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

were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented (Heb. 11:36-37), The Mennonite Brethren pilgrimage offers some parallels to the book of Hebrews. The movement began with a people searching for truth and assurance of salvation. Their vision was to restore the faith and life of the sixteenth-century An- abaptists, who in turn had sought to emulate the church of the first century. Like the heroes of faith in Hebrews, the early Mennonite Brethren were not perfect, but God blessed them and they became an influence in evangelism and missions dispropor- tionate to their numbers, They too learned to accept trials, mockings, scourgings, even bonds and imprisonment. With many other Christians in Russia, Mennonite Brethren were slain with the sword; they wandered about in "sheepskins and goatskins"; being destitute, afflicted and tormented in the Siberian wilderness.1 Throughout this book we have attempted to chronicle both the faithfulness and weaknesses of the Mennonite Brethren as they have sought to be a people in the world but not of the world In their early years they were no strangers to persecution from without. Later, in North America, the ma- jor tensions would arise from within as this closely knit homo- geneous group found itself thrust onto the open sea of a rapidiy changing world. The dramatic changes of the last half century logically pose the question "Who are the Mennonite Brethren today?" How are they different from their early forebears? In the process of adjusting to their exposure to modernity, what have they lost that they should have kept7 Conversely, what have they kept that perhaps should have been given up? 324 THE RACE THAT IS SET BEFORE US The question of identity is not a new one for Mennonite Brethren, On numerous occasions this question has been an- swered by defining what they were not. From their inception, declared Frank C. Peters in 1959, Mennonite Brethren saw themselves as Anabaptists in distinction from the Baptists.2 In time, however, they would be seen as having strayed from their Anabaptist moorings. In 1972 John A. Toews urged Men- nonite Brethren to strengthen their Anabaptist ties and become more selective about their identification with other evangeli- cals. While recognizing that Mennonite Brethren had gained much from other evangelical groups, especially in the areas of evangelism and missions, he warned that "we must learn to borrow from them with much greater discernment and dis- crimination. Whatever we borrow from other theological t