The Great Trek of the Russian Mennonites to Central Asia, 1880-1884, Fred Richard Belk, 1976

ng to the new movement, voted stricter rules which made immersion man- New Hope at Aulie Ata 145 . d x The church at KOppental in Aulie Ata. The old man is Wilhelm Penner’s father-in-law and the girls are Cornelius Wall's daughters. datory for new converts and restricted the Lord’s Supper to believers and excluded the ‘unconverted.’ But even with these more explicit rulings they never actually demanded immersion for those coming to their fellowship from the other churches. The Alliance Church continued its emphasis on the inner man. They also associated freely with the other two churches because they believed the competition strengthened all three. In later years, the Alliance Church merged with the Mennonite Brethren, leaving two fairly strong churches in the settlement.” One manifestation of the impact of the new religiosity is that as early as August 1883, though still living in dire poverty, the people seemed happy in their faith. Their joy was expressed in a large bap- tismal service held by the Talas River. Among those baptized were young Siebert and Abraham Goertz, recently returned from a stay in Tashkent, and Peter Dalke, the future father-in-law of Goertz. The scene has been described in this way: The entire settlement came to this baptismal service at the big river and looked on. And this started such a movement and a 146 The Great Trek of the Russian Mennonites fire of the Spirit that immediately one after another came to be baptized, and the [Mennonite] Brethren Church grew through God's Word; it increased without great preachers.** The revival of faith expressed itself also in a new missionary zeal to win their “heathen” Kirghiz neighbors to Christianity.” Al- though the Mennonites did not have official government permission, neither were they impeded in their efforts, so they decided to at- tempt religious evangelism. One barrier, however, was the Kirghiz language.** The young people were the first to attempt to become conversant with Kirghiz religion. They noted early that these Muslims referred to God as “Kudai’ in their dialect, rather than using the more common “Allah.” The Kirghiz emphasis on the one and only Kudai proved to be a larger barrier than language. These monotheistic natives could not accept the Mennonite belief in the Trinity. Instead they argued that Christians had three gods while they had only one.** The trinitarian problem did not diminish the zeal of young men such as Johann Bartsch, however. Because of his earlier work with the Kirghiz while but a teenager, he was invited by the English Bible Society to start a Bible center in Tashkent. The main objective of this body was to put the Holy Scriptures of Christianity into all the languages of the Turkestan area and actively seek to win the natives to the Christian religion. Bartsch gained the permission of the government to evangelize among all the native peoples. Franz Bartsch, his youn