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

of the Mennonite Brethren. These basic tenets of faith are the core of Mennonite Brethren belief- Our fundamental theology has not changed in more than 130 years of history, Yet the struggle continues to achieve a consistency between what we profess to believe and what we actually practice in life. 204 CHAPTER 16 Wrestling with Modernity Prior to the Second World War the Mennonite Brethren Church existed in a protected subculture where reli- gious and social controls aided their efforts to be "people in the world, but not of the world." Life, the- ology and ethics were relatively fixed. Annual conferences helped them draw the boundaries between belief and unbe- lief, church and world. The postwar era created a new context. The revolution- ary changes that followed 1945 affected all areas of social as well as religious life. Members began to question long-held scriptural understandings and churchly practices. The moor- ings of the past grew slack. BUFFETED BY A SEA OF CHANGE "Breakneck changes* was the way Life magazine de- scribed the period of its first fifty years (1936-1986). This era, it said, was "the most troubled, unsettling, cosdyT adventurous and surprising time even More has changed and faster, more has been destroyed, more accomptished than in any compara- ble interval in the five thousand years since recorded history began,"1 The Second World War (1939-1945) was the most cata- clysmic upheaval in the history of human warfare. Eighty mil- lion people were in uniform and an estimated fifty million people died, including ten million civilians. Germany lost four million men; and the estimates for Russian loss ranged up to twenty million. Life considered 1945 the watershed year of the twentieth century2 as atomic bombs dropped on Hi- 205 A PILGRIMAGE OF FAITH roshima and Nagasaki changed the face of history, America, in the words of Churchill, was recognized as standing "at the summit of the world.*3 The decades that followed were earthshaking. The world map was redrawn, Decolonialization set in. The world be- came smaller * In the coming years the rocket became the symbol of scientific advance, In October 1957 the first satel- lite, albeit a Soviet one, orbited the globe and ushered in the space age. Moreover, Life said: "The deciphering of the ge- netic code in the 1960s may prove to be as important to the course of history as the splitting of the atom.** Communica- tions exploded and shrank the world to a global village. Tele- vision revolutionized communication, perhaps more so even than the invention of print. Wo