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

lationism. They maintained their prohibitions against marrying "out- siders" (including General Conference Mennonites),2' The North American Mennonite Brethren also continued closed communion, making immersion baptism a condition of partic- ipation. As late as 1897 the conference ruled unanimously that members should not take out life insurance. To do so meant a lack of trust in the provision of God and the church.50 As late as 1915 they ruled against participation in the Mennonite Mutual Aid Union, thereby refusing a corporate relationship 130 MENNQNTTB BRETHREN AT THE TURN QF THE CENTURY with other Mennonite groups31 and reaffirming their character- istic isolationism. The American Mennonite Brethren, as a small group, felt threatened by any influence from the out- side. They remained ultra-conservative and more legalistic than their Russian counterparts, A major step of the North American conference at the close of the nineteenth century was to establish their own structure for administering foreign missions and thus end the need for their missionaries to serve under non-Mennonite Brethren societies,32 131 CHAPTER 11 Summary Observations to Part One The preceding ten chapters on the early Mennonite Brethren Church give occasion for some summary observations. The main source for a study of the early Russian Mennonite Brethren story is the volu- minous work of Peter M. Friesen, a history based on the ex- periences and perceptions of people who were vitally in- volved in the actual struggle of the mid-nineteenth century. For them, objectivity was impossible. Friesen acknowledged this by saying, "What we have written ... in a laige part of the book is not 'history', it is a statement of the subjective viewpoints of a contemporary; it is made up of 'chronicles1 and 'memoirs' which will have to await the objective analysis of future historians."1 The sympathies and antipathies of the contemporaries of that era encumbered objective analysis. ANSWERING THE "WHY" QUESTION Friesen's major focus was on the "how" of the events with an under-emphasis on the "why." But the burden of time also requires us to focus on the "why/ The early Mennonite Brethren saw themselves as the bearers of the Anabaptist movement, an echo from the six- teenth century. The relationship of I860 to 1525 has been well established Cornelius J. Dyck referred to the I860 event as "1525 Revisited."2 John A. Toews, in A History of the Men- nonite Brethren Church, provided further analysis of the link- age between the two movements.3 But the Mennonite Brethren were not alone