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

e of faith. Throughout their struggle for their convictions and answers to the at- 197 A PILGRIMAGE OF FAITH tacks upon the young Mennonite Brethren Church we find with fathers of the movement an unchanging faithful- ness to the Holy Scriptures. The Bible was for them the unfailing Word of God from cover to coven . . , In this commitment to the Word of God they reviewed every sin- gle truth and formed their concepts from the relationship to its content as they understood it.19 Has our separation of truth and life, salvation and respon- sibility driven us to prove and defend the prepositional foun- dation of our faith? Is the evidence of the gospel so lacking in our lives that it must be reposited in a document? Is not newness of life a stronger proof for the truth of the Bible than some creed that can be challenged? The Church The church as understood by the Mennonite Brethren is a fellowship in a relationship of love with Christ and with one another. It is a community of inter-responsibility and disci- pline. The church of "ecclesiastical democracy" with room for individualistic independence in the local church and in the conference, well adapted from our North American culture, would appear strange to our forebears and possibly even more so to the community of faith in the first centuries. Viewing grace as a gift to be appropriated without the disci- pline of self-denial and death is not part of our understanding of the Christian life. The contemporary emphasis of many evangelicals-to offer free grace as the doorway to a life of ease and security in this world and in the world to come-was not known among the early Mennonite Brethren, Have exter- nal pressures led to a process of accommodation within? Have we become a comfortable church nurturing the hope of heaven without sharing the demands of the cross? Can we actually be the church without being in tension with the sur- rounding culture? 198 IDENTITY AMID DIVERSITY The Future The question of eschatology has a long history with the Mennonite Brethren. Abraham H. Unruh described the escha- tological view of the early Mennonite Brethren as follows; "They exhorted (each other) to watchfulness and to a holy walk. The present views with reference to the rapture and die millennium were apparently foreign to them. However, they joined in the prayer: 'Amen, Come Lord Jesus'. "** Fasci- nation with end-times speculation was not part of our biblical foundation. It came to us from the outside (Darbyism in Rus- sia and dispensationalism in North America), and was spread wid