THE MENNONITE BROTHERHOOD IN RUSSIA (1789 - 1910), P. M. Friesen, 1911

Alexanderwohl— Elder Peter Wedel 6 in Alexanderwohl; Gnadenfeld— Elder August Lenzmann in Gnadenfeld; Waldheim— at that time without an elder, and the Kleine Gemeinde (here and there erroneously called the “Neukircher”) without a church, meeting in private homes— Elder Johann Friesen 7 in Neukirch, lived in all of these villages, more or less scattered among the members of the “Large Congregation” or concentrated in the villages where their churches were located and after which their parishes, that is, their congregations were named. The seven elders, together with their ministers and deacons, constitute the Molotschna Mennonite Council of Church Leaders. 8 b) The Chortitza District (with its administrative office in Chortitza) consisted of the very large Chortitza Flemish Congregation— Elder Gerhard Dyck, and the small Kronsweide Frisian Congregation— Elder Jakob Hildebrand. It also had a Colony A dmini strative Office, village mayoral offices and an agricultural society. The Bergtal Colony 9 in the Mariupol District formed a distinct civic and religious community with its own elder (Braun) and civic organization (colony a dminis trative office, village mayoral offices), five villages, which had settled there from the Chortitza District. Eighteen (19) villages constitute the Chortitza District. It has one secondary school (teacher, Heinrich Epp, later elder), every village has a village school, and Einlage has a small private school (that of the teacher Heinrich Heese, Sr.). On rare and important occasions the councils of the Ekaterinoslav and Taurida Mennonites would meet. (Compare #65(2): “Elder List/') XII. PASTOR WUEST, THE GREAT REVIVALIST, AN INSTRUMENT OF THE REVIVAL OF THE MOLOTSCHNA MENNONITES AND A PROMOTOR OF THE BROTHERHOOD MOVEMENT 1. The above sections (#5, 40, 43ff. and 51) concerning Tobias Voth, Gnadenfeld and the Brotherhood Movement make it clear what we mean by the term “brethren.” Strangely enough, it was the evangelical Pastor Eduard Hugo Otto Wuest, mentioned earlier, who became a mighty promoter of the Brotherhood Movement among the Mennonites. He came from Murrhardt, a rural village in the Kingdom of Wuerttemberg where his parents kept an inn. Wuest, who had been educated at the University of Tuebingen, was a member of the clergy of the Wuerttemberg Lutheran State Church, but since 1846 a minister of the separatist (Wuerttemberg) Lutheran Brethren Church at Neu-Hoffnung, in the vicinity of Berdiansk on the Sea of Azov, founded in the 1820s and consisting of some five-hundred souls scattered about in a number of villages. After a spiritually destitute childhood, during which virtually nothing of the rich treasure of grace and piety at work in the life of the Wuerttemberg people touched him, and an advanced secondary school and university career tainted by indolence, brutality and sin (he prayed for the first time just before his final examinations after six years at t