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

ntinued to work under God’s blessing. In §301 1856 a diligent and faithful co-worker, Br. H.C. Klinkert, joined him and in 1863 the Anabaptist Missionary Society sent out a third missionary by the name of Schurmans. In the meantime Jansz had moved from Sumbring, the estate of Sukian, to the city of Japara, where he continued to work faithfully as a missionary. In 1858 the congregation was composed of thirty-two members. Klinkert, and later Schurmans, supported him in the work of the Lord, until the former entered the service of the British Bible Society, and the latter had to return to his fatherland because of mental illness. P.A. Jansz, son of P. Jansz, who had prepared himself in Holland for the teaching and missionary ministry, arrived in Japara in 1877 and served with his father as teacher and missionary. The older Jansz had written a booklet entitled Evangelisatie door middel van Land ontginning (Ongoing Evangelization throughout the Middle of the Land). In it he proposed a new missionary method which would combine the preaching of the Gospel with instruction in agriculture. With the permission of the missionary society, the younger Jansz began such a project. On a large piece of land of wilderness and forest, a colony was founded in 1882 for such Javanese who either were or wanted to become Christians. Alongside the settlement the mission station Mergaredjo was established. Of the 157 Christians (the fruit of the work of the older and younger Jansz, as well as of the brethren Klinkert and Schurmans) who were found in various places of the Residentie Japara, some moved into the new mission station Mergaredjo (the name means “way to happiness”). Those Javanese who desired to become Christians came and settled on the large piece of land which the missionary had acquired in hereditary tenancy and brought it under cultivation. Soon a colony was established near the station Mergaredjo in which baptized and unbaptized Christian Javanese dwelt together. They constituted a civilian congregation under one Lurah (colony elder). All colonists were contractually obligated to come to hear the Word, to send their children to school, not to smoke opium, not to live immorally— in short, to submit to the prescribed Christian order. Only those were to be baptized who, in the judgment of the missionary, were true believers. 3. Now, after twenty-six years of labor by missionary P.A. Jansz, §302 there exists at Mergaredjo and in the colony on the adjoining leased land and the nearby Baujutava a Christian population of 1168 souls. In this mission Jansz had been assisted by a second missionary, initially by Johann Fast 3 4 (from South Russia, Ohrloff congregation]; later, when Fast took a furlough in his South Russian homeland, by Johannes Klassen [also from the Molotschna]; and after Klassen, who also spent a 664 FOREIGN MISSIONS §303 few years in his homeland, by Nikolai Thiessen [South Russian Mennonit