A History of the Mennonite Brethren Church, Ja Toews

rch. In 1861 the Wiebe family moved to the Crimea, where a group of Mennonite families had bought a Mohammedan village the previous year which they named Annenfeld. Through a spontaneous religious revival most of the people of this village experienced a genuine conversion and a radical change of life, Wiebe and his wife among them. 3 Although these new converts were like "sheep without a shepherd" 176 TIIK KUIMMKH MKNNONITK RRKTHRKN COME TO NORTH AMERICA 177 in the beginning, Wiebe soon emerged as the leader of the group. Since Wiebe had learned to know the Kleine Gemeinde (the first "separatist group" among the Mennonites of South Russia) when he was a hired hand of a member of that church in the Molotschna, the group established contacts with the Crimean Kleine Gemeinde. In 1864 elder Johann Friesen from the Molotschna, upon invitation, visited the Annenfeld group. When Elder Friesen offered to organize them as a Kleine Gemeinde congregation, Wiebe explained that first they all wished to be baptized on their faith. This, Friesen said, he could not do since it was against the rules of the Kleine Gemeinde to rebaptize. 3 Continued discussions did not resolve this problem, but in 1867 the group was nevertheless organized as a Kleine Gemeinde church. In the same year also Jacob A. Wiebe and Peter Berg were elected as ministers and in 1869 Wiebe was elected and ordained as elder. All this time, however, Wiebe and his group had serious reservations about their new church affiliation. They felt they should have been baptized upon the confession of their faith. They also found that they differed widely with the Kleine Gemeinde on the question of assurance of salvation (Heilsgewissheit). These con- victions eventually led to a second "secession" of the group. According to Elder Wiebe, the new movement was launched "after much prayer and searching of God's Word as well as in Menno Simons' writings." 4 On September 21, 1869, Wiebe, who first was rebaptized by Kornelius Enns, a senior member of the group, baptized eighteen others, including Enns. The mode of baptism on this occasion was not immersion, although that mode was adopted shortly after. 5 Forward immersion, with the candidate kneeling, became the general practice of the new church. The group chose the name Bruedergemeinde , but soon was called Krimmer Mennoniten Bruedergemeinde, to distinguish it from the Mennonite Brethren Church of the Molotschna. 8 In effect, the act of rebaptism constituted a withdrawal of the Wiebe group from the Kleine Gemeinde, with which it had been affiliated for only a few years. However, as Bender correctly observes, "much of the ultra-conservative spirit of the Kleine Gemeinde was transmitted into the K.M.B. group, in combination with the new K.M.B. emphasis on conversion, assurance, and experience." 7 There was little further connection between the Krimmer Mennonite Brethren and the Kleine Gemeinde, but in