Re: Mennonites as the Persecutors???
Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2017 11:51 pm
The thing about Mennonites in the Ukraine: if you were a young Mennonite man in the Crimea in 1942, you would have grown up being told there is no God and that bourgeois morality is invalid and right or wrong are what the Party says they are; your teachers would have encouraged you to inform on your parents if you received Christian instruction at home, and you were very likely to have seen one of your parents taken away never to be seen away.
One man I knew who grew up in that setting spoke of seeing the pastors and elders taken away, then other men in the church who stepped forward to take their place were taken away as well, and their replacements in turn, until by the beginning of the war 90% of the families in his village were fatherless.
In such circumstances, how are the young men expected to make informed moral decisions? Individual Mennonites from the Ukraine may have something to ask forgiveness for depending on how they conducted themselves, but the Mennonite people as a whole do not.
One man I knew who grew up in that setting spoke of seeing the pastors and elders taken away, then other men in the church who stepped forward to take their place were taken away as well, and their replacements in turn, until by the beginning of the war 90% of the families in his village were fatherless.
In such circumstances, how are the young men expected to make informed moral decisions? Individual Mennonites from the Ukraine may have something to ask forgiveness for depending on how they conducted themselves, but the Mennonite people as a whole do not.