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Chapter Six: The Call to Live as a Mennonite Should

This chapter investigates the women’s early understanding of the Anabaptist / Mennonite concept of being in but not of the world. It demonstrates how, in the environment in which they grew up, the Anabaptist concept of the two worlds had largely come to describe the contrast between Mennonite and non-Mennonite society. To live as a Mennonite should had primarily come to mean adherence to certain cultural norms and practises, which could be traced back to the near literal Anabaptist reading of the Sermon on the Mount. Based on this understanding of their Mennonite identity, the women experienced their community as a community in exile.


The Two World Paradigm


In early Anabaptism, the church, the community of saints, was central to the life of the believer. In the early experience of the missionaries, the church still played a central role. This is illustrated by Missionary 18’s recollection:

Our interests revolved around the church.

As a result, the missionaries were strongly aware, from an early age, of there being two distinct worlds. Missionary 8, who grew up in a predominantly Mennonite commu­n­ity, remembered that, for her as a child, the Mennonite and the non-Mennonite worlds did not mix:

We did not do anything with all of those other people, they were not Mennonites!

Even missionaries who grew up in minority Mennonite communities clearly lived in a two-world paradigm. Missionary 4 remembered how her mother kept the demarc­a­tion lines between the two worlds intact by insisting on sending her children to Mennonite schools:

Everybody else went to the local school, but my mother said no, we were going to the Mennonite boarding school!

Clearly, for them the church-world paradigm, which in the 16th century was a purely ecclesiological concept, had taken on socio-religious meaning. What had remained was the strong adherence to a dichotomous world view—and the related concept of being in the world but not of it was still familiar to many. When asked if she was taught the concept of being in the world but not of it Missionary 5 replied:

Yeah it was central when I was growing up.

While not everybody was familiar to the same degree with the concept as such, everybody was familiar with its practical outworking. This was because, as will be explored in the following section, its meaning, too, had shifted from the ecclesiological to the religio-cultural realm in the form of an amalgamation of religious, ethnic, and socio-economic values. As such, it strongly shaped the women’s identity, and indirectly strongly impacted on their implementation of their mission call.


Anabaptist Identity


Asked about the values with which they grew up, Missionary 17, Missionary 1, and Mis­sion­ary 19 provided the following sample lists:

Honesty, hard work, obedience, pulling your fair share of—whatever;

Honesty and wholesomeness;

Honest living, frugality, to work hard, and to do a variety of things in order to enable the children, (both male and female) to make our own living eventually.

These values echo the ascetic/perfectionist slant of the Anabaptist/Mennonite mon­as­tic roots, and the movement’s optimistic regenerative anthropology. In their youth, the women were reminded, in many ways, that they had to live up to these ideals because they were Mennonites. This is illustrated among others by Missionary 17, who remem­bered her mother saying

… good little Mennonite girls don’t dance.

On probing more deeply into the women’s interpretation of being in the world but not of it, it became clear that one important meaning they attached to the concept was that of simplicity and frugality. Missionary 5 made a direct link between a non-materi­alistic lifestyle and the call to be in the world but not of it:

(Being in the world but not of it) (…) meant that we would have less clothes probably, that we had only enough to meet our need. You didn’t need to follow the fashions. When you bought a pair of shoes, you bought the clumpy solid kind that would last forever. (…). I would have liked for more pretty clothes, but the reason we didn’t have pretty clothes is because they wouldn’t last for four years, and it took more time - they were very practical reasons.

Missionary 8,1 although seemingly not very familiar with the term ‘in the world but not of the world,’ attributed to it a similar meaning:

I think we do have some families who I would consider being in the world but not of the world—is that the way it is? Who are living a very simple life style, who shop at the Et Cetera Shop,2 and are happy with what they find there rather than going buying new clothes at a retail shop, who are satisfied with doing fun things in a simple manner.

This emphasis on simplicity and frugality was also evident in the food with which the women grew up. Although many stressed having eaten well, their food was basic rather than fancy—also reflecting their mostly rural background. Missionary 20 recalled:

(We ate) meat and potatoes, and bread. We always ate well. Mother enjoyed cooking I think and she just did a lot of it. Did a lot of home canning, later then freezing, but we didn’t have a freezer when I was growing up. In fact I can remember when we didn’t have electricity, I remember when we got electricity in our home. So she did a lot of canning, but we ate well, yet they didn’t have a lot of money. So we didn’t have extravagant things.

Missionary 6’s memories illustrate that, at times, a simple and frugal lifestyle was as much the result of economic circumstances as it was a reflection of traditional Anabaptist virtues. This especially as many women grew up during the Great Depression:

As I look back on it now, we and the people that were around us were basically fairly poor. My father’s salary was very minimal from the church,3 and he had to supplement that with raising a cow and chickens, and he did some carpentry work. And I remember the feed for the cattle would come in these bags that had nice designs on it. So my mother would maybe make me a dress out of one, and I’d see another friend, ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘my mum made curtains out of that sack!’ Our mothers all made our clothes.

Growing up with the values of simplicity and frugality had long-term consequences for many—although they were experienced differently by various individuals. This is illus­trated by the following three women. Missionary 5 observed that, for her, these ‘ascetic’ values became at least partly a burden in later life, in the sense that she felt un­able to escape them even if she had wanted to:

Once I was on my own I could buy whatever I wanted to. But, boy, the values had already been instilled strongly!

Missionary 6, however, stressed the enriching aspect of growing up with these ideals, because they taught her to live simply without feeling deprived:

Being frugal was a way of life for everybody, and I never felt poor. And I really credit my parents for that, because they lived very simply and frugally, but we never felt poor. They never gave us that impression. And that to me is being rich!

Missionary 11, who grew up as a Methodist,4 but had been exposed to a very basic early lifestyle in a rural area during the Great Depression, explicitly viewed her frugal childhood as a crucial support factor in her later mission experience:

I had worked very hard on the farm. I know how to do without things. I wasn’t perfect but I had a lot of early life I feel that helped me very, very much on the mission field!

From these comments we gather that, clearly, the simplicity and frugality of their early years had the potential to act either as a support or as a burden in the missionaries’ eventual interpretation of their sense of call.


We will find that the same was the case with such Mennonite virtues as a high work ethic, responsibility, and self-sufficiency. The women grew up knowing that the quality of the women’s work was expected to be of a high standard. Missionary 5 directly linked this to the concept of ‘being in the world but not of the world:’

Being in the world but not of the world meant (…) you didn’t do things slipshod, you did them well. Whether it was your school paper or your work in a committee in church, (…) or you were on a voluntary service assignment, teaching Bible school.

In addition, they were taught from an early age to cope with big work loads, many of them physically demanding. The family chores were generally divided along gender lines, with women being responsible for the domestic domain, including the often sub­stan­tial gardens, and the males being responsible mainly for the typical outside work, with women helping out on the fields. The girls often worked very hard alongside their equally hardworking and competent mothers. This was the case for Missionary 1 and Missionary 5:

My mother grew up during the depression, and she made us work very hard, too. With the garden and then with the chores, and we had chickens and cows and all things that are on a farm that we worked hard at doing also.

I basically worked alongside my mother. In summer we would have been outside in the garden at dawn till breakfast, and then canning, putting up food. This thing, on Monday you do laundry, on Tuesday you iron, and Wednesday and Thursday—something for everyday. During school days I think I was always responsible for making the lunches, because we took our lunch to school, washing dishes, washing the cream separator—I hated it! Because in summer it smelled like sour milk, and in winter, the back porch was so cold.

Missionary 14’s story illustrates the heavy physical aspect of their work:

I (…) remember that we had chores to do. One of my jobs was to bring in coal. In North Dakota we used coal for heat instead of wood. And we did not have electricity at that time. And so we had to carry our water. And we had a little red wagon. I think it was an eight-gallon, maybe just a five-gallon cream can to transport this water, and my twin brother and I were the ones that did that.

Many of the girls were all-rounders, who were competent not only at traditional women’s work but also at male tasks such as handling heavy farming equipment. Mission­ary 20 recalled:

… even girls were out in the field, driving a tractor and stuff.

In this environment, the missionaries learnt from early on to carry responsibility. Missionary 1 remembered developing the children’s sense of responsibility as one of the explicit reasons why her parents assigned duties to them:

My parents never really gave us money to be stewards of, but chores (were used to teach) responsibility.

These chores developed their reliability, perseverance, resourcefulness, and self-sufficiency:

(The tasks were) some of the common ones like, set the table and wash the dishes. And then the way our parents divided up the chores was that every other one was to milk the cows and feed the chickens, milk the cows and feed the chickens. And so I fed the chickens, for years, and years, and years. And even into high school, when I had basketball practices and all these school activities, I had to come home and the chickens were still my responsibility. (…) That was just my job, and I had to do it. I had to figure out what time worked best for me to do it. Or if I wasn’t going to be there just to make sure to give them extra feed or to make sure that somebody else could give them water if I couldn’t be home that evening. So that was responsibility.

They were brought up to develop a high degree of resourcefulness and inde­pen­dence. The children learnt from early on that, although it was considered a virtue to help the less fortunate, even if they were non-Mennonites, good Mennonites did not to accept ‘outside’ assistance such as government support, for example. Missionary 18 stated categ­orically:

During the depression a great many people were on relief. My father, he was a Mennonite and he would never consider going on relief!

Missionary 17 recalled her outrage as a child at learning this lesson:

During the depression (…) the bread wagon and the milk wagon stopped at the council houses. And at our house my mother baked all our bread, and she bought the milk from a man that came down the back alley. (…) She’d come back, and then I wondered, why can’t we be on relief? My father told me that Mennonites don’t go on relief. (…) Yeah, and then I thought ‘That’s not fair!’

This spirit of independence and self-sufficiency tended to go hand in hand with a certain attitude of pride. Missionary 5 alluded to this phenomenon with the following observation:

Many students and especially the boys were trained to be quite self-confident and arrogant, and so there was—how would you say that—I think we were strong personalities, because in the rural areas you weren’t babied. You weren’t given a ride, you walked! And you could complain if you wanted to but it didn’t do any good. Nobody would listen, so you just did it!

Missionary 1 noted that this attitude became an asset for those who joined short-term voluntary service programs:

Our young men were always very popular because of their ‘can do’ attitude.

The effect this attitude had on the long-term missionaries will be discussed at a later stage.

Life in Exile


As was to be expected, especially those who grew up in Mennonite communities often had a strong sense of ‘them’ and ‘us.’ Missionary 8 recounted:

That’s where all my associations were until I went to high school. Really I did not have any friends outside of the Mennonite community until I went to high school.

The majority of missionaries, particularly in their younger years, attended public schools in predominantly Mennonite areas, which were almost exclusively attended by Mennonite children. In response to questions as to how they fitted into the wider society, and whether they had any non-Mennonites contacts, or were discouraged from that, Missionary 1 responded:

I don’t think I even really had the opportunity to, because I went to a public school, but almost all of our classmates were Mennonites. They didn’t all go to our church, but they went to other Mennonite churches. (…) In high school there were non-Mennonites, (…) but I think that probably even there I tended to veer towards the Mennonites or the people that had similar beliefs. And so I don’t think I was discouraged or held back, that was just the kind of a world that I was in.

A minority of interviewees, who grew up in non-Mennonite communities, mixed more easily with outsiders. Missionary 17 recalled having very good friends in school who were not Mennonites. However, when it came to the crucial stage of choosing her marriage partner, the woman’s parents made sure that she would marry a husband from the Mennonite community:

By the time I was in high school, I was back in (Mennonite) Steinbach. And as my sisters reached high school age, they went to Steinbach to stay at my grandparents’, or at my aunts’, because my mother didn’t want us to marry the (non-Mennonite) Sperling boys. She wanted us to marry Mennonites, and we did!

The separation between the two worlds revolved around certain recurring issues. For many, the Mennonite peace stance was one of them. It was particularly topical during World War I and II. Missionary 12 remembered,

When World War ll started, in our church there were several men who were of the drafting age. And one family had four sons and three daughters, and the oldest three sons all were in the army. And my dad asked them to come to our home. And he talked to them for a long time. And they still all went. And then dad explained to us children what difference we could make in the school: ‘If you hear an argument do you enter in and fight against the person?’ I guess as little kids at that time we couldn’t imagine very much how we were different, but we were! And I think most of the teachers knew that the Mennonite children were maybe a little bit different.

Often it was also the moral/ethical values of their community that prevented the children from getting ‘entangled’ in the world and its practices, such as dancing, going to movies, or drinking alcohol. Missionary 17 remembered her mother’s strong objection to her participation in a school dance that had been organized for the visiting British king and queen, because ‘good little Mennonite girls don’t dance:’

Well, the king and queen, George the Sixth, and Queen Elizabeth, were going to come to Winnipeg. And I came home from school. I was so terribly excited! I remember running down the back alley, so I’d get home first to tell mother. And I told her that we were all going to practice to dance for the king and queen. And my mother got this certain look on her face. And I knew something was wrong. And she said, ‘Don’t you know that good little Mennonite girls don’t dance?’ ‘But for the king and queen, mother!’ She let us. We wore her down! We did, we danced for the king and queen!

In addition to their peace stance and ethical/moral distinctives, many interviewees also experienced ‘being different’ based on their ethnicity. Once their ancestors had settled in the United States, their acculturation commonly progressed cautiously and to a very limited degree.


Many families retained German as their home language. Some missionaries grew up with Low German as their mother tongue, High German as ecclesiastical language, and English as basically a foreign language which they were obliged to acquire at school. Based on her isolated upbringing, Missionary 7 actually believed that ‘everybody did that.’ Another woman, however, recalled that

in our home, no we didn’t speak any German.

Overall, living an insular exile existence was the only way of life that most of the mission­aries knew. Yet paradoxically, their multi-lingualism and other non-American ethnic practices reflect some of the cosmopolitan quality that, as we discussed in Chapter Three, is often representative of para-national and para-geographical communities that are poorly integrated into society as a whole. This international note that formed part of the women’s early environment had come about through the faith-related migratory life that characterizes Anabaptist/Mennonite history.


Potentially, it also provided the missionaries with Mennonite-specific coping skills for their journey to and from the mission field—especially as the call to ‘leave’ forms an integral part of the call to be in the world but not of it.


Many missionaries were still acutely aware, as children, that migration was integral to their community’s interpretation of the call of Christ, and therefore formed part of their identity. In many families, story-telling was used as one of the means to keep such memories alive. Missionary 5 observed,

I think we had a strong sense of our movement as a people, because of the persecution. From Holland to Germany to Prussia, and then why they came here, because of the draft. (...) So I think that gave us a strong sense of—we are different.

Missionary 1 understood the migration of her ancestors in the traditional Ana­baptist/Mennonite faith context of the Abrahamic call, which orients itself on the caller rather than on geographical or societal boundaries:

Maybe like Hebrews says, Abraham didn’t have a land that was his own; he was a wanderer, and he went where God told him to go and I think that our whole background, our ancestors (…) they were wanderers, too. There is no land that is their own—you go where God leads you.5

This call to leave often brings with it a sense of alienation, and the emotional pain that is attached to it. This was also the case for some of the women, particularly those who grew up in minority Mennonite communities, and who were often painfully aware of their outsider status. It seemed to be less of an issue for those who were safely embedded in majority Mennonite communities. Missionary 18, for example, who grew up in a pre­dom­inantly non-Mennonite community, spoke of herself and her family as outsiders:

Missionary 18: We never felt a part of the community, because most of the people in our community were Catholic.

In spite of her family’s limited integration attempts, she retained a dominant sense of social alienation in relation to her non-Mennonite environment. Elsewhere, she sums up the list of things that made her different as ‘just a different way of looking at life.’ This is how she describes the emotional toll of her sense of alienation:

I was kind of lonely at school. Because I didn’t do sports. I was not at all athletically inclined, and of course I didn’t do a lot of what the girls did. I couldn’t talk about movies, didn’t go to dances, and although I always had friends but I still felt kind of alienated.

However, she lost this sense of alienation once she started to go to a Christian college—where for the first time in her school career, she happily found herself among like-minded people:

When I went to a Christian college, to me it was such a wonderful, amazing thing, to be able to fit in with people that had similar ideas, and I could take part in the social events and so on.

Missionary 4 experienced how this sense of alienation is exacerbated if ‘being different’ is externally imposed—as tends to be the case for the children of those who follow the call. She grew up in a minority Mennonite community, and experienced parts of her early imposed social isolation from her non-Mennonite environment as very painful. Motivated by a strong desire ‘to be like everybody else,’ she rebelled against the restrictions imposed on her by her family, trying ‘to find (her) own way’ somewhere between the norms of her Mennonite environment and those of the non-Mennonite community. These early existential struggles fostered in her, on the one hand, an indep­endent inner strength. On the other hand, it also left her with a lifelong, lingering sense of social dis-connectedness and emotional loneliness:

I grew up in a (minority Mennonite) community. It was a very small Mennonite church and I was the only one in my age group. And so right from the start I was always upset with my mother! And I would say, ‘Well, everybody else is doing it!’ And I was very social and extrovert. I wanted to be like everybody else, and she wouldn’t let me. She wouldn’t let me do things that other people did, and I was just forced to be a strong individual. In my family I had a sister five years older, and a brother five years younger, and then others older and younger than that, but I was very much alone also in the family. I had to find my own way all the time. (…) Everybody else went to the local school, but my mother said we were going to the Mennonite boarding school. And so our family was very different than the other families in the community there.

Learning to cope with this sense of alienation had two mission-related consequences for many women. On the one hand, it fostered in them from early on a certain strength. Missionary 4 observed:

I was just forced to be a strong individual.

On the one hand, Missionary 18 directly identified her ability to cope with a sense of alienation as an important mission-related benefit, because it prepared her for a similar outsider status on the mission field:

I think it was probably helpful in the mission work because I had been used to being different, and so it was not such a terribly big change.

As we shall discover in later chapters, this sense of alienation or social dis-connect­edness could also become a very real burden for missionaries who, for one reason or another, did not succeed in integrating with the African community, who could have been their support.

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1As an exception, to further illustrate the point, this quote of an interviewee’s adult experience is inserted.

2A Thrift Shop in Newton, KA

3He was a part time minister of a church, as were many other fathers.

4Her example shows that not only Mennonites grew up with frugality and simplicity. It also represented the lifestyle of rural people. But for the Mennonites, those values were in addition socio-religious virtues.

5 The oral traditions were often supported by a plethora of mementos, inter alia in the form of photos, of which this missionary’s parents possessed ‘drawers full of their generation, and the previous generation, and other generations that they couldn’t even identify any more.’ In addition, records of family history were often meticulously preserved and researched: ‘All four sides of my family tree had their own family book - has the genealogy book where it has been researched back and back, and back, what all their names were, and who they all were. And then stories about them, and journals or diaries that they wrote as they came over as they homesteaded in Kansas, those would be printed up. And so there is lots of very interesting stories that we know a lot about.’