Anabaptist History: Mission & Missiology - (Day 21) — Dean Taylor

All right, well, good morning. Well, today, Lord willing, we're going to look at Anabaptist missions up to recent times and Anabaptist missiology. Some of this is somewhat controversial. That one. And so, these are my opinions.

I'll have to say, but I'm hopefully to back them up with what I have to share today. My goal today is to let you see, first of all, how the Mennonite churches, the different Anabaptist churches, has been very involved in missions since the beginning.

I did a lecture before we went to the Moravian Anabaptists about that, where I talked about it a little bit. I'd like to focus that more on this lecture to more of the current themes, the current expressions of missions.

The Anabaptist Vision for Worldwide Mission

But then, I'd like to, towards the end of the lecture, we're somewhere in there, have, I would like to bring up the Lancaster County missions to Africa as a test case for us to review. And then, I would like to look at how this conflicting themes between Evangelicalism and Anabaptists have conflicted on the mission field, and some of the mistakes that I see still, we feel the repercussions of, or some of the confusion, the repercussions of the Lancaster approach to missions, or the Lancaster attempt at missions in the 1940s, and how we're still kind of struggling over some of those things.

So, I'm gonna bring that out as a test case, and then give some ideas of Anabaptist missiology in general. I'm gonna bring in towards the end, hopefully, if I don't rattle too much, I'm gonna bring in towards the end, actually, that I believe that even many conservative Evangelicals are now beginning to see their own Evangelical model as being deficient, and they're turning to some of the Anabaptist writings and saying, hey, we need church community, even on the mission field, and I'm gonna hopefully bring some of those towards the end of the lecture as well.

So, let's start with prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you, Lord, for your presence, that you promised that you would be with us. And you said that you would never leave us, and it's because of that promise that you said, lo, I will be with you even to the end of the age, that we take the first part of that promise and go.

As you said, if we go, then you followed with, and lo, I will be with you to the end of the age. So, Father, as we've been talking about the all things of Christ through these five weeks, and the importance of returning to Jesus, and your message of the Sermon on the Mount, your message of the church community, your message, these different things, we also dare not miss this part of it, the spreading forth of that gospel to all the world.

So, Lord, we ask you now, Father, to be able to see your heart in that. I pray that you would be with me as I present this, that your name would be glorified. So, help me, I pray, Father, to present this lecture.

In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Amen. Okay, Anabaptist missions and Anabaptist missiology. All right, starting from the beginning, and again with the other lecture, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time with the very early times, but we saw missions was part of it from the very beginning.

Even missions and revival, and we're gonna see that through the day-to-day, that those tend to go hand-in-hand in many different situations. And I brought this chart back up, I have it there in your paper, I showed it to you in weeks before.

But again, just to see some of the spontaneous flowing of the gospel and conversions and missions, whether you call this revival or missions, they seem to have come together. Again, Hube Meyer, 360 there right after the beginning, ended up with 6 ,000.

You see Conrad Grebel, a whole processions of men and women, that was a revival in St. Gall. They believe that's around 500. You know, lots of different people. Hans Huth, 12 ,000 in his ministry. And again, I brought this up yesterday, Leonhard Bowens, who documented 10 ,378.

Bender takes that down to like 10 ,200 by looking at the documents of some crossover names. But still, 10 ,200, 10 ,378, still a lot. And so the, and this is just a few of the examples, that from the beginning, the desire to take the gospel everywhere was built in to the Anabaptist vision.

Some of the, I just recently, just studying for this lecture, some of the critiques of Harold S. Bender's Anabaptist vision did not include this element. And it's really a bit of a shame, because this should have been an element in the Anabaptist vision.

I do appreciate the Anabaptist vision, but this mission burden of spreading the church community to all the earth was certainly part of that original Anabaptist vision throughout all the different places.

Early Anabaptist Missionary Zeal and Church Community

A quote here I liked, I've given to you when we got to Mendel Simons, but let me give it to you here as well. And just the idea of how he saw these early Anabaptists spreading even in Holland. Mendel Simons said this, he said, therefore we preach, as much as is possible, both by day and by night, in houses and in fields, in forest and waste, hither and yon, at home or abroad, in prison and in dungeons, in water and in fire, on the scaffold and on the wheel, before lords and princes, through mouth and pen, with possessions and blood, with life and death.

We could wish that we might save all mankind from the jaws of hell, free them from the chains of their sins, and by the gracious help of God, add them to Christ by the gospel of his peace. For this is the true nature of the love which is of God.

The true nature which is of love, which is of God. And so he sees intrinsic within this whole message that this is part of the true nature of God is spreading the spark of fire to all nations. I'm not gonna again get into the Hutterites in the particular we saw, we've talked a lot about their different communities and certainly in this time period was the shining example of an organized mission.

But I found just a few points in the Mennonite Encyclopedia last night that I wanted to bring out as lessons for us today of their structure that they had way back in the 1500s. This is taken from the Mennonite Encyclopedia and it says, it was an organized effort.

They sent brethren every year to lands near and far according to the commandments of Christ and the practice of the apostles to teach and to preach and to gather for the Lord God's people. So I wanted to emphasize that it was something they did every year.

And so instead of this next year, okay, where are we going this time? Where are we going that time? And it was a constant burden to the church community of saying, okay, let's send out new missionaries.

And it was a yearly process and a burden of what they felt they needed to do. It goes on, it says, in order to be able to fulfill the task laid upon them by the Lord, the congregation semi-annually chose their preachers, a number of brethren, to perform a widespread missionary service in all directions to preach the gospel in accordance with the commandments of Christ and to lead the converts to, quote, the promised land in that time to Moravia.

And since it was impossible to plant the church communities in Germany and in these different places, they then tried to bring them to Moravia and then would plant these different communities around there.

Each missionary, this is an old term in the encyclopedia, each missionary had a certain field assigned to him. Thus, brethren went out into all parts, one to Germany, to Württemberg, to Thuringia, to the Rhineland, to Prussia, to Switzerland, Poland, in some cases, even to Venice, Italy.

A few made it all the way to Denmark and to Sweden, but that was not the usual thing. The other thing is they were equipped. These are early times, these are the early 1500s. They were equipped with the epistles, they had their letters and they had their tracts to hand out in their knapsack.

The home congregation supported its missionaries, not only by prayers, but also by writing them letters back and forth. This is something, of course, obviously economically, they're Hutterites, they were supported, they didn't have to wonder, those sorts of things, but as you could imagine, as you're living out in the fields of Switzerland, it was still very difficult for them just probably to make a living and to go about the great sacrifice that they were doing.

The point that I wanna bring out here is the involvement between the congregation and the missionary. You see this with Zinzendorf and the, excuse me, the Moravians under Zinzendorf the same way. Each one of those missionaries with Zinzendorf, like say you went to St. Thomas, let's say you went to Greenland, you were required to keep three journals.

You could do a journal for yourself there, you had to copy and send a copy to Hernhut in Germany, and you then had to give a copy to Bethlehem. And in each of those places then, when the church gathered together, they would read these journals, and so the church felt very much a part of what was going on.

It was a continual effort to make sure that this was a branch of the church. Everything we were doing in the church was a branch of what we're doing out there. And I think that's an important element here of this Anabaptist missiology, kingdom missiology in the case of Zinzendorf.

By dispatching brethren to maintain contact, bring them these letters and receive their replies, also to bring home all news of importance. They did end up with conflict of what was your calling? Who sent you?

Early on, we see the Calvinists and the Reformers asking them, well, who sent you? For instance, the Calvinist superintendent in Alcy, in the Palatinate, asked the Hutterite missionary Leonhard Dax, imprisoned in 1567, who had given him the right and authority to come to the Palatinate to, quote, confuse the people.

Dax replied that he is not sent to confuse them, but rather to lead everybody from error to the right way of Christian discipleship. Make a note of that. His concept, I'm gonna lead you out of error into what he thought he was giving them was a concept of Christian discipleship.

The brethren owned it to the world, the brethren owed it to the world, owed it to the world to bring it to the pure and unadulterated word of God. And those who were sent by the brotherhood were properly called apostles by them, or sinbotan in the German, and must be considered as commissioned by God himself, otherwise also the apostolic church would not have done right.

He gave the argument, Dax said, well, if this is the case, then the early church was wrong, because this is what we're doing, we're following in that same kind of line. So again, the Hutterites make an excellent example, the Moravian Anabaptists in that time make an excellent example of an organized mission effort connected to the church, planting church communities of discipleship around the world, and particularly Moravia in their case was the only allowable spot.

But nevertheless, that was their burden of what they were given. Early on, we see this as an element in the Anabaptist idea of missions. I don't want you to, it's gonna be one of the themes I press through this entire day, so just take note of that.

Mennonite Missions in the Nineteenth Century

All right, so let's get out of the ancient time and start coming a little closer. Before America, I wrote the category here. I think this is from, this was from John D. Roth in his book Stories. He said, the transformation of the Mennonite church from a tiny European fellowship to a global communion has unfolded in several steps.

Yeah, this was from Roth. It began in the second half of the 19th century with a renewed commitment among Mennonites, first in the Russia and the Netherlands, and then the North America to go to missions.

The imperative of the Great Commission to take the good news of the gospel to the uttermost parts of the earth. And so the first one that really in our, well, I can't say modern times, but in this 1800s, more recent times, was this interesting missionary by the name of Peter Jantz.

And a lot of us have been doing some studies here and just looking into this mission, Chris and I, and it's an interesting mission to study. And I didn't quite realize that he was a bit of a pioneer in the whole missionary world in the Anabaptists and bringing it back.

But you still see within him a very clear understanding of mission as kingdom. Now, he was a Dutch Mennonite, but as he went to Indonesia, as he was there, he began to see that when he would try to give the gospel, he was coming into problems with people getting killed.

If you converted, they killed them. So they began to ponder, well, what are we going to do? So he actually started taking the Russian Mennonite model of colonies and putting that into Indonesia and seeing what kind of fruit he would get there.

And the fruit was, it was interesting. Chris just sent me a book that a mission organization did, and I'd like to study him more, but everything I see from this mission seems like something it needs to be looked at even further.

I have here written, I think this is again from John D. Roth. It says, Peter Jantz and his wife on a journey to the Netherlands, East Indies, Indonesia. There, the Jantz's and their coworkers established a mission church in North Central Java and set about translating the Bible into Javanese and Malay.

And there's a little picture from that book Chris sent me of them translating the Bible there. It's interesting. And then what he gave again was this colony-based missions. The missionary model they introduced was based on small, self-sufficient, agricultural colonies that could better support new converts in a Muslim setting hostile to Christianity.

Over the next century, the Javanese Mennonites could grow slowly. They grew slowly, reaching a total of 1 ,200 people by 1940s. It was a slow growth, but nevertheless, it was a steady growth. And by, I don't know, I say 1 ,200 converts in a Muslim country by the 1940s is still something very impressive.

Apparently there was then a second wave that came to them. But first, before I talk about the second wave, I have a little bullets that I put on there of just things that I highlighted of this particular mission of Peter Jantz.

It was Jesus-focused. He would bring the entire gospel to them. It seemed to be, in all the things that I've read, it seems to be, again, an Anabaptist model that was given to him of Jesus-focused. There was Bible translating.

Excuse that bad misprint there. Not Bible translating. Bible translating. It was late last night. Cross that out. Bible translations was going on. Discipleship. A community discipleship model, and also care for the whole person.

These agricultural communities that he set up made places where these new converts could actually live out their Christian life in a sustaining world that gave an example and a light to the people around them.

Well, by the 1920s, a bunch of immigrants from China started to pour into Indonesia, and this led to a second wave. This little community that was there even further went with a second wave of Christians that began to come, and the Chinese then began to convert to Christianity, and there was many more converts.

Today, it says here that there's several different branches of the Mennonite churches there in Indonesia, but today, the Mennonite Synod, there's 15 ,200, and then one branch, 12 ,000, and another with a total of 48 ,000 members in Indonesia today.

Impressive. And so, still to the day, apparently, this area has a lot of unrest. There's some interesting stories that John D. Roth gives in his book on just how these missionary pastors have tried to be peacekeepers and this type of thing in a very hostile area that's full of Buddhists and Hindus and Muslim and Christian all in the same area, and it's a difficult place to be a pastor, but apparently, the Mennonites still today are trying to give a good example.

So, again, it's an impressive coming closer to our times. All right, then coming close to us, I have here the Russians beat us. Just like in the space race, they beat us in the mission race. The Russian beat us.

In the 1880s, the Russian Mennonite in the Ukraine started their own overseas mission initiative, sending a couple who had spent the previous four years in training at a Baptist seminary, and they sent them to India.

So they trained them at the seminary and sent them to India. Now, I made some comments yesterday that many times when we're coming into this great enlightenment period of the Anabaptists, the Mennonites and such, you have a little bit of a double-edged sword.

Sensing a need for revival, sensing a need for missions, you, many times we were trained by the evangelicals, and sometimes that was good, sometimes it was not good. And some of those things are still things we're sort of wrestling with today.

Nevertheless, these early missions were very impressive. And my, remember I told you my dialogues back and forth in my studies of the Russian Mennonites, Hoover sent me some of these documents talking about their emphasis there on missions.

And again, you kind of get this idea of the importance of the local church community being in the missions that comes out. And here's, I gave you this writing here, and I think it's important for us understanding the Anabaptist missiology, I'm gonna give it to you here.

It says, he wrote me, he says, the church found its mission in fulfillment as it had never, as it had ever since its coming to the Netherlands in the Vistula Delta three centuries earlier. Modern mission terms, or the idea of a mission as an institution staffed by career missionaries was to them unknown.

The Mennonites thought of missions only in the context of the Gemeinde, the church community. And for them, every member of the Gemeinde was a missionary called by God to build on earth a working model of the kingdom of heaven.

And in that statement right there lies what conservative modern evangelicals are even talking about today, the concept of a model of the kingdom of heaven. A signpost pointing to the rule of Christ and new heavens and a new earth to come.

This was a, I have a four part series on the Russian Mennonites, I can give you a copy of that in my studies of the Russian Mennonites. I'll post that and let you have a copy of that. He wrote on, he said, yes, the Mennonites visited and traveled and sought out seekers near and far.

They were not afraid of moving into the remotest wilderness to set up new Gemeinden as the Lord opens doors. But they understood the Great Commission as a corporate, never as an individual or institutional calling.

Johann Wiebe, who settled with a group in old colony Mennonites in the Ukraine and then finally took the community to Manitoba, Canada, wrote this, and this is straight from his words, talking about his concept of what he was doing.

And for time's sake, I'm gonna just give the first few points there and go on to the next thing. He says, from the beginning of the world, God has kept and guarded his visible Gemeinden, his beloved people, and he will always preserve them to the very end.

God's Gemeinde on earth began with Adam and Eve in paradise. I have that highlighted because that concept, many times we'll lose, that God had this people way back from the garden, okay? Then for a time, it consisted of faithful households like that of Noah and Abraham with whom he made his first covenants and through whom he gathered his chosen seed, the seed of Abraham, the family of Isaac and Jacob was the Gemeinde of the Old Testament.

So again, this carrying forth the people of God through the different times. Then in the fullness of time, when the Lord Jesus came with his gospel full of grace, he sent his disciples into the whole world to call his Gemeinde together from all races and tongues of the earth and those that get converted from the heart, all that trust in God and his son Jesus come together in one faith and in one baptism.

All that believe in Christ get baptized into one body and this way we all become united with Christ through the faith that lives in our hearts, faith that brings about the fear of God and compels us to do what is right.

And he goes on and I encourage you to keep reading through that. The question there that he talks about this idea of looking at even at Abraham, looking at the Garden of Eden and some of these different ones is a concept that sometimes we lose.

Even in some of the methods I have down there highlighted, do modern methods leave the convert anticipating the kingdom? Think about it here for a minute. Some of our methods, the Jesus film, the creation to Christ, some of these missionary models which are very good in and of themselves but do you leave with that message a sense of God's people on earth are going to establish his kingdom?

No. You usually end up with a sense of I'm forgiven and praise God for that. And like I said throughout the whole five weeks and I will say it again today probably a few times, it's not what they say that I usually have a problem with.

It's what they don't say. And it's that silence which has started to become very loud and through these methods sometimes unwittingly we're not realizing that the burden of this people of God through the Garden of Eden, through Abraham, through David, prophesied of the prophets and foretold and proclaimed by Jesus Christ as the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

It's not something that you get out of some of these methods even though I'm all for, of course I'm for the concept of a needing to understand the atonement. Many of the creation to Christ methods and such which again I would still use them into the right idea.

The whole emphasis ends on a person receiving the sacrifice and the theme of sacrifice through all the different Old Testament is the main thing that's given which again I have to keep balancing this.

It's very important but the burden of the way Jesus Christ gave it comes out a little bit different. Do you remember that Jesus fire that I talked about, I keep talking about in the Russian Mennonites and I talked about during the revival.

I just gave you a few quotes here to understand this Russian Mennonites spirit of what revival does to missions and this is a Russian Mennonite speaking and he talks about that and I gave the rest of this quote which I usually never got to in my different lectures.

Remember that Jesus fire we talked about in revival. He goes on to say, fire spreads quickly. This is him giving a sermon, preaching at the beginning of a mission conference in the Russian Mennonite colony.

Fire spreads quickly. It blazes up and sends showers of sparks high into the air. Then wherever a spark comes to rest, it sets off a new fire. This is how it goes when the Jesus fire lights up in our hearts.

If it blazes brightly, it lights up many more. To speak without a metaphor, it will drive us out with the Jesus fire in our hearts and the torch of the gospel in our hands to the uncivilized, the pagans and the Muslims and no parents, no brothers, sisters or friends will dissuade us or keep us back.

The savior wants the fire that burns in us to flare up and throw out many sparks. If we love him, catch this, none of us will fail to take part in the work of missions one way or another. It's part of the burden for the whole colony there.

For the one that refuses does not love the savior or at least not very much. And oh, how much needs to be done around the world until the fire of Jesus has kindled will burn everywhere among all peoples of the earth.

There now is estimated a world population of 1 ,400 ,000 ,000. How many is there now? I think we just hit 7 ,000 ,000 ,000, didn't we? Well, we didn't keep up. Of these, only a very small part are Christian believers.

He cries out to hear his burden. Through the work of the church in the Dutch Indies and Java and Sumatra, the Jesus fire has started to burn in the hearts of more than 2 ,500 heathen and Muslims. That's the fruit of what the Russian Mennonites were already accomplishing.

Even though it may not burn too brightly in some, it is burning. And our missionaries are stirring it up so that it may burn all the more strongly and well. Oh, what a marvelous work, this work of missions to spread the Jesus fire throughout the world.

Amen. Some of this did end up starting the Klan of Gemeinde and some of this mission emphasis that some of the Russian Mennonites, just like when they faced this great awakening in America, the Mennonites united up with several different groups and the Russian Mennonites united up with the Klan of Gemeinde and some of those groups that had even a greater mission emphasis than the general colony Mennonites in general.

So this concept of this church community going out and spreading is very much to the heart of the Anabaptist model. You know, they're not the only ones. You know, we don't, fortunately, and I'm glad we don't, we don't have a patent on this model.

Moravian Mission Models and the Kingdom

And other people had this idea. Again, just before I came here, I finished the Moravian Mission Machine article and the remnant. And in here, I was very impressed with how Zinzendorf copied, or not copied, but saw this kingdom model in the scriptures as well.

And look at some of their, look at some of their early models that they put around this earth. They'd go into an area and bring in a Gemeinde, a mission outpost of discipleship, training, and a light to the world.

And the Moravian models did this throughout all the different places. Here we see up in the Greenland or something. This is the American Indians. That's Ganada Huton, I think, actually. We see there. And he copied what he saw in Hernhut, what worked in Hernhut, what worked in Bethlehem.

And he did this, Zinzendorf did this throughout all the different places of the earth. This one I like particularly. You see these up here, and these are big old glaciers, and big glaciers. And here you have these little skinned teepees.

And again, the church community gathered up, and then from there, taking the gospel further. Here's another one. In some sense, this whole concept is almost, it's almost ridiculed in missiology today.

All the, many of the talks about, well, we don't want to change their culture, we don't want to do things, almost ridicules this kind of a thing. And I think it's a shame, because I think in a lot of ways, the missions has not been able to have this concept of training, discipleship, and a clear sense of church community, as it was in these days by many people who have taken it.

Again, I see people, even today, starting to bring this up, and talk about it in our time. So, now we come to America. Real quick, any thoughts on some of that? It does seem there was, there's, in my discussion, in my study of Russian Mennonites, Peter Hoover wrote me, he showed me documents, at first, of the Russian Mennonites supporting financially the early Dutch missions.

And then this man was one of the first, of even Holland, matter of fact, he was the first missionary, when the, yeah, Jens was, of sending out even from Holland. From that quickly, not far after that, the Russian Mennonites started to send out their own missionaries, Bible translations up to the far north, Siberia, and some of those areas.

And they were also in Indonesia. And they were also in Indonesia, yeah. Well, are they? Yeah, that's good. Okay. Oh, he ended up going to, okay, excellent. Like I said, that whole mission in Indonesia is something I'd like to study more.

It's a fascinating piece of mission history. Yeah, okay, well, interesting. Oh, that's right, he mentioned it right there. In Java, yeah, he mentions it right there. Sumatra, he's even, in his sermon, he's talking about that, so you're right.

He says it right there. He talks about 2 ,500 heathens converted. So praise the Lord. Let's do it again. Yes, sir. Who teaches you these questions? Heinrich, yeah, Dirks, mm-hmm. And I have that in those other handouts, particularly about the Russian Mennonite, Heinrich Dirks.

Okay, going on to America. So now, remember, we talked about yesterday in our Mennonite Great Awakening, or the Anabaptist Great Awakening that happened in the late 1800s, different Moody revivals and different things coming out.

So now the church in America is wanting to get headlong into these missions. And many of these things that happen are very impressive. In 1866, the General Conference in North America with the financial support and expertise of the Russian Mennonites in Prussia founded the Wadsworth Institute in Northern Ohio.

And there you see a little picture. And the goal of future training for leaders and missionaries. The school actually only lasted 10 years, but it started some seeds of thinking of different ways that we can go out and spread these things.

From there, we remember that Funk, in spreading the truth and spreading light, they heard about the great famine and distress in India. And then one of the first places that the Mennonite missionaries then went out to from America was a relief organization in India in 1900.

And they then went to China in 1914. And then, it says the Mennonite church entered overseas missions in 1899, sparked by the reports of a widespread famine in India. This is John D. Roth speaking. Like many later Mennonite churches, mission projects and initial Mennonite presence in India began with a relief effort, the construction of an orphanage or a school that served the basis for more explicit evangelistic outreaches.

So many times it was the burden of some kind of famine or terrible situation that caused them to get there in the first place. From there then, it branched off into the missions that followed that. I see this happening today with Kim the same way.

And I think it's a beautiful way to start missions. Other Mennonite churches missions efforts soon followed. He writes, he says, in Argentina in 1917, East Africa, 1934, Puerto Rico, 1945, Ethiopia, 1948, Japan, 1949, and a host of other African, East Asian, South American countries in the 1950s, by the 1950s.

Once established, the various Mennonite mission boards and agencies took up their task with energy and optimism. According to the mission historian, Wilbert Schenck, European and North American Mennonites created 25 new missions between 1850 and 1945.

Whole organizations, not just missions, but entire mission organizations were planted during those years. So again, it was a time, you can see while the title, the Mennonite Great Awakening, it was a time of feeling of revival of that revival producing fruit and going out and spreading these messages of the gospel.

Following World War II, mission initiatives increased exponentially with 52 ministries begun during 1945 and 1959 and well over 100 during the second half of the 20th century. It's impressive. So again, as conservative Anabaptists here today, some of those missions today, you would say, okay, I don't agree with this technique or that technique, but whatever are some of the fruits I will readily admit I'm not happy with.

Nevertheless, wow, you gotta say wow. As a matter of fact, I read a statistic and I forgot the exact number, but if you were to take who claims to be Mennonite today in the world, the far majority of Mennonites in the world today are from non-American, non-white places.

Matter of fact, I think I read once that an African female is the most, makes up the most of what is called a Mennonite today on this earth. And so, all right, so let's say you don't agree with this technique or whatever you see today, but the fact is that I'm very impressed with and I'm very blessed to see is you can see the seed of a vision and it growing and growing and growing and it's impressive nonetheless of seeing what, of seeing what they accomplished.

Let's take a quick break and then we're gonna take a look then of start to bring it to some of our people and look at John D. Roth's concern here. He brought up in his book the effect of evangelicalism on these missions and on revival.

So take a quick break, three minutes, be right back. All right, welcome back. Okay, well, as we were talking, this growth of missions, now we're coming into this great awakening period and you see the Russians even sending them to evangelical schools.

You see Funk trying to have a balance between being Anabaptist, but yet with revival and missionary zeal. But some of that, you know, they were, at that time period, the evangelicals were around saying many of the things of revival and missions.

So we began to get a lot of our understanding from them and that began to have a bit of an effect on us. So John D. Roth says this. He says, in both Europe and North America, Mennonites tended to borrow heavily from the strategies and methods of the broader Protestant mission movement.

For example, Mennonites in Netherland and the Palatinate consciously modeled their early efforts after the Baptist missionary societies in England. In Russia, Mennonites followed the lead of the Lutheran Pietists and German Baptists, although still had an incredible concept of Anabaptists compared to today.

And in North America, the revival meetings of D .L. Moody and the YMCA movements affected the church and Mennonite strategies. This borrowing was undoubtedly a catalyst for early Mennonite missions, but when it was done uncritically, the gospel preached by Mennonites on the mission field tended not to differ in any meaningful way than of other Protestant groups.

And so I ask the question here on page eight, what was the effect of fundamentalism and this new evangelicalism on the church? And then you saw my little evangel meter that I have there I found online while I was looking around.

How many of you have ever heard the sermon 10 Shekels and a Shirt by Paris Reathead? Has everybody? Okay, all right, you should if you haven't. All right, if you haven't, today listen to it. Do you remember how he talks in there that what happened to his church with the idea of fundamentalism itself?

And he said he talked about the fundamentalists in their day stood for good things, inspiration of the Bible, there's a heaven and there's a virgin birth and those sorts of things. But the fundamentalists then began to say, they began to have that almost become a creed.

So he says in the 10 Shekels and a Shirt where it got to the point where, oh, how does he word it? If you could spit out and say uh-huh to a few statements of the faith, somebody, how's he word it, would pat you on the back, shake your hand and say, brother, you're saved.

And so that became fundamentalism was again got to be a bit creedal even though Paris Reathead argues that originally they were arguing for some important things. The creed of fundamentalists became to be identified of what it meant to be Christian.

And again, that affected even in his camp. I think it affected our Anabaptist camp even more. Another thing that happened, I still see this today and it disturbs me. During the fundamentalists, it was the liberals who were helping the poor.

After the fundamentalism liberal split of the early 1900s, it became where if you were a good fundamentalist, then you were against, or you were talking about the rapture, you were talking about the millennialism, you were talking about these different things, and you had to get people saved before the rapture and all these different things were happening.

But it was the liberals that kept saying, well, we got to do what Jesus said about helping the poor. And the fundamentalists kept saying, no, it ended up being called a social gospel. And it was labeled that we don't want to be a social gospel.

Then suddenly you had a very disturbing concept coming to even to missions and to evangelism work where we're not going to care about their physical person, but only getting them saved. And this is a terrible thing that happened to the church.

I still, I've heard sermons from conservative Anabaptists who talk about helping the poor like it's part of the emerging church or something. And that should never happen. There's an interesting book out by a man called The Hole in the Gospel.