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Chapter Five: Responding to the Call to Discipleship
The chapter which follows investigates the women’s early—that is, pre-adult—view of God their eventual divine caller, and their view of what constitutes an appropriate believer’s response to the divine call. In this, we refer in particular to the distinctive Christ-centeredness of the Anabaptist / Mennonite call to discipleship, the impact of the fundamentalist-revivalist tradition, and the influence of individual, personal factors on the women’s early understanding to the call to discipleship. The purpose of this investigation is to provide the foundation for a better understanding of the women’s eventual sense of call to missions, and its role as a support factor and/or as a burden. The inquiry relies primarily on the missionaries’ oral evidence as described in the introductory chapter—with the occasional addition of excerpts from the written body of evidence, particularly from application forms.
The Divine Caller
The missionaries’ memories of their early image of God reveal the amalgamation of traditional Mennonite faith and practice, and strong fundamentalist / revivalist influences which had so concerned the proponents of a ‘Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision.’ Most of the missionaries were, from an early age, acutely aware of two differing theological emphases in their religious environment, and most of them felt that their families fell into one or the other camp. In the case of Missionary 18, this theological division ran through her birth family. She remembered her grandparents, and particularly her pastor grandfather, on the one hand as having been fundamentalist, with a
… pretty prominent image of God as someone who punishes.
Her pastor father’s1 preaching, on the other hand, was
… conservative in the sense Mennonite, but (…) not fundamentalist. Instead he was very, very, very strong on following the teachings of Jesus.
Her father then also applied the typical Anabaptist Christo-centric hermeneutic to scripture. This, she remembered, caused alarm among the majority of her Mennonite community, who were influenced by the fundamentalist/revivalist theology:
In a time when most people in our Christian circles felt that the Bible was the written Word of God, directly from God, my father felt there was such a thing as progressive revelation, and that Jesus was the prior revelation of God. And a lot of people weren’t very happy with that kind of a reading of the Bible. But that was the way he could reconcile the Old Testament with the teachings of Jesus.
Missionary 18 felt torn between these two theological views. Early on in her life, her father’s theology caused her serious anxiety as she remembered
… there was a time when I was growing up that I thought my father was way too liberal, and I was sometimes afraid for his salvation.
However, in later adolescence she began increasingly to adopt her father’s view of Christ’s call. This decision left her with a latent concern that she herself might have gone too far.
Missionary 52 had similar early memories of a divided theological environment. Her father strongly opposed the fundamentalist/revivalist influences, such as the revival-meetings, which were popular among part of her community, and where much of the preaching was on the reality of hell, divine punishment, Christ’s return, and the need for repentance and conversion. He rejected such preaching as a means through which one either came to faith or grew in faith. Instead, he focused on Christ the servant as the role-model for the discipleship-life, whom he tried to imitate in a mostly non-verbal way
… through the actions to the people (…) that needed help3
The girls usually adopted their parents’, especially their fathers’ theology.
The God Who is ‘Not to be Trifled With’
For most women, whatever their tradition, God was to be taken seriously. Missionary 8 remembered:
He was a father, worthy of respect, of worship, of praise …
Missionary 17 similarly remembered the God of her childhood as having been very holy. For her, this notion was epitomized by the traditional Anabaptist/Mennonite4 Spartan atmosphere of her church:
The Kleingemeinde,5 was very plain, a kind of greyish-blue color—the floor and the benches, just ordinary windows, no decoration whatsoever in the church, no musical instrument whatsoever in the church.
Her sense of God’s holiness was further reinforced by the fact that the church services were conducted in High German as opposed to the commonly spoken Low German or English:
… you addressed (God) in a special language. 6
All this led her to the conclusion that
God was austere, but very, very holy, he was not to be trifled with!
Although some other aspects of her perception of God changed with time, his holiness remained a permanent feature in her view of him:
I still believe he is very holy …
Many interviewees remembered that, mixed with their awe of God was a fear of God, which at times bordered on terror. This view was predominantly rooted in the fundamentalist/revivalist tradition, which strongly emphasized the realities of divine punishment, hell, etc. We will deal with this phenomenon next.
The Divine Taskmaster
Many interviewees had a dual image of God, derived primarily from fundamentalist/ revivalist influences. It consisted of the God of love who simultaneously was the God of punishment. Missionary 20 remembered:
I think I have always thought of God as a loving and caring personality, but I know that I also have always seen the judgmental aspect; that if you don’t do what you are to do that there will be punishment.
For Missionary 16 the fear aspect was often the driving force behind her decision. Her conversion, for example, was motivated by
… that kind of fear thing, to avoid the bad.7
Missionary 13 had similarly fear-oriented early memories of God:
He was pretty terrifying. If you didn’t behave, he was gonna get ya! And so yes, we had a real fear—a holy fear of God. That we had to behave and draw the line or he would punish us. (…) But this was as a young child, because we had a lot of warnings in the German language about how fierce, how strict he was. And of course they were a lot stricter in those days than they are now. I mean, you towed the line!
As her comments imply, most missionaries found relief in their later youth from the more extreme aspects of this early fear of God and especially from the fear of eternal punishment, mainly through their conversion experience. However, occasionally the terror of God and the fear of his punishment remained a permanent problematic feature of a woman’s image of God. This was the case with Missionary 15:
I think (I had) too much of a legalistic image (of God), something that I have been trying to shake all my life, and I think it still comes out in different ways!
While both the intensity of her fear of God as well as its lasting effect were the exception among the interviewees, many missionaries retained a life-long sense that God respectively corrects and rewards all their deeds, and that he punishes their transgressions. Missionary 13 for example believed,
he has his ways of correcting us and then he rewards us.
Similarly Missionary 20 commented that
if you don’t do what you are to do, there will be punishment.
This image of God as a kind of divine taskmaster is likely to keep the missionaries in a permanent state of low-key tension, causing them to be sub-consciously looking over their shoulders ensuring that God is not displeased with them. As such it might lead to a fear-driven as opposed to love-driven ministry.
The following section shows that the women’s early view of the divine caller was not shaped by theological concepts only.
Protective and Benevolent but Remote
Many missionaries’ view of God was also reflective of their experience of their fathers. Many of these men were shaped by their Mennonite heritage, by their European backgrounds, and by the fact that they and their families often had had to survive great hardships on account of their faith convictions before they finally arrived in North America.
The missionaries usually spoke fondly of their fathers—yet there was also a certain painfulness attached to their memories. Many remembered them as comforting, strong protectors—but also as distant and silent enigmas. Missionary 17 recalled having had a strong feeling of security in her father’s presence:
We thought of our parents as great protectors. Our father especially was. (…) He would sometimes be working late, and he would come home on a Friday night, and I would hear him coming in, and stamp the snow off his shoes on the rug, kind of sigh or make a sound—security, total security! Or when I would hear him bank the furnace for the night, total security! And then it would stay warm all night. And then in the morning I would hear him getting the fire going again to warm us all up. Yeah, great, felt very protected, and very sheltered, very sheltered. Yeah, good feeling.
At the same time, she remembered with pain that all her life her father had to a large degree remained a closed book to her:
I was all very sad when my father died, because I felt like I never knew him. My mother revealed herself to me, but my father did not.
She attributed his inability to communicate on an emotional level to the era in which he had grown up, and to his European background:
In those days they couldn’t. Those autocratic European fathers—they knew what their job was, and they did it well, but I don’t think my—maybe my father said he loved me. I know my husband’s father never did, never in his whole life! (…) Never once did his father say I love you. He was his youngest boy! It’s hard, deep, deep it’s missing!
In a similar vein, Missionary 4 remembered prominently her father’s inability to sympathize with what he perceived as ‘weakness’ in other people:
He was a survivor of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. He came (to Canada) as a two-year old. He only lived because ‘MCC’ sent relief food to that area. In fact he had health problems because of malnutrition. That kind of stayed with him for his life. (…) He was a survivor. He said, ‘Everybody should be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.’ And we said, ‘Some people can’t do it, dad!’ He said, ‘Well I did, they should be able to!’
A number of interviewees made a direct link between their early image of God and the way they experienced their fathers or other important ‘male figures’ in their lives, emphasizing in particular their kindness and competence, yet also their ‘vague,’ ‘distant,’ and/or ‘non-communicative’ nature. Missionary 5 and Missionary 1 connected their early image of a benevolent and protective yet remote God with their memories of important males in their early lives:
I would say it was a loving elderly male God. And most of the male figures in my life were distant and sort of non-communicative with me. They were there to provide the boundaries, but like my grandfather (…) he sat in the parlor and smiled. That was sort of my image of him, and I don’t remember him doing much, but I’d say that was pretty close to what my image of God would be—those elderly males with beards who were in the community.
I think I probably thought of God as somebody distant, not really somebody that I could just feel a real closeness with. I’m not sure if that’s tied in together with my relationship with my father, but my father was very much of an introvert. And he was not a talker, and he just was—his business mind, he was very wise, maybe that’s kind of what my image of God was. It wasn’t somebody that one could have a close relationship with in that you could talk with him but he just knew the right thing to do. And so I think that maybe God was kind of that also. More of a distant person. But he could always hear what I would say or what my prayers were. It wasn’t like he was so far a way that he never heard me, he was always there.
Missionary 17 further echoed this observation, that her father-in-law’s failure to express his love for her husband had left him with something ‘deep missing.’ Missionary 5 recounted how the emotional restraint practised in her family, and particularly by her father, similarly left her with a lifelong need to achieve perfection:
(In my family) you didn’t express a lot of affection or affirmation. I have often said I never heard my father affirm me. Mainly what he said was, you could do better. So that left sort of a perfectionist kind of attitude to just—yeah, you are always striving, you can always do a bit better.
It will later be demonstrated that, if not resolved during the pre-mission period, such an emotionally distant image of the divine caller represented a potentially heavy burden. Although over time many had their early view of an emotionally distant God profoundly changed, this was usually a gradual and often painful process, sometimes brought on by the pressures of their missionary calling. Others, like Missionary 5, grappled all their lives with a father God who they felt demanded nothing less than perfection.
We shall now investigate what turned out to be the most individual aspect of the women’s view of the divine caller, which is based on key personal experiences of God.
Experienced Personally
Some interviewees referred to personal, dynamic experiences that impacted strongly on their view of God. These cannot easily be assigned to Anabaptist/Mennonite, fundamentalist/revivalist, or psychological formation categories. They tended to occur at times of personal crisis, when God became very immediate and real to them. Missionary 17 remembered that such an experience left her in awe of God. There had been considerable tension in her home over her father’s ‘unholy’ lifestyle, including his smoking habit. He finally spoke to a pastor. The results strongly impressed the young future missionary:
One Monday morning, very shortly after that, he was getting up, going to go to work at the potter. And he hadn’t smoked when he first got up which was surprising. And he was gonna smoke at the bus stop where he was waiting for the bus to take him to work, and he threw the packet of cigarettes into the snow, and that was it—it was gone! It was gone! Now that to a teenage girl is very impressive, if your father has smoked all your life, and all of a sudden the power of God just (click noise)—that’s how it happened! And from then on there were devotions, and things were different.
When asked how she experienced that, she responded:
I liked it! And I was very awed at the power of God – very awed!
Missionary 9, an MK who had been brought up in an Indian boarding school, and was eventually sent to the U.S. for her tertiary education, experienced the profound separation trauma that usually accompanies such a move. At the height of her crisis, she had an experience with God which she later identified as a changing point, because she suddenly realized that God felt with her:
Leaving home was like the end of the world coming to me. And when my father took me to Calcutta and put me on the ship, we were standing on the gang plank, just before the bell rang for all visitors to go off. He was talking to me and gave me a little New Testament in Hindi. (…) I still have that, I take it along to my talks sometimes. Then the bell rang, and he had to go off and I went up on deck as the tugs pulled us out on the Hugli River. It was getting dark, and Calcutta was getting farther and farther away and I waved until I couldn’t see him any more. Then I went up to where my cabin was. I didn’t want to go down to dinner. Everybody else was down at dinner. I went up on the deck, and it was night, just dark, and I was in the dark because I felt I was leaving my home and my family, and I was coming to this wild and woolly country of America. I was on the deck and it was just the stars shining down in the water and all I could see was one other steamer coming in. Those were the only lights I saw, except our own. So I said to God, God I said, I just can’t do this any more! I can’t be going away from home. I said, since I’m seven years old every year I have had to say goodbye to my parents, and then hello when we get there for vacation for two, three months. (…) And so I said, I can’t do that again. Well he says, you never need to say goodbye to me! That was a changing point, and I thought, God has his hand in how I’m feeling. Feeling has come into my whole experience. God is feeling with me. He knows how I feel. And he’ll know that I’ll understand it.
Missionary 4, too, recalled a profound personal experience with God at a time of crisis in her late teens. It was during her time of voluntary service that she realized that God transforms lives:
My experience in voluntary service in North America taught me that God transforms lives. I had very rough teen years, and so that experience of living in a community of caring people—it brought a spiritual growth, and it reconnected me with God in a real way, where the Bible took on new meaning, prayer took on new meaning, ...
The following section investigates the women’s early concept of what it means to follow the divine call.
The Believer’s Response
The missionaries grew up in an environment with a very strong God-consciousness. Most of them remembered that the church determined their culture. Missionary 21 is representative when she recalls that,
… being a part of a church community was important.Missionary 18 remembered:
Our life was bound up with the church. That was the main thing in our lives—God, the church.
This typical Anabaptist concept of the faith community, which combines the religious and social spheres of life, created in its members an all-prevailing God-consciousness, which was inter alia expressed through frequent, regular public worship. Missionary 18 recounted:
We had church services on Wednesday nights, prayer meetings and of course church and Sunday school on Sundays. We had two services on Sunday that we always attended.
This public worship was usually complemented by family and personal devotions. This is how Missionary 1 remembered family devotions around meal times:
We ate every single meal together as a family. And we had prayers before and after every meal, a prayer of thanksgiving after the meal, as well as a prayer beforehand. Often those were rote prayers, but not necessarily. But then we also had devotions after every breakfast, and after every supper. And that would be out of a devotional book or magazine8 or something.
Missionary 13’s memory illustrates how seriously family worship was taken:
Every morning! Sometimes we had to get up for that, even though we had nothing planned for the day, we had to be up for breakfast, for the devotions. I remember in our early years we always also prayed in the evening, during reading or writing or whatever, then we’d kneel by our chairs.
Missionary 20 told how this early God-centered lifestyle permanently shaped her devotional practices:
(The devotions) made a lot of impression on my mind.
And while she could not recall specific teachings, they left her with a lasting sense that:
… there is always time for God in your day, and just the fact that (devotions) is an important part of family life.
This strong community God-centeredness and the deeply entrenched communal and private worship practices formed habits for developing and strengthening their relationship with the divine caller, both on a personal and on a communal level.
In the context of an all-prevailing community-oriented God-consciousness, we shall now investigate individual aspects of the believer’s response to the divine call to faith, beginning with the role of repentance and conversion.
Repentance and Conversion
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, a majority of missionaries grew up in communities affected by the fundamentalist/revivalist movement, where the divine judgment, the Second Coming of Christ, the need for repentance, and salvation from eternal condemnation were prominent sermon topics.
A crisis childhood/adolescence repentance and conversion experience was common among a significant majority of missionaries. The women remembered experiencing a sudden, strong sense of their sinfulness in the face of a holy, divine judge. Their early repentance and conversion experience represented, for most, the moment when they received divine forgiveness and assurance of eternal salvation.
For some, this assurance came about in stages, as in the case of Missionary 6:
When I was about eight, my mother prayed with me one evening and I look back at the time when I accepted Christ in a personal way. However, until I was about age twelve, I often had a lot of insecurity. Now am I really saved? And sometimes there would be a lot of emphasis on the Second Coming of Christ or on hell, and I’d wonder (…) am I really saved? But when I was twelve I went to a church camp and made a commitment again of my life and from that point on I never had those doubts.
On the surface of it, this view of salvation shifts the salvific act completely into the realm of divine grace—uncoupling it from the human response of the practical, committed discipleship life as a means of authenticating the experience as true repentance. However, we shall discuss this issue further and in a more nuanced manner under the following section. For the time being, it can be noted that, for most, their conversion experience amounted to more than simply escaping an eternity in hell, but represented a serious, practical commitment to follow the divine call. This was the case with Missionary 16, who was convinced that she would have chosen to follow God even if she had not been scared into it:
I think there was never a thought in my mind that that’s not what I wanted to do with my life. It was the only option, really.
For most, their conversion experience marked a clear beginning of a new and dynamic relationship with the divine caller. Among the descriptions used to describe the experience, we find terms such as ‘to receive Christ as savior,’ ‘to accept Christ in a personal way,’ ‘to have a relationship with God,’ ‘to give one’s heart to the Lord,’ etc. Missionary 7 remembered how her conversion experience at the age of twelve generated in her a deep love for Christ:
I realized what Christ had done for me, and that is all I need, and how that hope and assurance is in him, and not on our own good works, ‘cause that might never be enough.
Most viewed their repentance and conversion experience as the foundation of their personal spiritual journey, and therefore as foundational to their eventual sense of call to foreign missions. This is inter alia illustrated by the fact that many interviewees made the point, usually without having been prompted, of referring to their conversion experience as part of their overall account of the development of their missionary call. The mission agencies’ application forms took a similar approach by including questions regarding the applicants’ conversion experience as a matter of course.
This early ‘re-definition’ of their relationship with God, based mainly on human trust in divine forgiveness and love, which was integral to their sense of call, would later strongly underpin their missionary experience as a support factor. As will also become evident, however, this initial experience had to expand with the reality of their missionary life for it to remain a support factor.
While the large majority of missionaries did have a repentance and conversion experience, which they retrospectively viewed positively, there were two sets of exceptions. The first were those who had a ‘bad’ conversion experience. Missionary 15, who was born into a strict Amish Mennonite church, was never able to overcome the deep, lingering fear that formed, for her, part of conversion and divine judgement:9
I’m not sure what age I was, maybe thirteen. But I was very sensitive spiritually. And at whatever age I was, there were Brunk evangelistic tent meetings going on in our area. And my Dada was a great supporter of them, and so we went and attended. Then of course at the end there was an invitation given, and I just felt that if I had done one wrong thing I couldn’t raise my hand to say that I was saved or whatever the question was. During that time then, I even wrote a letter to the Brunks, or the secretary I think got the letter, saying something about I had raised my hand when I shouldn’t have. I mean even the guilt! And I mean that just does not give a good feeling about spirituality.
This incident would later have a profoundly negative affect on her sense of call and on her overall mission experience.
The second set of exceptions consists of those who explicitly or implicitly stated that they never did have a personal crisis conversion.10 Among them was Missionary 5, who remarked:
I don’t remember a strong ‘I was saved on this day or that day.’
Instead, she remembered having had a sense of growing into faith by studying and absorbing biblical teaching as a criteria (sic) for life.
A sense of growing into faith was there. And we studied the Bible. And I think it’s just biblical study, we just absorbed that and that was sort of the criteria for life. And yeah we memorized, and we had theology, and all these things built on that.
In the following section we investigate their early understanding of discipleship as a human response to the divine call.
Discipleship: Its Prevalence and Practice
Were these Mennonite women familiar with the term and concept of discipleship during their youth? The range of answers was broad. Some did not remember the term being used at all, some encountered it occasionally, while others recalled discipleship as having been ‘very strong.‘ Missionary 20 was adamant that the term ‘discipleship‘ did not feature in her youth. When asked whether discipleship or was emphasized in the circles where she grew up, she replied:
Well yeah. (…) When I grew up it wasn’t called discipleship
When asked about ‘Nachfolge’ she said:
I don’t recognize that German word, no.
Missionary 19 similarly did not remember the term having been used in her youth:
I don’t know that it was particularly used a lot.
But in Missionary 5’s childhood, discipleship played a pivotal role:
Yeah, discipleship was a strong thing.
While clearly not everybody grew up being familiar with the term, all those who commented on the topic felt that they were taught a form of discipleship which was practised. Missionary 20 and Missionary 19 commented:
What I think of as discipleship is living a Christian life day by day. That was always strongly emphasized in my family, in my home church. (…) The fact of living for Christ, and it’s not just a matter of OK now I have my ticket to heaven, now I do whatever I want. But that we belong to Christ. That was just always a part of my teaching and my family and my church, in our Christian schools. I think we were taught that as a disciple of Christ, as a child of Christ, we needed to follow, and that means what discipleship is.
The interviewee who had remembered discipleship as having been a strong thing, similarly defined it as an ongoing, practical commitment to follow Christ, which she defined in the typical Anabaptist Sermon on the Mount and Gospel tradition as
… following Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount, the Gospels, the specific teachings of the Gospels.
Common to the interviewees, both from the more traditional and the ‘revived’ background, was the understanding that the Christian life was a serious, practical, and ongoing commitment to follow Christ, and that there was no such thing as cheap grace. Where they differed, however, was in their Christological emphasis. For many, Christ was primarily the salvific Christ, and secondarily the role model of the Sermon on the Mount—while for others he was the primarily the role model of the Christian life.
One of the symbols of their commitment to follow Christ was their baptism. Missionary 2 remembered her baptism subsequent to her conversion as having been
very important.
For her, the meaning of her new life in Christ was encapsulated by the words of the hymn: ‘O Jesus I have Promised to Serve Thee to the End,’ which was sung by her Sunday school teacher at her baptism. This song remained with her as
… a meaningful memory of my baptism.
For Missionary 1, her baptism, at least in retrospect, represented a critical event in her spiritual development. It symbolized the public confirmation of her commitment to follow the call of Christ, which to her meant modeling her life on his. When asked whether her baptism meant anything to her spiritually, she replied:
It did, very much so. I think probably more in retrospect than on that day specifically, but for me it was a time to actually acknowledge that decision that I had made, and that really was—not necessarily a turning point, but a pivotal point in my life. That it is a public confession—that is publicly I’m saying that I want to follow Christ, and I want to live a life that is as his example is to us. And so to me that was a very special time in hindsight. I’m not sure on that day specifically that much.
In the women’s view of their baptism, we again find their emphasis on human resolve and commitment to follow the call of Christ. From a pastoral perspective, we need to re-emphasize the potential burden contained in this interpretation, based on the fact that it pins much of the success or failure of discipleship on human ‘oughts’ and effort—or to use Lutheran terminology, on human works as opposed to divine grace.
Many missionaries were taught from early on to include the suffering for the sake of Christ into their understanding of discipleship. Missionary 16 remembered:
As a teenager in Brazil, our youth group had a big emphasis on being broken, and going through hardships, and how that’s building character, and that was really ingrained in me.
Missionary 1 was taught a similar view on the ultimately sanctifying benefit of Christian suffering, or of being crushed:
I remember one communion service was just extremely meaningful, (…) because they brought the wheat and the grapes to it, and emphasized how these things have to be crushed before the bread and the wine and how we (thumps her hand with her fist) need to be crushed. Sometimes our wills need to be crushed (thump), and our thinking needs to be crushed (thump) to follow Christ’s example.
This awareness of suffering as being integral to ‘following Christ’s call’ was underpinned by the familiar family stories of intensive and extensive suffering for the sake of Christ’s call. In these stories, those who had undergone ‘voluntary’ persecution and suffering were seen as heroes, because in typical Anabaptist fashion they had followed the call of Christ not only in the private but also the social sphere. Missionary 5, who had been deeply moved by the tragic fate of some ancestors from Russia, who through their pacifist stance had as an indirect consequence lost sons, found this still very much part of her Mennonite identity:
We had several great uncles, or would it be even a generation back, who came (to the US) because their young sons were going to be drafted. And when they came here, those sons within a year or two drowned in a river. And the tragedy of that – because the parents had sacrificed so much fleeing the draft!
The extent and importance of such oral and written family martyr traditions resulted in the fact that many women viewed practical suffering for the sake of the call of Christ as the norm rather than the exception. While these traditions constituted a potential support factor, insofar as they prepared them well for missionary hardships, the danger existed that they might prevent them from realistically judging the toll that such suffering takes on the sufferer.
This tendency in the missionaries’ heritage, to disregard one’s human limitations by setting oneself unrealistic goals, is further exacerbated by the service ideal, contained in Anabaptist Christology and Christ’s call to discipleship—featured prominently in the upbringing of many. An investigation into the missionaries’ early understanding of this service concept shows that they—some more than others—remembered perceiving serving, helping, and sharing, particularly with the less fortunate, as a general way of life. Missionary 5 recalled of her family,
… there was concern for the marginal in the community and in the world.
Missionary 18’s parents similarly emphasized spiritual and physical Christ-centered service above any financial considerations:
They believed in following Christ, and that was the way they read their Bible. That this is what we were to do, to bring people to Christ and to help them in whatever physical or spiritual way it was possible. The idea of making money was never in their mind—as long as they had enough to eat, that was all they cared about.
She recounted how such spiritual and practical concern for the less fortunate was expressed:
A lot of people would come to my parents for counselling. And after we kids were gone they even had a number of people, widow women who were ill and couldn’t take care of themselves, come and stay with them over extended periods of time. Another thing that they did lot of—at the end of the war, my mother was involved very much in mending and sending relief clothes to Europe.11 The women in our church would get together and they would mend. We had a garage always full of clothes to be gotten ready and sent. Also—now this, the spiritual and the rest of our lives was always very much (interwoven)—we had a program in the summer for recreation for kids, and we used to have four weeks in the summer of vacation Bible school, in which we would teach not just the Bible, but also crafts. My father would teach woodworking and my grandmother and my mother and some other women would teach embroidery, and that kind of thing. My parents were very much involved with their children, as far as helping them and so on. It wasn’t so much (religious) practices like rituals. It was more just the general way of life.
These acts of service, particularly if they were conducted towards people outside the Mennonite community, usually had the additional purpose of non-verbal witness to one’s faith. For the father of one missionary, Christian witness was
… more action than (…) vocal - than saying anything.
She remembered examples of such practical witness on her father’s part:
We lived on the edge of the (Mennonite) community and my father was always fixing the neighbors’ machines when he should be on the fields harvesting. And so they late at night would need repairs. So he would help them to get their machinery repaired so they could get up to their fields, rather than say ‘you should have all winter been repairing your machines.’ Or ‘I’m not going to help because you were sitting around drinking or something when you should have been working.12
This servant spirit of generosity was further expressed in the extensively practised hospitality in the childhood homes of the future missionaries. Missionary 18 recalled:
My parents were very hospitable. Their home was always open. (…) There were always new people coming to church, and a lot of people coming from out of town to school or something stayed, and there was always room at the table for another person. So we always had company on Sundays and sometimes during the week, too.
The service principle was further evident in the ‘alternative service’ that the men in many missionaries’ families chose instead of doing military duty. This is a clear example of discipleship transcending the private sphere, through practising the peace principle in civil society, and willingly accepting the consequences. Missionary 1 remembered that ‘doing service’ formed part of her family tradition:
All of us, except my brother who is handicapped, have done service at some point, some place in the world or for some period of time in their life, and that is just a given (…) And so that was kind of a family attitude. All of my siblings, I, all of my extended relatives, that’s just who we were. We all did that.
Indications are that the distinctive Anabaptist/Mennonite service principle still formed part of the missionaries’ early socio-religious profile, although not in every case to the same degree. It was particularly formative for those who grew up in a predominantly traditional Anabaptist/Mennonite environment. In typical Anabaptist tradition it oriented itself on the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount, and on his call: ‘follow me.’
Discipleship and Witness: A Contentious Issue
For the women, one of the contentious issues concerning discipleship during their youth was the question: whether, in what form, and to what degree open evangelism formed a part of Mennonite discipleship. The way that this question was answered would in many instances have major consequences for their eventual understanding of their missionary calling.
Overall, the women’s early understanding of the role of open evangelism in discipleship was largely determined by the slant of their theological background. Missionary 5 observed:
All these evangelist Billy Graham kind of people that came, the mass decisions, big campaigns, and rallies, and tent meetings (…) was not part of my growing up. Youth for Christ, Campus Crusade, that kind of thing. Although, I think it caused a lot of divisions in our churches. It seemed like churches either went towards discipleship or evangelism, but had a harder time integrating the two.
In her case, evangelism did not feature prominently in the discipleship concept as she encountered it in her youth:
I think discipleship (…) probably had more of a connotation of your daily life. The evangelism aspect was not strong in discipleship I don’t think. I think evangelism became more a (feature) of the evangelical movement here, and we as Mennonites shied away a lot from that. The Mennonites in the East did a better job of incorporating that without a lot of the fundamentalist aspects of that. But we here were much more influenced by the fundamentalist movement. And for my parents, they had nothing to do with that. That was just fake!
For Missionary 20, however, open evangelism was integral to discipleship:
And then (after becoming a disciple) it’s a matter of making other disciples. Then we share our faith and then those people also need to be taught.
Clearly the women’s early, differing understanding of the role of open evangelism in discipleship would later affect their interpretation of their missionary call. Both views would contain their respective potential to act as support factors and/or burdens, as we shall demonstrate at a later stage.
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1When discussing their parent’s religious convictions, the interviewees generally referred to their fathers’ tenets rather than their mothers’.
21st interview.
3 Ibid.
4From my experience, currently there are various degrees of austerity to be found in present day Mennonite churches in the U.S.A.
5German for ‘Little Congregation’
6Some interviewees grew up in a religious environment, which used High German exclusively as an ecclesiastic language.
7 ‘The bad’ meaning eternal punishment in hell.
8A formative contributory component of the missionaries’ early concept of God was the classic Protestant children’s literature. This included their children’s Bible, children’s songs, and children’s prayers, which were used as devotional aids during family or bed-time devotions, and at Sunday school.
Missionary 5 particularly remembered how pictures from the Children’s Bible impacted visually on their early concept of God:
‘The picture of Jesus holding a lamb, Jesus blessing the children, Jesus feeding the multitudes, Christmas, the open tomb. I think I don’t think of those as Bible stories as much as the pictures. I can visualize the pictures that I remember.’ (1)
Missionary 10 commented:
‘I remember the first Bible I got and it was one of those traditional ones with a picture of a white Jesus on the front with the long brown hair, and the white children gathered around. So I’m quite sure that my first images of God were of a white male. (…) I think I would not have expanded my ideas of God much beyond that for a long time. It was never spoken—it was never said this is what God looks like. When children are presented with those pictures that’s what they think. And then on the Sunday school material and whatever they were having pictures of Jesus, and we were talking about Jesus and God then that’s what God looks like I think.’
The religious children’s prayers and spiritual songs in use typically emphasized God’s love and provision, and the need for leading a godly life. The classics among them were passed on from one generation to the next, contributing to a continuation of faith attitudes and theological concepts.
9This would affect her faith life and her mental health to various degrees all her life, and significantly impacted on her missionary call and her field experience.
10Some interviewees did not comment on the subject at all. Everybody however, was requested to recount their conversion stories on the application forms.
11Probably through the MCC, which made helping in the spirit of Christ its motto.
12 Missionary 5 further illustrated the strong service solidarity which existed within the Mennonite community itself: ‘My father helped a lot of struggling young couples. They would be hired men for us for a couple of years, and then he would help them get a farm or get established, this kind of thing. That way (he) financially helped them get on their feet in some way.’
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