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

ut baptism]. In 1648 [eighty-nine years after Menno’s death] seventeen church members extended the demand that the mode of baptism be immersion, that footwashing precede the celebration of communion, and that co mm union be commemorated at night with unleavened bread. Whether they wished to see this innovation apply to the entire church or just to themselves, is not clear. According to G. Roosen, Minister Beerens of Luebeck was the initiator of these innovations and Minister Jem Borchers their chief promoter. Yet innovations they were, because our congregation stood in intimate relationship with that of Fresenburg where Menno himself lived and taught, and thus it had much the same mode of worship as the former. If Menno himself had baptized by immersion, at least towards Baptism by Immersion 297 the end of his ministry, the Dompelaars here would certainly have appealed to his example. How the members of our church first arrived at the notion of these demands remains uncertain. Bolten suggests a four-fold possibility in this regard, namely: they could have come from the Collegiants in Holland; or Abraham de Voss, who lived in Colchester [England], and was baptized by the Baptists, could have provided the impetus; or the writings on the history of baptism (1646-1647) by Mehring from Holstein could have been the cause; or these views could perhaps have been conveyed from Polish Prussia [thus from the homeland of our Mennonite fathers]. Soon the controversies took on a very irritable character in which the members who held on to the old traditions seem to have acted very harshly. One of the most energetic and zealous opponents of the innovators was Gerhard Roosen, a deacon since February, 1649. At one point this dispute reached the stage where the Danish military had to intervene. [Altona, where the Hamburg- Altona Church was and still is located, at that time belonged to Denmark.] In their polemical writings the Dompelaars also accused their opponents of having forcibly evicted them from the common church building, toward the purchase of which they had themselves earlier contributed. Around 1656 the division of the two quarreling parties into two entirely separate churches is supposed to have taken place [despite efforts towards reconciliation by the Amsterdam and other Dutch Mennonite pastors]. That this dispute was a very painful one may be inferred not only from the bitterness with which it was carried on, but also from the circumstances that it (the dispute) partially affected certain families of the church deeply. The well-known Dompelaar Minister Jakob Denner, 97 originally a dyer in blue, worked very effectively here and in other places from 1684 [as an 18-year-old adolescent] until his death at the age of 80, on February 17, 1746 .... In Barmbeck, not far from Wandsbeck, a pond was rented in which at least the first members of the church were baptized .... In 1666 the Flemish Church [the la