Foreword
Leaving Anabaptism

Begun in 1889 as the Conference of United Mennonite Brethren of North America, the denomination in 1918, facing the militaristic pressures of World War I, changed its name to the Defenseless Mennonite Brethren in Christ of North America. Then in 1937 members changed their name to the Evangelical Mennonite Brethren Conference. The terms Defenseless and Evangelical in the successive names reveal the differing tugs of their changing and fragile identity. The name adopted in 1987—Fellowship of Evangelical Bible Churches (FEBC)—suggests the triumph of one element of that bifurcated identity.

Nineteenth-century movements for religious renewal swept across Mennonite communities in both the United States and South Russia. Isaac Peters of Nebraska and Aron Wall of Minnesota, the leaders of the two congregations that initially formed the United Mennonite Brethren—were both immigrants who in the 1970s left Russia for the United States. In both countries most renewal movements, like the FEBC, saw themselves as recovering the purity of a now-compromised Mennonitism. In reality they drew inspiration from varying currents: Anabaptism, Pietism, and Evangelicalism were all present during the emergence of the FEBC.

Born of such multiple and perhaps even contradictory influences, the FEBC was unable to establish a firm identity. Repeatedly its members sought mergers with smaller Mennonite denominations and simultaneously established theological linkages with segments of North American fundamentalist and evangelical culture. The result, in the first century of their story, was adoption of a name and theological posture that largely minimized their Mennonite moorings.

This story of immigration, quest for religious renewal, development of a fragmented and uncertain identity, inability to develop strong denominational institutions, search for kindred groups and theologies, increasing embarrassment over distinctives, and, finally, capitulation to dominant patterns of North American conservative religion, is not peculiar to the FEBC. Such themes recur in North American religious history. Calvin Redekop skillfully combines sociological analysis and the historical narrative of this small group to make its story archetypal of many Christian reform movements.

Paul Toews
Fresno Pacific University
January 1998

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