A Pilgrimage Of Faith, J.B. Toews, 1993

love. Is there any way in which you could add to the fer- vor of prayer, or to the fervor of admonition to prayer through your sermons and publications? In any case, the time has come to lift up the tired hands and strengthen the weak knees. Like a woman in birth pangs, we should labor for the new birth of our people. Is the Lord's hand shortened? Has His ear become hard of hearing? Or has His blood, the precious blood of Jesus, now lost its power 7 A PILGRIMAGE OF FAITH and validity? O, what is lacking? We-the witnesses and watchmen-we are lacking. A laige number of us lack the beginning letter of the alphabet, the capital "A" of Chris- tianity: "Wake up, o man, from the sleep of sin, etc." This is not due to our lack of leamin^-though it were desirable that matters stood differently among us even in this regard-it is due to our emptiness and estrangement from God, . . . If only we shepherds were alive, then the sheep would hear our voice, and the awakening life would flow beautifully and appropriately within the guidelines of our confession. But now it is breaking out of the decayed forms, is flattening the rotten pillars that we are, and is working its own way, as it were, over our dead bodies, to freedom. There it now crests and flows in unbridled power until the Lord of the church will final- ly succeed in containing it, and we will be left with a dry form, with a husk lacking the seed, with a church lacking living members. That is what it looks like here. Anything that begins to live wants to escape, as though we were doomed to die.24 INFLUENCES TOWARDS REVIVAL The course of history demonstrates that God from time to time visits his people anew with a gracious movement of the Spirit. First, a period of gloom sets in and weariness invades the hearts of men and women. Then, sick in soul, they seek after God, The human spirit cannot rest until it finds peace in God. This search for renewal in the life of the Mennonite church in Russia emerged in several forms. One of the earliest was the birth of the Kleine Gemetnde (small congregation)(1812-1819). This renewal movement, led by Klaas Reimer (1770-1837), was the result of small prayer circles of those who were discontented with conditions in the larger church. Reimer was concerned to reform the Russian Mennonites in accord with the traditions of the six* 8 A PHENOMENON OF RENEWAL teenth-century Anabaptist church and the writings of Menno Simons, Dirk Philips and Peter Peters.25 The formation of the Kleine Gemeinde did not calm the tur