Interested in learning about Holdemans

[Ernie]

You keep saying "most", but by numbers, "most" should include Holdemans and Apostolic Christians, whose numbers rival the rest of the conservative Anabaptist world if we exclude the Old Order groups. And let's be frank: the Old Order groups don't exactly fellowship and commune with the non-Old Order groups. They are, for all intents and purposes, a separate sphere.

that most plain Anabaptists are horse and buggy, even though the small fraction that are conservative Mennonites etc. do drive cars.

Most conservative Anabaptists don't use Medicaid or state aid at all. I am in one of the very few conferences that does do so.

John, you meant to say "most Plain Anabaptists" in that last quote, correct?

[Ernie]

Both Holdemans and other "conservative Anabaptists" who are car-driving (fundamentally we are the same bloc of people) need to face the fact that they are in the minority compared to the overwhelming mass of non-car plain Anabaptists.

I thought you have tried to make the case earlier that Holdeman's don't consider themselves conservative Anabaptists.

[JohnH]

Both Holdemans and other "conservative Anabaptists" who are car-driving (fundamentally we are the same bloc of people) need to face the fact that they are in the minority compared to the overwhelming mass of non-car plain Anabaptists.

I thought you have tried to make the case earlier that Holdeman's don't consider themselves conservative Anabaptists.

Culturally and ethnographically, they don't view themselves that way.

An outside observer would consider them to fundamentally be part of the same "thing", though: "plain Anabaptists who are not horse and buggy".

Another example are Swartzentrubers, who don't really consider themselves at all like Old Order Amish, and likewise Old Order Amish have told me they consider us (Holdemans) to be far more similar to them than Swartzentrubers.

However, an outside observer would find Amish and Swartzentrubers to fundamentally be the same "thing". "Plain Anabaptists who don't drive cars."

[ohio jones]

I'm thinking we need some venn diagrams here.

[wunruh]

This also isn't accurate. What happened at Greeley is revival ministers showed up for revival meetings, just like any other congregation, and the congregation refused to accept them. This actually started in the 1950s, along the same time as every other Mennonite church was liberalising. Over a process of years, more conservative families started to leave the congregation until the whole membership that was left was interested in liberalising. Eventually, the remaining membership was excommunicated, mostly by a refusal to talk to the rest of the church conference over a period of years.

This may be what the COGICM officially says but this is not at all what any of the members who went through it report. I've talked to many of them and many of them have corroborating stories and they do not agree with this version at all. In fact my grandparents were there when my father was 10 or so.

[JohnH]

This also isn't accurate. What happened at Greeley is revival ministers showed up for revival meetings, just like any other congregation, and the congregation refused to accept them. This actually started in the 1950s, along the same time as every other Mennonite church was liberalising. Over a process of years, more conservative families started to leave the congregation until the whole membership that was left was interested in liberalising. Eventually, the remaining membership was excommunicated, mostly by a refusal to talk to the rest of the church conference over a period of years.

This may be what the COGICM officially says but this is not at all what any of the members who went through it report. I've talked to many of them and many of them have corroborating stories and they do not agree with this version at all. In fact my grandparents were there when my father was 10 or so.

Well, go ahead and tell us what you think happened, then.

I think my original claim that the congregation decided it didn't want to be a conservative Anabaptist church is an accurate statement, considering that they ended up deciding... not to be one. Would you disagree with that statement or not?

[wunruh]

I think my original claim that the congregation decided it didn't want to be a conservative Anabaptist church is an accurate statement, considering that they ended up deciding... not to be one. Would you disagree with that statement or not?

No I would say my understanding is that they could see the beliefs claimed by the COGICM were not what was actually being lived and enforced.

They didn't leave Anabaptism. The home minister's own November 22, 1976 address to the congregation, delivered before the excommunication, builds his entire case by walking through Menno Simons and Dietrich Philips directly, and citing the Thirty-Three Articles of Faith, the historic Anabaptist confession, to show his position on justification by faith and the nature of the church matched those sources. His argument wasn't a break from Anabaptism, it was that Holdeman's teaching on the "one true visible church" and the capitalized, institutionalized "Church" had drifted from those same historic Anabaptist writings, not the other way around.
After the excommunication, Majestic View kept functioning as a congregation, and the minister's 1979 testimony was published in The Echo, the voice of the Rocky Mountain Mennonite Conference, an existing Anabaptist body that received him and the congregation into fellowship. That's continuity within the tradition, not an exit from it. Leaving the narrow definition the Holdeman church holds does not constitute leaving the larger Anabaptist faith.

As far as what actually happened at the Majestic View congregation, it's not what I "think" happened as I have minutes from meetings during that time as well as witness testimony. Following is the information from those sources.

The record doesn't support the "years of mutual refusal" version.

February 1976 minutes: Majestic View is a normal functioning congregation, voting on ministers, running Bible school. No sign of estrangement.

November 22, 1976: Revival ministers arrive. Within days they're sent home. Gerald's own account states the reason: the meetings weren't revival, they were interviews built around detecting "foreign and deceptive spirits," using flagged traits like resistance to discipline, being insubmissive, unteachable. This exact protocol is documented separately in the Pacific District minutes from the same season, already in use in Canada and Haiti. This departure from the normal revival to the individual interrogation was the "Purge" or "Panel" beginning.

December 13, 1976: Full excommunication meeting held in Kansas. No member of Majestic View present. Minutes never released, despite being promised.

Time from the revival ministers being sent home to the excommunication: about three weeks.

The excommunication letter itself: four paragraphs, no dates, no cited history of warnings or prior refusals. Just "a foreign and deceptive spirit" and two doctrinal charges. About 85% of the congregation was excommunicated at that meeting and sent notices afterwards.

2009: Eldon Wenger, a Holdeman minister present at the Kansas meeting, told a reconciliation meeting the decision was made to act immediately specifically to prevent people from having time to reconsider, and stated there were mistakes made and it should have gone slower.
85% of the congregation excommunicated in a single closed meeting, with no member present to speak for themselves, is not the outcome of a gradual, years-long mutual estrangement. The timeline doesn't support that claim.

[JohnH]

I would appreciate it if you didn’t use AI to write / edit your posts.

I said “exited conservative Anabaptism”, which Greeley did. They discontinued practices like the Christian woman’s devotional head covering. Unfortunately, I think that result speaks for itself; was there a “deceptive spirit”? The congregation no longer exists and the congregants long ago abandoned plain Anabaptism.

As I understand it, families that wanted to remain plain Anabaptist had gradually been drifting away in the 60s and 70s or had discontinued attending until they could move and weren’t affected by the excommunication.

With that said, I don’t think anyone is very happy with how things turned out and a great deal of effort has gone into avoiding a repeat of that. Part of that means working with an affected brother as soon as there are signs of doubting what is considered the true, historic Christian and Anabaptist faith.

Of course, not everyone wants to be a plain Ananaptist. If not, there are plenty of other churches to choose from. If someone doesn’t want to be Holdeman there are plenty of other plain Anabaptist groups to explore.

[wunruh]

You asked me to respond to what happened at Greeley, and that's exactly what you didn't do, instead trying to use the Anabaptist angle to avoid addressing most of what I'd laid out.

Since you'd rather argue Anabaptist identity than address the timeline and events, let's go there instead.

It amazes me that you take the outcome of a group of people unceremoniously removed from a group they developed in, and point to that outcome as proof of what they were trying to accomplish. It is very obvious from all the responses that they were not trying to leave the Holdeman church, or they would not have been inconvenienced by it, much less experienced the devastation most of them did.

If the congregation you are part of was suddenly and heartlessly removed from the church without you having any idea it was happening, I have no doubt you'd pull yourself up by your bootstraps and remain a very staunch and well put together Anabaptist group. I'm sure sixty years from now, the quality and health of your group would be very plain evidence of exactly what you wanted at the moment you were excommunicated. And you'd move stolidly forward as you had the avoidance leveraged against you, which at that time was quite severe, with some families going bankrupt as their businesses had relied on their brethren who stopped working with or supporting them.

From everything I can deduce, they had actually expected the church at large to be interested in the fact that they felt a walk by faith was not being lived by most people. I believe this is why there was shock and consternation among many of them at the sudden and vicious removal. Gerald had, after all, been registering his feelings about the OTVC doctrine since his ordination, fifteen years earlier, and during the intervening time was a well-renowned revivalist all over the conference. So I do not believe they had any idea any of this was coming, or that they wanted it. I've asked several people about this since coming to that conclusion, and I was told I was correct. It's also worth noting that the years leading up to this are generally described as some of the more relaxed and open years in the church's recent history.

Altogether, it seems that the story you seem convinced of does not hold up very well to scrutiny, either of the historical documents or of the facts, such as the shock and hurt at being expelled. It is obvious that's not what their goal was at all, even though you suggest they'd been moving in that direction. If it had been, the shock and hurt wouldn't have followed.

Overall I am shocked to see anyone trying to sane wash the Greeley event and make it sound benign while also admitting that they have taken many pains to not repeat it. Both cannot be true at the same time. Shame on you.

[JohnH]

You asked me to respond to what happened at Greeley, and that's exactly what you didn't do, instead trying to use the Anabaptist angle to avoid addressing most of what I'd laid out.

I appreciated your perspective of what happened at Greeley, which mostly lines up with the narratives I have heard (secondhand in my case).

Since you'd rather argue Anabaptist identity than address the timeline and events, let's go there instead.

It amazes me that you take the outcome of a group of people unceremoniously removed from a group they developed in,

This is an interesting perspective. If a group of people disagree with a larger group's doctrine and practices, why would they want to be part of it? Wouldn't they be happy to longer be part of it?

It raises the question of whether or not a church is simply an ethnic club, or else is a community defined by shared confession of faith.

and point to that outcome as proof of what they were trying to accomplish. It is very obvious from all the responses that they were not trying to leave the Holdeman church, or they would not have been inconvenienced by it, much less experienced the devastation most of them did.

If a group of people want to abandon the doctrines and practices that have been part of John Holdeman's church movement since he began it, it is hard to see how they can be described as not wanting to leave the "Holdeman church".

If the congregation you are part of was suddenly and heartlessly removed from the church without you having any idea it was happening, I have no doubt you'd pull yourself up by your bootstraps and remain a very staunch and well put together Anabaptist group. I'm sure sixty years from now, the quality and health of your group would be very plain evidence of exactly what you wanted at the moment you were excommunicated. And you'd move stolidly forward as you had the avoidance leveraged against you, which at that time was quite severe, with some families going bankrupt as their businesses had relied on their brethren who stopped working with or supporting them.

If my congregation were on a path towards abandoning what I consider to be Christian and Anabaptist historic practice and abandoning things like the headcovering, and on a path to joining a non-plain denomination like MC USA or FEC, I would simply make for the exit myself - which is what many families at Greeley did in the 1960s; they simply quietly moved elsewhere. Of course, this did have the effect that those who remained were much more aligned with abandoning Holdeman doctrines along with plain Anabaptist practices.

(Full disclosure: I used to be part of an MC USA church that is now an FEC church, and I don't think they ever cancelled my membership, so in an odd way I am united in two ways with whatever is left of the Greeley church.)

From everything I can deduce, they had actually expected the church at large to be interested in the fact that they felt a walk by faith was not being lived by most people. I believe this is why there was shock and consternation among many of them at the sudden and vicious removal.

So, in other words, they expected the rest of the church group to be open to radically abandoning their long-established doctrines?

Gerald had, after all, been registering his feelings about the OTVC doctrine since his ordination, fifteen years earlier, and during the intervening time was a well-renowned revivalist all over the conference. So I do not believe they had any idea any of this was coming, or that they wanted it. I've asked several people about this since coming to that conclusion, and I was told I was correct. It's also worth noting that the years leading up to this are generally described as some of the more relaxed and open years in the church's recent history.

So after 15 years of deviating from long-established doctrines (and being given a wide berth to figure this out), they were finally removed - and this was several years into the interviews when it finally happened. How on earth could this be a surprise? It is more analogous to the recent situation with the SSPX where they have finally been severed from the larger Catholic Church. Sure, the people in the SSPX are pretty unhappy about it, but it's not they couldn't see it coming.

Altogether, it seems that the story you seem convinced of does not hold up very well to scrutiny, either of the historical documents or of the facts, such as the shock and hurt at being expelled.

I do not discount the "shock and hurt" at all, although I do question why someone cares if a church you don't think is legitimate expels you. Wasn't that Greeley's new position?

It is obvious that's not what their goal was at all, even though you suggest they'd been moving in that direction. If it had been, the shock and hurt wouldn't have followed.

So what was their goal? In any case, they seem to have decided to stop being plain Anabaptist. Were they planning to try to take the rest of the conference in that direction as well?

Overall I am shocked to see anyone trying to sane wash the Greeley event and make it sound benign while also admitting that they have taken many pains to not repeat it. Both cannot be true at the same time. Shame on you.

Overall, I am quite glad to be part of a church that is defined by doctrine & practice, as opposed to a church that is simply a club for people with last names like Unruh, Koehn, and Johnson. There are plenty of other churches where one can celebrate their Russian Mennonite ethnic heritage but not practice Holdeman Mennonitism. I would say that Greeley is one of them, except the Greeley church was unable to keep enough of their young people around, and it eventually aged and shrank to the point it no longer exists. This isn't meant to gloat or to brag, but rather an overall problem afflicting much of the world of non-plain Anabaptism.