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

r until 1938 and 1939 when the conference chairman and assistant chairman first came from the ranks of the Russlander, From 1941 to 1943 the leadership was again with the Kanadier Only from 1944, twenty years after the coming of the Russlander, was there a continuous pattern of mutuality in the conference leadership,15 Genera! Conference Mennonite Brethren leadership fol- lowed a similar pattern. It took fourteen years (1924-1938) for the first Russlander candidate to be accepted for an assign- ment under the Board of Foreign Missions, and not until 1945 was a Russlander elected to this board,16 The Russlander gen- erally assumed that marrying a woman from a Kanadier family would hasten a candidate's acceptance,17 In the spring of 1946 members of the Board of Foreign Missions interviewed a Kanadier student at the Mennonite Brethren College in Winnipeg. As the president of the college, I advised the board members against accepting the candidate 158 MENNQNTTE IMMIGRATION TO CANADA DURING THE 1920s because the college faculty felt she lacked the needed qualifi- cations. The board's response was: "The time has not yet come that the Russlander will tell us whom we send to India as a missionary." They sent the candidate. In a few years she had to be recalled. Hie evaluation of the college faculty had proven to be correct. The incident illustrated the protective- ness felt by Canadian Conference leaders in the first decades following the 1924 arrival of the Russlander. As the conference grew with the coming of the immi- grants, the conference agenda expanded accordingly. The concern for preserving the German language, referred to in 1911 and 1922, became a major conference issue between 1926 and 1959 Ia During the same years the Canadian Confer- ence minutes record vigorous discussions on church polity and practice and the dangers of false teaching in the church. During these decades the conference also reviewed the structure of church organization and qualifications for confer- ence membership. Membership in a local church was to be based on a candidate's personal conversion and consistent Christian lifestyle. Membership of a church in the conference required accepting the Mennonite Brethren Confession of Faith as well as adopted standards of Christian behavior. A committee would examine a local church with regard to its organization and polity and recommend acceptance of the church into the conference fellowship.19 A host of other issues also dominated conference discus- sions. After 1932 we find a continuous concern for Mennonite Brethren who l