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Chapter Four: The Call for Women to Follow
This chapter investigates the effect of the divine call on Anabaptist/Mennonite women—both in the early era of the movement, and again during the period of the modern missionary movement.
In the first part, this chapter shows how the distinctive early Anabaptist / Mennonite understanding of the divine call, based on direct pneumatic intervention, had a dynamic, liberating effect on the women recipients. In their family lives it afforded them a relatively important role, as they were in many ways seen, by their spouses, as equals in witness and in suffering. Through their own calling, they had become ‘spiritual companions’1 of their husbands in dangerous times. Through their direct personal call, and based on the priesthood of believers, they were also seen to make an important contribution to the church community. Although generally they were never recognized as equals in church governance, in the early days some of them acted as prophetic leaders, and in some cases substituted where no suitable man was available.
However, in spite of their relatively important role, Anabaptist women remained beholden to the increasingly restrictive rules of their communities, which among other things expected of the women selfless caring and supporting of others—concepts that were embodied in the call to discipleship. As part of the overall shift of Anabaptism / Mennonitism, from the Spirit to the letter, the women’s call increasingly became restrictively defined by the obligations of Anabaptist / Mennonite discipleship.
In the second part, this chapter shows how, during the modern mission era, women again found new avenues for ministry that had been closed for them in their home congregations. However, the role that was assigned to women, and which women disciples often assigned to themselves, was often oriented towards a ministry defined by human relationships and the service and care for others. In this scenario, the danger existed that they might remain bound by socio-religious obligations and the needs of others, rather than being freed up to follow the divine call itself.
Women Caught in the Tension Between the Inner and the Outer
Did the Anabaptist understanding of the divine call fundamentally affect the women’s standing in the Anabaptist community, and in the more intimate sphere of their families? The answer depends on certain critical variables, which are largely determined by the degree to which the community acknowledged the non-gender-specific concept of the direct empowerment of the Holy Spirit. The degree to which the churches practiced the spiritual gifts depended on the Anabaptist branches, and on the time period.
The Martyrs’ Mirror provides many indicators of the impact of the call on early Anabaptist women, as far as their family relationships and their role in church and society is concerned. It shows that, in both spheres, they had a relatively important status. According to John Klassen,2
(t)he records of the Martyrs’ Mirror show, that women were active members within the Anabaptist community and were capable of expressing their faith both in personal terms and in terms of doctrine.3
Anabaptist women were called to follow Christ as much as their male counterparts in witnessing and also in suffering, and as a result they had a strong impact on the movement as a whole. In the words of C. Arnold Snyder, ‘women played a central role in the spread and the survival of the movement.’4 Many made their contribution in a personal, non-official form, based on the priesthood of believers. This is evident from letters contained in the Martyr’s Mirror.5 Jennifer Hiet Umble established that 29 letters were written by men to women, mostly their spouses.6 The content of these letters indicates that, in times of persecution, women fulfilled an important spiritual ministry towards their persecuted fellow believers, by supporting and encouraging their believing husbands and other brothers and sisters in the faith. Their incarcerated spouses relied on their support, by drawing on them as ‘spiritual companions’7—addressing them as ‘sisters in the Lord.’8 By using this term, these men acknowledged ‘a degree of spiritual equality for female believers.’9 Jennifer Hiett Umble further points out that this spiritual support was critical in the case of the wives of congregational leaders.10 Anabaptist marriages were, however, not only defined through their spiritual aspects. Hiett Umble refers to many instances where husbands used respectful, grateful, and intimate terms of endearment to address their wives.11
The women’s involvement with imprisoned Anabaptist believers sometimes cost them their lives—but many of them actively12 chose to suffer rather than deny their personal calling, because they accepted suffering as a requirement of true discipleship.13 In this context, Hiett Umble questions whether, on a deeper level, they really chose freely to suffer rather than to compromise—and if their choice was not rather passive, because they believed that ultimately their fate was not in their hands, but that it was God who determined their destiny.14 Nevertheless, Keith L. Sprunger15 comments that, in those early days, ‘Anabaptist women were called upon by the church for extraordinary deeds.’16
Based on their personal divine call, early Anabaptist women also made significant choices in their ordinary family life, where some of them were faced with the decision either to join the Anabaptist movement, or to continue to live life with an unbelieving husband. In such cases, the divine call and their marriage to their heavenly spouse had priority over human ties. This left the believing spouse free to choose a divorce. This was true for all Anabaptist branches. Pointing out the similarity between this view of the marriage vows and the monastic vows, Snyder refers to ‘the “ascetic” substratum (in) all Anabaptist thinking about marriage that marks it as Anabaptist and nothing else.’17 Based on this understanding, that the divine call overrides all natural relationship, the parent-child bond, too, was secondary to the bond between the parents and Christ, although there is ‘a great deal of evidence of parental love among the Anabaptists.’18 In this context, Klassen quotes the example of one mother who rather gave away the child she was nursing to a wet nurse, than to recant. It is telling, though, that this did cause her the greatest sorrow of all.19
Over time, the relatively great freedom of choice that this practice afforded women, where spouses at first were chosen according to spiritual principles20, began to restrict, and the dynamic impact of the divine call on marriage became more static. According to Snyder, the practice of leaving unbelieving partners for the sake of the call of Christ ‘was replaced by obedience to community norms.’21 These norms largely reflected the customs of the wider society, and were theologically underpinned by the congregation’s interpretation of the Pauline teachings.22
Such a considerably more restrictive family life was practiced in the highly structured Hutterite community. Packull describes this form of community interaction as fitting into the patriarchal society of the time, with the shared ‘traditional virtues of chastity, modesty, humility, reticence and piety,’23 and with a similar high regard for ‘hard work, and frugality.’24 Within the Hutterite society, the women’s role and place were determined not primarily by her personal call but by the overall system which they compared to the functioning of a ‘beehive or an ingenious clockwork.’25 John Klassen similarly describes the Dutch Anabaptist community as one that ‘accepted the patriarchal views of society, in which the male dominated the female and the children obeyed.’26 However, he also points out that ‘The Anabaptists did not have a unified stance on questions of and the nature of the family.’27
Women’s Formal Ministry in the Church
The relatively important informal status of women in early Anabaptist life also applied to their formal role in the church. On the whole, the same rule that had applied in matters of family and marriage also applied in the context of the church: the greater the openness of the community to the direct pneumatic influence, the more significant the role of the women. Or to use C. Arnold Snyder’s terminology, the inner-outer tension, which underpinned Anabaptist faith and practice and their understanding of the divine call, also affected the development of the status of women in the congregation. In the early days, where direct pneumatic intervention was a critical feature of all Anabaptist religious life, the women’s contribution was to some degree that of equals. As the movement became more organized and formalized, this trend was reversed:
(The emphasis on the Spirit of God working within the individual believer) opened wider leadership possibilities for women because ‘the Spirit bloweth where it listeth;’ while (emphasis on the Word) limited leadership possibilities for women by appealing to community standards (which tended to mirror societal norms) and Pauline restrictions.28
The personal pneumatic calling and empowerment of women introduced important elements of liberation into their socio-religious life—even if it did not bring about full gender equality as such. What it did was to ‘re-establish(..) the proper, biblical divine “order,” with God as Lord over all.’29 In practical terms, this meant that ‘(o)bedience to God was the first step, but it was followed by the requirement of obedience to the Body of Christ on earth, the church.’30 This was clearly evident in the way that Anabaptist congregations were led. Although there are no records, for example, that in the Zollikon congregation women were administering the sacraments/symbols,31 there was a time when, even in that congregation—from the start relatively letter-bound—a woman, Margret Hottinger, acted as a prophetic leader. Other women, too, were known to practice a prophetic leadership role to various degrees among the Zürich and St. Gall Swiss Brethren, and in other early Anabaptist branches. They also seemed to play an active part in church discipline, including the discipline of male church leaders.32 While women were generally excluded from official leadership roles, Snyder mentions another exception, namely where men proved to be too weak to fulfil this role fearlessly.33 By implication, in the more mystically inclined branches of Tirol and Moravia, women played a more prominent role—both in the court records, and as lay leaders, lay missionaries, and martyrs.34
The overall tendency within the Anabaptist movement, over time, to increasingly emphasize the Word over the Spirit, explains how, according to Werner O. Packull, ‘the economic-social space allotted to women constricted during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, (…)’35 Menno Simons had already abolished the office of prophet both for males and females—mainly in response to the spiritualist aberrations of his days. This closed the door to the one acknowledged official leadership role that had been open to women in Anabaptist congregations. During the following period, women’s leadership roles were largely restricted to informal positions, and notably also to hymn writing. According to Keith L. Sprunger, the volume of hymn writing was ‘sometimes sufficient for a collection or even a full hymnbook.’36 In the Dordrecht Confession of 1632, however, the office of deaconess was explicitly included. The duties of a deaconess were described as follows:
And that also honorable aged widows should be chosen and ordained deaconesses, that they with the deacons may visit, comfort, and care for, the poor, feeble, sick, sorrowing and needy, as also the widows and orphans and assist in attending to other wants and necessities of the church to the best of their ability (1 Tim. 5:9, Rom 16:1; James 1:27).
Sprunger points out that, in later developments in the nineteenth century, pioneered by some Dutch congregations, Anabaptist/Mennonite women gained a more official voice, by being afforded the right to vote. Later, in 1905, Dutch women
‘served on church boards (…) and about the same time women began preaching occasionally from Dutch pulpits.’37
In conclusion, our investigation into the role and status of the early Anabaptist woman, both in her family and in the church sphere, leaves us with an ambivalent picture. The distinctive Anabaptist understanding of the sense of call as a direct personal pneumatic intervention, which was present to various degrees in all early congregations, provided her hand with a measure of equality with her male counterparts. This applied especially to the areas of witnessing and suffering and informal ministry, and to some degree to more formal leadership roles in the church through prophecy, and through her joint witness with her husband. The pneumatic phase of the movement lasted for varying periods in the different branches. Even during that time, however, the women’s role and status were largely defined by the restrictive norms of society. This became increasingly the case through ever more rigid congregational obligations imposed on women, which were largely due to the overall shift from the inner to the outer of second-generation Anabaptism.
The Modern Call to Serve
It was largely through the modern missionary call, which importantly grew out of a spiritual renewal, that Anabaptist/Mennonite women again found unique, meaningful, and innovative avenues for ministry—many aspects of which were habitually closed to them in their home congregations. However, Anne White38 reminds us that early 19th century female missionaries were in many ways viewed as mere assistants to male missionaries.39 In this context, Fiona Bowie40 writes of the ‘invisibility’ of the early women missionaries.41 It stands to reason that those women who did not feel part of their husband’s sense of call were even more invisible than their actively involved counterparts. This notion of the invisible missionary reminds us of the shadowy existence of the missionary wife in the Poisonwood Bible. She had involuntarily been incorporated into her husband’s missionary call, but never assumed an active part in it—at least not in any way that he would have appreciated. Instead, she did what she had to do on her own, unnoticed by her driven spouse. Yet she was insightful and effective in her own way—in many aspects much more so than her husband who had the call.
To return to the early female missionaries in general, White remarks that, although their contributions ‘were vastly underappreciated and underreported in mission historiography, through the missionary call, “woman’s sphere” became the world for them.’42 Their newfound scope for ministry moved them from the mundane to a world of risk and innovation. In the words of Juhnke,
The missionary movement was on the cutting edge of social reform, and out on that edge were new opportunities for women.43
Similarly Wilbert R. Shenk points out that44
Where people managed to hold in tension inward piety and outward concern for the world, (…) renewal movements became engines of wide-ranging innovation, the modern mission movement with its strong women’s ministry being one of the most evident fruits.45
As had been the case in the early Anabaptist movement, the personal divine call had a limited equalizing effect for women. Adrian Hastings’46 observations on the missionaries’ gender-equalizing impact on the mission field also applies to the women missionaries themselves: their Gospel call was an equalizing factor, because through it ‘(w)omen and men shared the same beliefs, the same fears, the same sense of right and wrong.’47 Dana Robert also points out that, according to her research into American women in mission,48 the motivation for mission of the early 19th century Protestant American women missionaries was the same as that of their husbands:49
Missionary wives shared with their husbands the view that, without the God found through Jesus Christ, the souls of humanity would not obtain eternal life.50
She further mentions, as additional motivating factors, love for God and Christ, disinterested benevolence, typical American optimism, the wish to serve as co-worker with God, and the desire to glorify God.51 What did distinguish the motivation of these early female missionaries from that of their male counterparts, however, was a ‘desire for usefulness, concern for women and children, and the necessity of serving their husbands.’52 From the start, these concerns put women’s ministry under additional emotional and physical strain.
This posed a challenge particularly to missionary women with their own families. Firstly, they shared with their husbands the burden for souls. Secondly, they labored for their mission congregants’ practical and physical wellbeing and development. And thirdly, they responded to their families’ needs, which the community expected them to address, but which was ultimately rooted in their own strong instinct. In practical terms, the latter could mean that, as family women, they had to grapple with the considerable and often emotionally and physically draining odds of converting ‘a series of simple houses into homes,’53 keeping their families fed, clothed, and healthy, and the younger children educated.54 They had to try to combine this challenging, multifaceted engagement at the home front with their official mission engagement.55 This was expected of them by the mission organization, but it was also close to their heart, and very much part of their sense of calling. What was true from a missionary perspective, namely that ‘most women could select only a portion for their mission, but would feel the burden of inadequacy for the whole,’56 more often than not also applied to the woman's role as a wife and mother.
In contrast to the single women, whose ministry was at least superficially more independent, and, partly due to the fact that missionary assignments were primarily geared towards the husbands, married women sometimes lacked a strong sense of personal self. Bertsche makes the following observation in this regard:
Perhaps the greatest challenge of all for the missionary wife and mother was to find her own identity in the mission world of which she was a part. Across mission history, placement of missionary couples had been largely determined by the training and gifts of the men. CIM/AIMM was no exception. Thus it was that a high percentage of the time, missionary wives followed their husbands from one post to another and from one assignment to the next. (…) on the whole missionary wives lived and served in a male oriented landscape.57
Bertsche indicates that what kept most married women from falling into a permanently negative attitude, because of this and other gender related burdens, was primarily the common sense of call that many had developed together with their husbands. This enabled a couple, or should we say the wives, to ‘super-center’, in the Tournier sense, beyond their respective interests, on a higher purpose:
With the conviction that God called and led them to Africa as couples, the details of the assignment for either spouse were not of first importance. Their ongoing presence and ministry, together, in a land to which they believed God had led them, was their overarching concern.58
What Bertsche wrote of missionaries in general applied also to the women, namely that in all the very real suffering they had to endure because of their missionary call, their perception that they were part of the meta-story, the ‘overarching concern’ largely kept them from falling into victim mode. Their overall focus kept returning to the fact that
(t)o serve in an area and among a people to which they believe God has led them and to witness the transforming impact of God’s grace in the lives of people around them affords a profound sense of fulfilment.59
If we turn our attention to the single women, who overall made up approximately 20% of CIM/AIMM missionaries,60 we find that they were vulnerable not only because of their gender, but also because of their marital status. In the early days of the modern mission movement, they were not only seen, together with their married colleagues, as second-class missionaries, but they were originally sent out only reluctantly, and were obliged to rely on married households for their support and living arrangements.61 Over time, single women became an accepted and valued part of the mission endeavor, and learned also to rely on each other—but they always had to make an extra effort to become embedded in supportive and nurturing relationships that would help them cope with the diverse missionary demands on the mission field. Bertsche refers to this subject from a male perspective when he writes:
The lot of single women missionaries has never been a simple or easy one. For many, their assignments have taken them into the isolation of the bush stations. Though usually situated with missionary couples and families who have sought to be supportive and helpful, there inevitably come those times, at the end of the day, when in the solitude of their own living quarters, they are cast upon their own resources to hold loneliness at bay.62
In addition, great flexibility was expected from single missionaries. As example, Bertsche firstly mentions their living arrangements, which often required them to share a household with whatever other single happened to be looking for a house-mate. Secondly, with regards to their deployment, this was often based on the assumption that moving would be easier for them than for their married counterparts. Thirdly, they had to negotiate their position between home culture and mission culture single-handedly.63 Sarah Burkholder further mentions that ‘returning missionaries listed spouses, friends and relatives, in that order, as being the most helpful to them on returning to North America.’64 Clearly the unmarried woman has to substitute the married woman’s primary support in her re-entry experience.
The single woman usually had a stronger sense of identity than her married counterpart. Unlike the married women, who sometimes followed their husband’s call, singles usually entered missions ‘with a deep certainty of God’s leading in their lives.’65 They usually, though not always, ‘have come at peace with themselves about their single state as they applied for service, believing that in God’s purpose for them there was a place and ministry which they and they alone could fulfil.’66 It stands to reason that many of the unmarried women, at the point of applying for missionary service, had indeed ‘dealt’ with important aspects of their single status and developed a heightened sense of their personal identity. This is likely to have had a liberating effect on them, setting free additional energies for their missionary challenges.
Renee Sauder conducted a study on women in pastoral ministry.67 In her investigation into the various influences that led women to choose pastoral ministry, she found that, for 82 percent of the participants, it was an ‘inner call.’68 She further found that, because of their social conditioning, the women often did not really expect that they would be successful in their ministry. Sauder suggests that one factor that kept them ‘bound’, and prevented them from ministering boldly, was their need to lead in such a way that relationships were not disturbed.
Besides psychological factors, she points in particular to the ‘language of discipleship’ as an underpinning factor for this phenomenon in Mennonite women. Mennonite women in particular felt obligated to ‘fulfil others’ demands’—and the demands of discipleship are very many. They are expressed primarily in humility and in the selfless service of others—while the original concept of discipleship as a commitment to the divine call of Christ is largely forgotten. Based on Sauder’s findings, we may conclude that ministry, including missionary service, can be done in its true sense only if women succeed in re-orienting themselves—from the obligation of discipleship as a means to address the needs of others, to the liberating call of Christ to serve him rather than people.
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1The term is used by Jennifer Hiett Umble. Cf. Umble Hiett Jennifer, ‘Spiritual Companions: Women as Wives in the Martyr’s Mirror,’ Mennonite Life, Sept. 1990, pp.32-35.
2KLASSEN John, ‘Women and the Family Among Dutch Anabaptist Martyrs,’ MQR 60, 1986, pp. 548-571.
3 Ibid., p.571.
4 SNYDER C. Arnold, Anabaptist History and Theology: An Introduction, Pandora Press, Kitchener,
Ont., 1995, p.4.
5According Klassen 28,6% of those identified by gender in the Martyr’s Mirror were women. (‘Women and the Family Among Dutch Anabaptist Martyrs,’ p.549).
6‘Spiritual Companions,’ p.32.
7Ibid., p.32.
8Ibid.
9Ibid., p.34.
10Cf. ‘Spiritual Companions, pp.32f.
11Ibid., p.33.
12Cf. i.a. HIET UMBLE Jenifer, ‘Women and Choice: An Example of the Martyr’s Mirror’ MQR LXIV, 1990, pp.135-145, p.137.
13‘Women and Choice’ p.140.
14Ibid.,p.144.
15SPRUNGER Keith, ‘God’s Powerful Army of the Weak: Anabaptist Women of the Radical Reformation,’ in Triumph over Silence, Women in Protestant History, Richard L. Greaves, (ed.), Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, London, 1985, pp.45-74.
16Ibid., p.74.
17Anabaptist History and Theology, p.292.
18‘Women and the Family among Dutch Anabaptist Martyrs,’ p.565.
19Cf. Ibid., p.566.
20Cf. ‘Spiritual Companions,’ p.32.
21Anabaptist History and Theology, p.292.
22Cf. ibid. This is confirmed by Jennifer Hiett Umble, who writes, ‘ … the attitudes of Anabaptist men toward the religious and marital status of Anabaptist women do not seem to differ radically from the sixteenth century norm. (‘Spiritual Companions,’ p.33).
23‘We are Born to Work like the Birds to Fly,’ p.86.
24Ibid.
25Ibid., p.85.
26Ibid., p.549.
27Ibid., p.550.
28Anabaptist History and Theology, p.253.
29Ibid.
30Ibid.
31Ibid., p.254.
32Ibid., p.258.
33Ibid.
34Ibid., p.259.
35PAKULL Werner O., "We are Born to Work like the Birds to Fly: The Anabaptist-Hutterite Ideal Woman," MQR 73:1, 1999, pp 75-86, p.75.
36God’s Powerful Army of the Weak: Anabaptist Women of the Radical Reformation,’ p.56.
37Ibid., p.56.
38WHITE Ann, ‘Counting the Cost of Faith: America’s Early Female Missionaries, Church History, Vol. 57, 1988, pp. 19-30.
39Ibid., p.30.
40BOWIE Fiona, ‘Introduction: Reclaiming Women’s Presence,’ in Women and Missions: Past and Present, Anthropological and Historical Perceptions, Fiona Bowie, Deborah Kirkwood and Shirley Ardener, (eds.), Berg, Providence/Oxford, 1993, pp.1-19.
41Ibid., p.2.
42‘Counting the Cost of Faith: America’s Early Female Missionaries,’ p.30.
43As examples, Juhnke mentions that ‘Single women were in charge of forty evangelical boards of missions in 1910. The Union Missionary Training Center in Brooklyn, where many early Mennonite missionaries went for preparation, was founded by a woman’ (A People of Mission, p.67).
44Cf. also Sharon Klingelsmith’s description of critical work done at the mission home front by the Women’s Missionary Societies. ‘Women in the Mennonite Church,’ p163
45SHENK Wilbert R., in Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of their Thought and Practice, Mercer University Press, Macon, Georgia, 1997 reprinted 1998, p.X.
46HASTINGS Adrian, ‘Were Women a Special Case?,’ in Women and Missions: Past and Present, Anthropological and Historical Perceptions, pp.109-125.
47Ibid., p.109.
48ROBERT Dana, American Women in Mission: A Social History of their Thought and Practice, Mercer University Press, Macon, Georgia, 1997, reprinted 1998.
49 Ibid., p.27.
50 Ibid., p.25.
51Ibid., p.31.
52Ibid., p.37.
53CIM/AIMM A Story of Vision, Commitment and Grace, p. 687.
54Ibid., pp.687f.
55Especially in the early days of American Protestant mission history, this usually was a teaching or a medical ministry, and in some rare cases an evangelistic ministry. American Women in Mission, pp.160-169, et al.
56American Women in Mission: A Social History of their Thought, p.3.
57 CIM/AIMM A Story of Vision, Commitment and Grace, p.688.
58Ibid., p.688.
59CIM/AIMM A Story of Vision, Commitment and Grace, p.691
60For statistics on Mennonite single missionaries cf. ‘Mennonite Single Women in International Mission,’ in Mission Focus, March 1991, Vol.19, No. 1 pp. 5-6
61 SAUDER Ruth, ‘Mennonite Single Women in International Mission – A History,’ in Mission Focus,
March 1991, Vol.19, No. 1, pp.4-14. p.4
62CIM/AIMM: A story of Vision, Commitment and Grace, p.685.
63CIM/AIMM A Story of Vision, Commitment and Grace, pp, 685f.
64BURKHOLDER Sarah, ‘Support needs of Bicultural Single Anabaptist Women,’ in Mission Focus, Vol. 19, No. 1, March 1991, pp.7-10, p.8 (quoting Austin 1983:278-287).
65CIM/AIMM A Story of Vision, Commitment and Grace, p. 686.
66Ibid., pp. 685f.
67Sauder Renee, ‘Inner Call/Inner Ambivalence: Conflicting Messages in a Fragile Conversation.’’ In Understanding Ministerial Leadership: Essays Contributing to a Developing Theology of Ministry, John A Esau (ed.), pp. 47-56).
68Ibid., p.47.
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