Where Did They Go?

Christian ethics and theology with an Anabaptist perspective
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ohio jones
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Where Did They Go?

Post by ohio jones »

In “The Inroads of Evangelicalism” presented at AIC 2015 (quoted below) and AIC 2016 (similar), the question is raised as to why there are so few conservative Anabaptists today. While this may be a good and relevant question, the context in which it is presented contains historical flaws that detract from the impact of the inquiry. Let's explore this.
(3:00) John Funk … realized that [Protestant churches] don't hold to nonresistance, the doctrine of the two kingdoms, the women were discarding the head covering, many women wore makeup in these Protestant evangelical churches …
Note that the evangelicalism being referred to here is not the Billy Graham-style post-fundamentalist movement that we now generally refer to by that name (originally called neo-evangelicalism by Harold Ockenga, but soon shortened for convenience), but the late 19th century variety with a Methodist backbone and pietist roots, exemplified in that era by Spurgeon and Moody.
… so he had an idea: What if we take Protestant evangelicalism, with all its theology, particularly its doctrine of salvation, and we add to it the various truths that the Mennonites and Amish hold, like two kingdoms, nonresistance, nonconformity, head covering, things like that. Surely this would produce the very kind of church that God wanted. It would restore New Testament Christianity if we took what the Protestants have as our foundation and we add nonresistance and that to it, then we have everything, he thought.

Well, it ended up causing the split between the Old Orders and what I call the conservative Plain churches.
This is where the inaccuracy begins. The group from which the Old Order Mennonites divided (or more specifically in Funk's case, Wisler and company were expelled from Yellow Creek, 1872) may seem conservative and plain to us, but they were the mainstream Mennonite Church of that day and were progressive enough to introduce major innovations such as Sunday school, revival meetings, higher education, and foreign missions.

On the Amish side, the Old Orders were the conservatives and the Amish Mennonites were the progressives – so progressive that by 1925 they had merged into Funk's mainstream Mennonite Church.
(6:30) Well, did John Funk's theory work? Did it go on to become the restoration of true Christianity on earth? Let's look at membership statistics, not that membership proves everything, but it's rather disturbing. At the time of the Old Order split in the late 1800s, the Old Order made up 35% of all Amish. 65% went with the Amish Mennonites. Now today the Old Order number about 125,000 members; if you're talking people, there are probably around half a million including the children.
Gameo suggests 3700 in 1900 and 50,000 in the 1950s. The Young Center, whose research I trust implicitly :) says 308,030 including children as of May 2016. Nowhere near half a million, though it may reach that in 15-20 years or so.
Now the plain Amish Mennonites at the time of the split made up 65% of all the Amish; the vast majority went with this new Protestant fusion, half-Anabaptist, half-Protestant. So now if they did no better than the Old Orders, and here they were supposed to do better because they had found the “real way,” there would be a quarter million of Amish Mennonites today. If they did no better than the Old Orders, if they made no converts or anything, just followed in their footsteps. How many do you think there are? How many are there, like Beachy Amish or other Plain Amish Mennonites? 14,000. There should be a quarter of a million if the Amish Mennonites had done no better than the Old Orders. There's only 14,000. What's worse, the vast majority of those 14,000, probably all of them, are recent converts from the Old Orders, they're not descendants from the Amish Mennonites back in the 1800s who went away from the Old Orders; no, it's the Old Orders that keep the Amish Mennonites going. Very few can trace their lineage back to that original split, or if they trace it back, it would be on the Old Order side. In other words, this didn't work at all. In fact, the Amish Mennonites today owe their existence to the fact that they are continually replenished by recruits from the Old Orders.
While I can't argue with the migration from Old Order to Beachy, what this train of thought entirely ignores is the fact that the entire Amish Mennonite side of the 19th century division merged into the Mennonite Church a hundred years ago. If you're looking for their descendants, look in MCUSA, not in the people who identify today as Amish Mennonites.
Well, what about the Mennonites? Did they do any better than the Amish in that? In the split, only 10% of the Mennonites chose the Old Order. And today there are about 27,000 of these Old Order Mennonites. This would be like the Groffdale or Joe Wenger, the Wisler, the Horning; about 27,000 of them today, again we're talking about members.
Gameo says 5800 in 1957 and 20,000 as of 2002; Scott (1996) reports about 16,300 if I've added them up correctly, he doesn't seem to give a total. Like the Amish, I think the 27,000 may be somewhat inflated.
Since there were 9 times more Mennonites who went with the Protestant-Anabaptist fusion, there should be about a quarter million of us today if we did no better than the Old Order Mennonites did. We should number a minimum of a quarter million, hopefully we would be looking at a million or more of us. But how many are there in reality? Only 28,000, if you don't count the Holdemans. Only 28,000 conservative Plain Mennonites when there should be a quarter of a million minimum. With the Holdemans there's about 47,000.
This is where it really runs off the rails. How does the progressive Mennonite Church of late 1800s become equated to the conservative Plain Mennonites of 2015? Most of those do indeed trace their origins to the Mennonite Church side of the Old Order division, but so does the larger Mennonite Church, which numbered 112,311 in 1997, just prior to the MCUSA merger. Call the total 140,000 in round numbers, if you don't count the Holdemans.
So where are the other 200,000? Where did they go?
Quite simply, they were never born. The Old Order population today is a result of the compounding effect of high birth rates, whereas the other groups quite logically have birth rates comparable to the Protestant Evangelicals that they fused with.

To mitigate the compounding effect somewhat, dial the clock back to the 1950s. Compare the total Old Orders of 25,800 (50,000 total Amish, so let's say 20,000 baptized members, and 5800 Mennonites) to the 77,369 in the Mennonite Church. In the past 60 years, using round numbers, the Old Orders have grown by 6x and the Mennonite Church and its conservative offspring have grown by 2x. This does not necessarily illustrate that evangelicalism is ineffective (where did the 2x growth come from, after all?), but that high birth rates are extremely effective at producing numeric growth over time. Which should come as no surprise to anyone with a basic grasp of math.
Where did they go? The answer is that they followed Protestantism to the point that either they are liberal today, they may still be Mennonites but they would be liberal Mennonites, or else they no longer claim to be Anabaptists, they're just plain Protestants, or maybe not even Christians at all. I'm talking about the Mennonite Church USA, Mennonite Brethren, groups like that who are no longer Plain.
I don't know why it would be surprising that the liberal Mennonites of the late 1800s have become the liberal Mennonites of the early 2000s. What is surprising is that he fails to recognize that conservative Plain Anabaptists today are significantly more influenced by Protestant (neo-)Evangelicalism than are liberal Mennonites today.
All of these Mennonite churches are descendants of the New Testament church John Funk thought he was creating.
Well, not the Mennonite Brethren, they are a separate group of Russian Mennonite origin.
He thought he had found the answer, blend Protestantism with Anabaptism and you have the perfect church. It hasn't worked that way at all. And even among the conservative Mennonites, very often, again, their forefathers were Old Order Mennonites or sometimes Old Order Amish, very often Old Order Amish.
Again, simply not historically accurate. Some individual members may have come from the Old Orders, but the groups as a whole are overwhelmingly from the Mennonite Church, mostly by way of the Conservative Movement (Scott, ch. 8) of the mid-late 20th century. The exception is CMC, which does have Old Order Amish roots, but I doubt he's including us in the “conservative Plain Anabaptist” category anyway.
None of us should be comfortable with this. We've got to find some better way. ... It should cause us to search our hearts, our beliefs, and our history.
It should indeed. But a loose grasp of the history only serves to cast doubt on the other conclusions.

Where did my readers go? Did anyone make it all the way to the end?
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Josh
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Re: Where Did They Go?

Post by Josh »

Part of his talk was about the fact Old Order groups retain a lot more of their young people, whereas conservative Mennonites retain less, evangelical-assimilated Mennonites even fewer, and progressive Anabaptists retain almost none.

You are correct that his history was a bit inaccurate on the details, but the overall story is correct.

In essence, he was explaining the Anabaptist escalator to an audience who hadn't really seen it laid out before.

The connection he didn't make is that the conservative Anabaptist of today is identical to the "liberal Mennonites" of the 1800s, and will probably have identical results. It's a good case you make for that, but it's a difficult one for some people to recognise that they're in. A lot of folks like Mennonitism frozen in time as it was in, say, 1950 or 1900 and cannot see that 1950 led to 1950 which led to today.
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mike
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Re: Where Did They Go?

Post by mike »

If this doesn't get Edsel out of hiding, nothing will. An interesting topic OJ.
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Wade
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Re: Where Did They Go?

Post by Wade »

Regarding the birth rates:
Are people that are calling themselves conservative Anabaptist's restricting the amount of children they have with forms of birth control today?
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Mrs.Nisly
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Re: Where Did They Go?

Post by Mrs.Nisly »

It sounds like Conservative Mennonites are basically doomed to the escalator over the next how many generations.

Is it possible to retain or regain the essential Anabaptist theology without returning to the Old Order?
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Re: Where Did They Go?

Post by Biblical Anabaptist »

Mrs.Nisly wrote:
Is it possible to retain or regain the essential Anabaptist theology without returning to the Old Order?
Good question that I would like to know the answer to. It seems the conservative end of the spectrum thinks it is not with the increased emphasis on regulation that appears to be happening across the board.
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mike
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Re: Where Did They Go?

Post by mike »

Wade wrote:Regarding the birth rates:
Are people that are calling themselves conservative Anabaptist's restricting the amount of children they have with forms of birth control today?
New thread
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lesterb
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Re: Where Did They Go?

Post by lesterb »

Mrs.Nisly wrote:It sounds like Conservative Mennonites are basically doomed to the escalator over the next how many generations.

Is it possible to retain or regain the essential Anabaptist theology without returning to the Old Order?
It is sort of popular the last while to lift up the Old Orders as an ideal. However, that deliberately ignores a number of things. The OO's are definitely the quiet in the land. They are satisfied with providing a "safe" environment for their families, but most have little interest in helping sinners find Christ.

I think there are elements of their theology or practice that we would do well to pay attention to. But on the whole, I would never take my family back to those settings.

This message is a push back against the conceived "Charity" influence. Charity, of course, went to the other extreme, leaving the impression that if you were OO, it automatically meant that you weren't saved. That isn't true either. I'm not pro-evangelica, but I don't think that the original Anabaptists would be any happier with the OO's than they would with any of the rest of Mennonitism.
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Re: Where Did They Go?

Post by lesterb »

mike wrote:If this doesn't get Edsel out of hiding, nothing will. An interesting topic OJ.
I agree. :up:

I think it is important to be sure of your facts when you give this type of presentation. When people use the "scientific method" to put together this kind of presentation, they have better be sure to use it properly. If a speaker starts off with a hypothesis, he had better be very sure to test it properly, and be willing to restate it if it becomes to stilted or artificial.

I'd prefer to start off with a question, rather than a hypothesis, and end with the hypothesis instead.

Maybe this will be the "killer" discussion that starts to bring people back.
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Josh
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Re: Where Did They Go?

Post by Josh »

Mrs.Nisly wrote:It sounds like Conservative Mennonites are basically doomed to the escalator over the next how many generations.

Is it possible to retain or regain the essential Anabaptist theology without returning to the Old Order?
Are you actually asking if we can get our children off the escalator? We can retain essential Anabaptist theology easily.

The problem is that our children don't. Whatever we are teaching them, they seem to be most comfortable in a "conservative", evangelical church and are very comfortable shedding nonresistance.
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