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

opriately within the guidelines of our confession. But now it is breaking out of the decayed forms, is flattening the rotten pillars that we are, and is working its own way, as it were, over our dead bodies, to freedom. There it now crests and flows in unbridled power until the Lord of the chinch will finally succeed in containing it, and we will be left with a dry form, with a husk lacking the seed, with a church lacking living members. That is what it looks like here. Anything that begins to live wants to escape, as though we were doomed to die. The harvest is great, but . . . pray the Lord of the harvest . . . Luke 10:2. The Lord grant us wisdom from above. Amen!” 13. The formal ecclesiastical recognition of the M.B. Church in the Molotschna by Johann Harder, elder of Ohrloff, the actual mother church of the colony, in the name of his congregation of whom Senator H ahn said to Claassen: “You have Elder Harder to thank for your deliverance,” 54 is indisputably established in the documents of November 12, 1862, and December 24, 1863. §108 254 THE MENNONITE BRETHREN CHURCH a) “To the Area Administrative Office in Halbstadt: From the elder of the Ohrloff-Halbstadt Church. Statement! "The October 11, 1862, conference of municipal leaders in the Area A dminis trative Office regarding the matter of the Mennonites who seceded from the decadent (!) churches advanced the alternatives that either these people will have their colonial status rescinded and be exiled, or they will have to be recognized as a church with rights similar to those of other Mennonite churches in the future. Faced with these alternatives, our church declares that since the first alternative is not based on God’s Word, we agree to the latter on the condition that when these people publish a confession of faith, it should correspond substantially with ours. Since upon investigation the secessionists declared their confession to be the same as ours, namely the confession of faith of the so-called united Flemish, Frisian and High German Anabaptist Mennonite Chinch, published by the Rudnerweide Church in South Russia, the Ohrloff-Halbstadt Church sees no hindrances to recognizing these Mennonites as a church and notifies the Area Administrative Office to that effect. Blumstein, November 12, 1862. Johann Harder, Elder.” b) The above, as all the previously cited documents of the Ohrloff elder, with the exception of the one immediately following, is published in the Mennonitische Blaetter of 1863. c) As a result of a petition from the M.B. Church dated December 30, 1863, to the Ministry of Crown Lands, the five elders made the same presentation to their congregations that, according to the above document, Ohrloff had made: in spite of the fact that the congregations refused to recognize them, they would not give their consent, by majority vote, to “strike their names” and "send them away." According to the letters and diary of Jak