Brethren Herald, for instance, a writer uses the term "Anabaptist" simply as a shorthand for"MCC constituency." You don't have to say "Mennonite Brethren, Old Mennonite, General Conference Mennonite, and Brethren in Christ;" just say "Anabaptist," that means us. There was recently a meeting in Toronto about "Anabaptism in the City." They didn't mean Anabaptism; they mean Mennonites moving to the city end they dealt the cultural problems these migrants have because of the Corpusculum Christianum from which they come.

We are told because of the Anabaptist slogan that we are a Believers' Church, but we tell ourselves at the same time that it is not statesman-like to tamper with the practices, influenced partly by revivalism and the child evangelism movement and partly by the religious education movement, of bringing practically all of our young people into the church in their teens, with the effect it has on the meaning of membership for those same persons when they reach their 20's and 30's. We are told we are committed to nonresistance as a peace church, yet we must be "redemptive" or tolerant with the large number of individuals and even whole congregations which do not support the official conscientious objector position, and that within our own institutions we must for the sake of effectiveness sometimes move in ways that do violence to personality. We are told that our theology places the local congregations at the center of all spiritual experience, yet when we give attention to problems of church structure it is at the top that we make the changes and there that we seek to gather ultimate decisionmaking responsibility. We tell ourselves that the preaching of the word of God in the gathered congregation is an agency for change and renewal which can make things happen that men would not have expected; but then we temper and tamper with our message and divide it into doses small enough to be palatable so that the people will be able to accept it. Thus consistently the verbal affirmation of Anabaptist commitment has been linked with a second nonverbal affirmation of a type of churchmanship which operates on other axioms.

This assumption that we are the Anabaptists is thus a source of some particular difficulties which we must now try to deal with. It makes it harder to face the problem of the discontinuity between the Anabaptist Vision and the Mennonite Reality because to think of this would mean admitting—as we never had to under the leadership of Funk and Coffman--that we are not simply falling short of the Anabaptist vision; we are in our fundamental structures incompatible with it.

One of the negative effects of this confusion between us and the Anabaptists is the tendency to use the Anabaptist flag as a label for everything good, true, and beautiful. At this point it was wholesome to have a warning in the Goshen College Record saying:

"...it is time that we make Anabaptism a little less rubbery. A recent Record article listed eight or ten 'values inherent in the Anabaptist position' which have particular relevancy to the college, and they turned out to be a set which any agnostic humanist might comfortably espouse. Maybe we should make Harry Emerson Fosdick. an honorary member of the Swiss Brethren" This the one tendency; a '`rubberizing' of the 'flag' which we fly over whatever we were doing anyway.

The other confusing effect is that because of the assumption that Mennonites are an enlargement of the :Anabaptist Vision, this vision is now increasingly coming to be rejected without getting a fair trial because of the poor performance of Mennonitism. In a seminary chapel about a year ago one of the seminary graduates reported that on the basis of his experience in a country congregation, he is now convinced that the Believers' Church vision does not apply because in the church where he served it did not work very well. But the church where he was, was not trying to be a Believers' Church. All of its children were baptized and nobody else. It did not have the missionary volunteryistic structure which the Anabaptist vision called for. So sometimes we will blame the vision for not working when it was not given a fair test, other times we will blame the people for
disloyalty or apostasy or cheating or not caring when what they are doing is simply following another vision. We say that nonresistance will not work because certain Mennonite leaders are scheming or manipulative. This does not prove that this approach will not work; only that they have not tried it. We say that fraternal admonition according to Matthew 18 will not work because Mennonites are nit-picking gossips; that does not mean it will not work---that means it hasn't been tried.

One of the tragic effects of this focusing of the problem of identity in the revitalization of the recent past in the present constituency, rather than in a renewal of the New Testament life or the 16th century reformation vision, is that Mennonites with their acculturation agenda find themselves out of phase with the needs of the world. Just at the time when the wider society is ready to move back from the humanistic individualism which has dominated our culture for centuries, and is reaching out for some new kind of communal dimension to life, young Mennonites are trying to prove their independence from parents and church.

Just when many contemporaries are asking for help in finding an economic life style freed from the affluency models of Suburbia, Mennonite preachers and college teachers ask for a wage level like what they could earn elsewhere. Just when wide segments of our society are asking for help and understanding how one can make sense out of a rejection of war as more than a movement of visceral disgust, Mennonites are concerned to avoid being considered as pacifists. We expend our energy and moral vigor and our strength of personality in running again through combats which had a real point somewhere else some other time.

It has been reiterated above that the message of the present paper should be meaningful regardless of the specific theological orientation of the reader within contemporary Mennonite theological change and church organizational policy making. The problem of denominational identity is illuminated by this kind of historical overview whether it reinforces one's desire to direct the denominational movement more precisely to the right or to the left or somewhere else. The portrayal of what has happened should have at least a degree of its validity independent of where the writer himself would like to see the denomination move.

There is, however, one level on which a "normative or evaluative judgment" is possible; that of functional effectiveness. To say that one's agencies are committed to the Anabaptist vision, yet to let it be understood that they are able to serve a constituency which is committed to a Mennonite cultural identity, can at some points become seriously dysfunctional. We noted that there are those, both young and old, who say that the vision is refuted because it does not work, when the ^"not working" which they have observed is within Mennonite communities which were not trying to make it work. Some further examples

(A) Questions have been raised in some quarters about whether it is honesty or whether it might rather be a breach of covenant, when a seminary supported by Mennonite churches who hope to receive well-trained young functionaries to keep their church organization moving smoothly sends out instead graduates whose concern for spiritual vitality and committed congregational participation makes them agents of change rather than of stability in the congregations which call them.

(B) To assume that Mennonite population rather than some other segment of our society, Christian or not, is the most fruitful field in which to propagate the Anabaptist vision, may divert our attention from other populations more openly disposed to hear the vision and respond to it with greater freshness. (C) Several Mennonite agencies., each having ^"borrowed^" from a different segment of the wider Protestant movement, can easily find themselves at cross purposes, each accusing the other of some kind of betrayal. The current debate all across Protestantism, which Mennonites have not had the clarity of vision to transcend or heal, between the social and the individual dimensions of Christian experience and expression, is one of the fruits of this disjointed borrowing tin, fruit contradictory sources where a positon arising with greater integrity directly from Anabaptist rootage or from a re-reading of the New Testament would have avoided the debate completely.

The other challenge I have to meet as a test of the correctness of this presentation is to ask whether. the criteria items were the right ones after all; 'Believers' Church' inside and outside; ^"Way of the Cross° inside and outside. Did I perhaps pick the criteria which would make Mennonitism show up the worst? Could I have perhaps picked other criteria which would have even us a better reading? How about solid family structure, hard work, honesty, charity?

I think the case can be made, both biblically and sociologically, for the appropriateness of these criteria. One reason is that the meaning of the other virtues and criteria changes, depending where we stand with regard these criteria. The meaning of discipleship as a vision of morality inthe doing of. the will of God in the power of His presence means one thing if it is an invitation to all men in a truly missionary church, it means something very different if we really only expect it of the children of strong parents, brought up in a good Sunday School. Nonresistance means one kind. of thing, it means the Jesus kind of thing, if it is proclaimed to a broken and worried world as an option that calls men to change; it means something very different if it is held to in a context in which a small group of people will call upon the government to let them off because there are not many of them. The meaning of evangelism is different depending on whether it really calls people into a new community, or whether it is a technique whereby a congregation helps its own youth to make their teenage decisions, So this is the one reason that it seems to me that the criterion of mission. is the most fundamental and the proper one to use: the meaning of other criteria changes depending on whether you are a mission community.

The other reason arises from my own learnings as I was assigned to teach a course in the Theology of Mission several times in recent years. If we are to take the story of Acts or the message of Ephesians seriously, then the work of Christ is incomplete, the work of Christ is not done if there has not come into being a "new humanity,^" made up of two kinds of people, some of whom had good strong parents and some who did not, of whom some were born under the law and some were not, and of whom some have the heritage of moral rigidity and some do not. If the marriage of Jews and Gentiles is not happening in every generation, then the work of Christ as described in Ephesians is not happening.

One more creative borrowing which was initially not included in this text was the early involvement of Mennonites in the Protestant missionary movement. Overseas missions, city missions, charitable homes, and evangelism among non-Mennonite rural population all began to win modest support around the turn of the century.

Among its representative leaders there was no one great man of quite the same stature as those dealt with elsewhere in this study. Christian

Yoder of Ohio, D. D. Miller of Indiana, and Christian Good of Harrisonburg were among this group. Because of the relation of this development to our criterion of mission, it is appropriate that we look at it separately as a test of our general thesis.

First of all it is clear that the notion of missionary and charitable work carried specifically by agencies created for the purpose was one which was borrowed. There was nothing uniquely Mennonite in the techniques used or in the message they bore. They followed existing models. Secondly, the structure of these efforts was institutional, not congregational. To "do mission work" was delegated to supported devoted professionals who served away from home, The character of the home congregation was not changed by their support given to missions, nor was the evangelistic success of their work such as to change significantly the composition of the denomination.

Until half a century later, the mission churches did not have congregational status, being staffed and financed from the home churches (this applied to both home and foreign missions) The few converts who persevered had to adjust to a Mennonite life style rather than to changing the character of the brotherhood by their joining. It thus seems that an expansion of the historical survey would only have strengthened the observation of a pattern already established in the other, episodes.

It could also be pointed out that if other criteria were to be used they would tend to demonstrate the same thing. We could seek to measure the sense of immediacy in worship gatherings, or the presence or absence of openness in relation between individuals in church agencies and gatherings, and we would similarly come to the reading that we have developed a fearful and defensive way of living together. Some of us are afraid of answers that are too firm and others are afraid of questions that are too pointed. We could also have drawn out of Anabaptist experience the concern for nonconformity, and simplicity of life, the readiness to trust God for tomorrow, a leadership style made for unity and diversity_, capacity to handle new issues with confidence in the presence of the Holy Spirit. It is my claim that these additional test criteria would lead us to the same reading as before.

We can look back now with some perspective over a century during which great men with great capacities labored with Mennonite sociology to try to make it correspond with recent theology, using once the tools of Moody, once those of rigorous statesmanlike social control, once those of mainstream Protestant church education and once those of the discovery of one's own forbearers. All of these efforts to make Mennonitism from the inside something else than what it was in 1860, although successful in. creating institutions and defining formal positions have been no more effective in remodeling Old Mennonitism from the inside than had been the less friendly efforts of the outside world in the preceding century. Resisting anyone who sought to remold it from within or without, Mennonite peoplehood goes on with great devotion and fervor just surviving. The face of cultural Mennonitism may be changed by the colleges and by Civilian Public Service and, by technology. The Amish men may move into the trailer factory. But all of this facial change has been plastic surgery. Mennonitism still finds its identity most properly on the ethnic community level. These are the bones behind the changed face; this is what had kept the organism alive for four centuries. It is not the changed face but the bone structure, nervous and circulatory systems, concerning which we must ask whether they can survive the encounter with modernity, and, if they can, what place it may have in God's purpose.

It seemed to make more sense to analyze one specimen carefully from the inside than to seek to mix observations from several different movements or to try to establish parallels more strict than actually obtain.

It is not suggested that this description applies in any direct and formal way to the Mennonite Brethren or General Conference Mennonites. The sociological cohesiveness of Old Mennonite population, as well as the geographic distribution and the migration patterns, probably made it more possible for the Old Mennonite constituency than for the others to have a relatively unified or monolithic movement, whereas the other groups have been more scattered, moving in more directions at once. There might also be something either about the Old Mennonite character or about the sociology which would make it more possible to speak of the Old Mennonite experience in terms of a few great men, whereas observing the other groups could not focus on the central leadership as precisely. But the focusing of the above report upon the individual leaders was a simplification for the sake of brief presentation, and as not really essential to the thesis. Nor is the meaning of the thesis essentially changed if one modifies it to take note of a greater diversity of borrowings and synthesizings.

With due recognition for great differences of detail it would be possible to project as well for the General Conference Mennonites an analogous pattern of acculturation through selective borrowing. The beginnings of the eastern wing of the conference and the work of Jacob Oberholtzer were certainly a case of movement introduced by such borrowings; the development of colleges and missions was similar to the Old Mennonite pattern. Acculturation in terms of musical instruments, the professional pastorate, and involvement in the fundamentalist controversies were even farther reaching.

The General Conference and Mennonite Brethren histories have been more marked by migration both as a recent memory of the entire brotherhood and as a classical way of solving certain problems. The borrowings of the Mennonite Brethren from German Pietism have been more massive and more consistent than some of the ways some of the other groups have been tributary to outside influences. The General Conference has probably opened itself to a greater degree of pluralism by borrowing at distinct sources. The Mennonite Brethren have been in principle more open to such borrowing ever since their origin. Those Mennonites who concentrated on the maintenance of the German language and cultural identity have been less open to ^"English" influences, but that has simply meant that they have borrowed from German sources.

Yet it is my hunch that the same pattern will be found to obtain nonetheless mutatis mutandis. Each of our groups will show the pattern of selective borrowing by creative men who began on the margin of the movement and by their creativity found themselves at the center. Each will be found an analogous pattern of survival by accommodation, of renewal not by return to the 16th century or to the first so much as by dependence on other Christian traditions, So if the several Mennonite groups are more alike today than they were in 1950 or in 1900 it is because they have been borrowing at some of the same places. If we are less alike it has been because we have been borrowing at different places.

There would have to be a special set of adaptations to apply these readings to the case of the Mennonite Brethren, in view of their new beginning a century ago, which gave to them a kind of first-generation feeling which is, in some senses at least, more like the Anabaptist model. There are certainly some points at which the Mennonite Brethren movement has about it a more missionary character. Yet in the earlier generations the missionary work was often among other Mennonites, and the borrowings from other Christian groups were imported from Bible institutes back in Germany, so that the structural difference is probably not deep enough to invalidate completely the appropriateness of the Old Mennonite sample as somehow representative of us all.

The most closely related documentation of the Mennonite Brethren experience would probably be the "Wineskins conversations" of a few years back, in which the most basic question was how the traditional theology and piety, which had focused on a radical adult conversion experience, can be adjusted to suit a situation in which the church is constituted by the children of members, who therefore cannot be expected normally to reproduce that kind of crisis experience. The concern was in other words to resolve the tension between a conversionist theology and a nurture-centered practice, in favor of the priority of the latter.

The concern is to find a theology of experience which can take as the norm not the coming to faith of adult unbelievers but the growing up in the faith of the children of believers.

If we were to add to this list of differences a reference to the Brethren in Christ, we would perceive there perhaps the most colorful set of varied borrowings within a synthesis which may nonetheless be tenable. There is the original Germanized Wesleyan Pietism of the United Brethren; there is the simultaneous initial borrowing from the Mennonite and Brethren cultural heritages with special emphasis on congregational process and discipline, including intensive mutual aid and fraternal concern; there is the borrowing of the outward trappings of conservative Dunkard and Mennonite culture, the plain coat and covering; there is the second work holiness teaching and the practice of the camp meeting widely adopted before the turn of the last century, and there is the fuller involvement within the (non-Wesleyan) conservative evangelicalism in the National Association of Evangelicals; concurrently with this last there has been a renewal of the borrowings from Mennonites through the involvement of the Brethren in Christ in the Mennonite Central Committee and the Council of Mennonite Colleges.

My impression is, therefore, that the fundamental structural observation which I have made would apply, despite many variations of timing and superficial appearance, to the other groups as well. In our several ways, we are still basically a Christian population surviving by the techniques with which any Corpus Christianum survives. All of us have experienced extensive borrowings from other traditions, with the purpose and partial effect of spiritual renewal, borrowings, however which came from non-Anabaptist sources, so that the product after the borrowing is structurally no more Anabaptist than before, even though in some cases it might be quite abit more lively or in other cases quite a bit more respectable. All of us have seen our leadership structures shift from lonely renewal movements to defensive moderation. All of us by now see our constituencies influenced more by mainstream mass media religion than by any specifically Anabaptist type of vision.

It is the constant temptation of the reader of history to seek to project patterns of the past into the future. If this pattern of creative borrowing has been discerned in the past and has had this much to do with making Mennonites who they now think they are, what does that mean will happen next? Will Mennonitism survive as CBS thought it might? And if so, in what shape? Does our discerning do next, or whether it will be worth the trouble?

Each time this outline has been presented it has been criticized as "pessimistic.^" In response the point must be underlined that its intent was not to let a value judgment get in the way of description; the assignment was empirical, not judgmental. There are some who would say that the movement described here is regrettable but many others who would not be sure. While they meant to be restoring Mennonite identity a number of these great borrowers actually helped Mennonites to acculturate, which from one perspective is a good thing. Thus many graduate students and younger church college faculty people would wish only to complete the movement of assimilation which those great leaders began when they thought it was a reaffirmation of distinctness. They would consider this an optimistic reading, because it demonstrates how the power of the surrounding culture can penetrate an isolated group, using toward that end even the very techniques which the group hopes will help to maintain its separateness.

Those who would speak to this as a "pessimistic reading^" are those who are themselves committed to some particular vision of that which is to be defended. But for such persons it must be pointed out that it is better to have an objective diagnosis of one's status, so that the necessary medication or surgery can be used, rather than be told one is in routinely good health. The medical parallel is not without some point, It is said to happen with certain kinds of illness that the patient refuses to believe the diagnosis which calls for the surgery which might save his life.

But what would that surgery be? If in the past it has recurrently happened that the denomination in the face of the growing impact of the surrounding culture was helped to reaffirm its identity by the ministry of a great creative borrower, . . . should the call not go out for another such leader to create another catalytic crisis and posit another confident identity? Without accepting the mantle of the prophet, the historian must point out that in some significant ways the presupposition of that great creative synthesis of each generation in the past no longer obtain.

There is in the Midwest no convinced cultural solidarity or separateness left among Mennonites. Those over 40 retain that sense of distinct identity but their children do not, as the CBS film can testify. Such a residual sense of cultural separateness can still be appealed to in western Canada or by Old Mennonites east of the Alleghenies, but hardly anywhere else in between. While editors and educators are more clear than before about the theological distinctness of "Anabaptist/ Mennonitism," the cultural separateness into which this theological distinctness was always planted in the past is no longer there to be appealed to.

The style of central leadership of the age of John Coffman was partly a function of his unique articulateness in an age when most of the churches were rural. To have a comparable leadership potential a half century later would demand some other kind of central power. But the exercise of such a central power, if possible, is manipulative counter to proper congregational responsibility and ultimately sectarian and defensive. Central leadership and the reaffirmation of one's identity by a great man of God whom everyone trusts can be effective, if that reaffirmation is culturally defensive, i.e. if that is in the cause of a corpusculum. It is not equally usable for an Anabaptist cause.

Or to state the point the other way around: Anabaptist renewal itself has a critical impact which undermines the methods of the corpusculum with which it had identified itself. The Anabaptist affirmation of voluntaryism and renunciation of coercion undercut traditional methods without replacing them with other methods which are equally reliable. The Anabaptist vision has a winsome effect for those few who pilgrimage from the closed community to the border and then "come back," and to some few who are attracted to it from outside; but it tends to threaten those whose security is linked with the corpusculum culture. Precisely because the language of Anabaptism has so long been used as a reinforcement of Mennonite self-confidence, the Mennonite population is now refractory beyond the average to the Anabaptist message, having been, as it were, vaccinated. Mennonites are less avid in asking to see the novelty of the Anabaptist witness than are Christians of other kinds of backgrounds. This is no reproach; they are struggling to overcome a wrong conception of their separateness. These ^"vaccinated" younger Mennonites are struggling to overcome a conception of their inherited distinctness and separateness which is neither biblical nor viable in the modern world or the modern church. But what we are trying to test now is not whether this observation gives reason to scold someone. The question is whether it is into the root stock of the heirs of Mennonite culture that God is most likely to be able to engraf the new radical reformation reality which is His will for the modern world.

In earlier conversations concerning this paper, it has become clear that there should have been more explanation of the significance of the concept of ^"borrowing" as the description of the major stages of change which made American Mennonites what they are. It should not have been assumed in the descriptions above of repeated ^"borrowing" made by various Mennonite leaders, that an immediate negative value judgment was involved. The descrip