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

the Promemoria attached to the petition. “The Molotschna Mennonites, in the Province of Taurida, base their internal administration, in matters of faith and church discipline, upon the Holy Gospel and the teaching of Menno Simons. The entire Mennonite church order is rooted primarily in the principle: freedom of conscience and of personal conviction. The Russian imperial law plainly guarantees the Mennonites complete freedom of religion 52 and absolute- ly avoids any kind of direct or indirect interference in the internal affairs of the church and its discipline. The Mennonite Church Council, too, in keeping with the teachings of the Gospel and Menno Simons, is, for its part, supposed to avoid all matters that pertain to the secular authorities, and to give to God the things that are God’s and to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. On the basis of these principles the Difficulties and Victory 251 Molotschna Mennonites, quite apart from divisions in regard to civil matters (in which context every colony also forms an independent community), are also divided into separate congregations or fellowships with respect to their church organization, each with its own ministers and elders at its head. The actual difference between the latter and the civil community, whose organization is determined by positive law, consists in the fact that the church fellowship is built, not by means of the law, but through the free decisions and in accordance with the personal convictions of the fellow believers themselves, irrespective of geographical, administrative or other factors which determine the organization of a civil community. As a consequence, each ecclesiastical community may embrace a more or less substantial number of administrative communities; in contrast to this, however, every in- dividual Mennonite— in the individual civil communities as well as in the family— is completely free to join any particular ecclesiastical fellowship, as the Molotschna Mennonite fellowships reveal. There can therefore be no doubt about the personal right of every Mennonite either freely to withdraw from a fellowship which does not conform to his convictions, or, as the case may be, to help establish a new church— ah the more so since the civil law does not address itself to this matter while the Holy Scriptures and Menno Simons make it into a veritably unavoidable duty for every true believer, in a given instance, to withdraw from such a fellowship. Similarly, it follows that it is the right and obligation of the church of expel its corrupt members— to ban them. “On the basis of this very teaching the ‘Lichtenauer’ and the so-called Kleine Gemeinde were established in Molotschna prior 53 to 1820. The first of these broke away from the Ohrloff congregation and, in spite of the fact that the injustice was clearly on its side, now constitutes a majority, while the so-called Kleine Gemeinde was made up of members derived f