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

st Russian Conference of Baptized Christians in 1884.37 The first elder of the Mennonite Brethren Church, Hein- rich Huebert, suffered prolonged imprisonment for baptizing a Russian servant upon the confession of her faith.38 Ahram 88 A MISSIONARY MOVEMENT Linger and Heinrich Neufeld, in spite of mistreatment and im- prisonment, could not be silenced from preaching salvation to their Russian neighbors. Johann Wieler, an early convert in the Mennonite Brethren Church, felt that God's purpose for the Mennonite Brethren movement was the evangelization of Russia, For years he was a preaching fugitive, moving from village to village. The intensity of the persecutions finally forced his escape to Romania, where he served in a Russian evangelical fellowship,39 Heinrich P. Sukkau sold all his possessions to become an apostle to the Russians, With no sponsoring body to provide his daily necessities, he followed Paul's example of working for his support, and seeking the lost amid much personal de- privation.40 The imprisonment of Abraham H, Unruh and Gerhard P. Froese in the early 1900s, the work of Adolf Reimer and Heinrich Enns, and the Tent Mission under the leadership of jakob Dyck, who prayed for his brutal execu- tioners as he died under their sword, compares with the hero- ism of the gallery of faith recorded in Hebrews ll.41 In America the early Mennonite Brethren limited their evangelistic outreach to people of cultural affinity. Beyond other Mennonite groups, whom they considered their first mission field, they sought to evangelize people of Lutheran, Congregational and Catholic background who had immigrated to the middle west from the Russian German colonies and from Germany. They found it difficult to cross cultural bound- aries to carry the gospel to English-speaking people. With the exception of the Minneapolis City Mission, established in 1907, it was not until the 1930s and 1940s that they launched programs to reach their English neighbors, THE "HEATHEN" MUST HEAR As late as I960 the Mennonite Brethren made a distinction between missionary outreach to people of Christian religious background and those of non-Christian religions. The latter 89 A PILGRIMAGE OF FAITH were considered the "heathen," having never heard even the basics of the Christian message. (The term "heathen" as in Heiden Mission was in common use for many years. In re- cent decades it has been abandoned as imperialistic and pejo- rative,) The outreach to people with some Christian back- ground was referred to as "home mission"; the outreach to non-Christians as "foreig