A History of the Mennonite Brethren Church, Ja Toews

German was a basic ingredient in the war hysteria that swept through the country. The Saskatchewan Branch of the Canadian Legion urged the nationwide ban of the German language at public services. 15 To demonstrate this anti-German attitude, several Mennonite churches were burned to the ground by superpatriots. Among these were the M.B. churches at Vauxhall (Alberta) and Newton Siding (Manitoba) — both destroyed in 1940. The war and its aftermath helped Mennonite Brethren (as well as other Mennonites) to dissociate themselves completely from political Germanism and partly even from cultural Germanism. The new emphasis in the postwar period was on the significance of knowing and understanding German for the home and church, and on the im- portance of a "second language" for higher education. 16 Occasionally its value for missionary outreach was stressed in urban centers (like Winnipeg), where large German-speaking communities existed. How widespread this concern for the preservation of the German language was in the Canadian M.B. Conference can be seen by a resolution that was presented to the convention in 1950 by the Board of Reference and Counsel. The first part reads: The Conference acknowledges the need for the preservation of the German language, and for that reason requests that churches establish Saturday schools wherever possible, where children may be given the ABC's of the German language and of religious instruction. The Conference further requests that church leaders, Sunday school superintendents, Sunday school teachers, and German-speaking public school teachers cultivate the German language wherever possible and also ask parents to speak German with their children. " It is difficult to conceive of a more comprehensive approach to the solution of the problem than is embodied in the above resolution. But history has a way of bypassing resolutions when the latter no longer conform to the real needs on a congregational level. Although the annual reports of the "Committee for the German Language" appear in the conference minutes until 1962, the language problem ceased to be an issue on the conference floor several years earlier. On the local church level the language issue was often debated loud and long, and much spiritual energy was lost in the process. In the fifties Canadian M.B. churches were in the midst of an inevitable language change. FACING CULTURAL CHANGE 329 Transition from German to English According to the reports received, all Canadian M.B. churches conducted their services in German until 1940. Only twelve of the seventy-seven churches responding had made the transition to the exclusive use of English in public services by 1961. Twenty-two others made the change in the decade from 1961 to 1971. Half of the congregations who had completed their "transition interlude" reported that their bilingual period had lasted from ten to twenty-five years. With one or two exceptio