Reinländer Ältester, Johann Wiebe, 1837-1906 (Part 1)

by Peter D. Zacharias

We are pleased to publish the third in a trilogy of articles on Mennonite Ältesters who helped "make" the migration of 1874-1875 to Manitoba. This article is a shorter version of a paper presented by the author in the Reinland Community Centre on 24 April 1993.

It is important to look first at the background of this important Manitoba Mennonite leader. Ältester Johann Wiebe came from a pioneering family. His great-grandfather Jakob Wiebe (1723-1788) was a landowner in Prussia. Johann's grandfather Jakob Wiebe (1760-1804) settled in Neuendorf, Chortitza or Old Colony (Alt-Kolonie) in 1789 with his wife, nee Anna Fast, and two children¹. One of the children born to Jakob Wiebe (1760-1804) in what was then Imperial Russia (today part of Ukraine) was Bernhard (1796-1852) who married Helena Wiebe. This couple became Johann Wiebe's parents. They, too, became pioneers, settling in the new village of Neuhorst in 1823. Their second youngest child, Johann, the seventh child of eight, who became Ältester Johann Wiebe, settled in Olgafeld, Fürstenland, as did his older brother, Abraham (1831-1900), a minister in Olgafeld almost since the founding of the settlement in 1864².

Johann Wiebe was born on 23 March 1837, the year in which young Queen Victoria began the longest reign in British history. His wife was Judith Wall. He was baptized by Ältester Gerhard Dyck of the Chortitzer Mennoniten Gemeinde, i.e. the Old Colony Gemeinde in Russia.

At the age of 28 Johann Wiebe was elected to the ministry. At 33 he was elected Ältester of the Mennonite Church in Fürstenland, the young "daughter" colony of Chortitza. This far-reaching event took place in Peter Loeppky's implement shed in the village of Georgsthal in the afternoon of 13 September 1870. Johann Wiebe was only 38 when he led many Fürstenland and Chortitza families to America.

History has not always treated Ältester Johann Wiebe and other pioneer church leaders of western Canada very kindly. They have sometimes been dismissed as narrow-minded, obstinate, and tradition-bound vis-a-vis the so-called "progressive" Mennonites. One Mennonite encyclopedia article refers to "the extremely conservative Old Colony Mennonites led by Johann Wiebe". But what is meant by the word "conservative"? The least we can do is attempt to see Ältester Johann Wiebe as he saw himself.

In actual fact, Johann Wiebe did not consider himself to be a conservative. He saw himself much more as a reformer, trying to recover the New Testament vision of the church. In a penetrating sermon entitled "Die Auswanderung von Rußland nach Kanada 1875" (The Emigration from Russia to Canada, 1875), preached probably in the very early 1880s, Wiebe attempted to take his congregation's memory back to the migration movement and to examine its reasons³.

The sermon's message is not: Let's keep it the way we have it. Instead Wiebe is saying in effect: Dear brothers and sisters - Things have got to change. We have gone wrong. And we must get back on track. We have gone wrong in Russia. We no longer confronted each other in love as brothers and sisters should. We no longer practised brotherly discipline. Instead we went the way of the flesh. We took disciplinary action that belonged to the state alone and used it against fellow believers. Wrongdoers, said Wiebe, were known to be whipped, jailed, put on a bread and water diet, fined, sentenced to wood chipping or ditch digging, but they remained in good standing in the church. The Scriptural three-fold admonition had gradually been abandoned, Wiebe felt. According to the Bible the transgressor would first be confronted privately and secondly before one or two witnesses, and thirdly, before the congregation. The ban would follow, if necessary, but the ban would be applied in love, and following repentance, there would be a complete restoration, not just externally, but spiritually as well.

To be sure, there were those who did not see things his way. "I must add," wrote Wiebe, "that the minsters themselves could not grasp all these things when the conflict grew so intense, because this was to be an entirely different order from the one they were accustomed to in Russia. To deal with everything according to the Gospel was strange to some. Some said that we were introducing a new teaching when it was only the teaching of Christ which the apostles had received from the Lord more than 1800 years ago."

Assurances from the Russian government that arrangements for forestry service could be made, albeit in uniform, in lieu of service in the military, placated many Russian Mennonite church leaders, but these assurances did not satisfy Ältester Johann Wiebe⁴. He saw their acceptance as only one more sign of how far the church had drifted from its moorings in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Johann Wiebe was looking to the "mother church" in making the decision to emigrate, but was disappointed. He made one final visit to Ältester Gerhard Dyck, but found that there the option of emigration was being dropped. In fact, Dyck urged acceptance of alternative service as a reasonable compromise⁵. Wiebe's entire trip from Chortitza back to Fürstenland was spent in anguish of soul and prayer. That agony continued at home in the presence of his family until he finally found peace.

Ältester Wiebe gathered the brethren at their Alexanderthal meeting place (probably a school) and eventually an emigration plan fell into place. Wiebe found it hard to say farewell to those in the congregation who did not understand him and would not join him in the move. He found it especially hard to say farewell to the Amtsbrüder, to those in the Lehrdienst, his fellow ministers, who did not share his conviction about the necessity to emigrate. Not many members of the Lehrdienst of the Old Colony came to America. From Fürstenland also, there were only a few.

On 3 June 1875, Ältester Wiebe and his family and a large portion of Fürstenland's families cast eyes on their home⁶ and villages for the last time and set out on a six-week journey across land and sea. They arrived at Fort Dufferin just north of the Canada U.S.A. border on 14 July that summer. They had travelled from eastern Canada north on the Great Lakes to Duluth and then to Moorhead/Fargo where they took a ship going north on the Red River. Some days after their arrival at Fort Dufferin, Wiebe held a Bruderschaft at the immigration site where he was confirmed as Ältester of a church Brotherhood ..... that was quite different from the one he had served in Russia. The new Gemeinde

now included a large number of people, not only form his own Fürstenland colony, but also from the Old Colony. In fact the Reinländer Mennoniten Gemeinde, as the new group came to be called, was later referred to as the Alt-Kolonier i.e. "Old Colony Church", by many people.

There were unifying forces, of course. The immigrants were generally opposed to alternative service and "Russification", favoured en bloc settlement, and settlement in villages, desired freedom to have their own schools, and wanted a total military exemption.

But Ältester Johann Wiebe saw several reasons to meet before settling down. There was the question of being one church. This was not a foregone conclusion. The fact that many came from Ältester Gerhard Dyck's congregation in the Old Colony was to become an ongoing problem for the new congregation. Secondly, would they be under one Ältester?

At the Fort Dufferin meeting Ältester Wiebe was confirmed as Ältester of the one church. Isaak Müller emerged as the Vorsteher of the pioneer settlement. A unity, however short-lived, was established, an important factor in the formative years.

Ältester Johann Wiebe, his wife Judith, and their family settled in the village of Rosengart, a mile north of the United States border and just west of Blumenort. During the winter of 1876, a year after their arrival, work was begun on the church building, the house of worship. That building is still in use though renovated now to serve as a community hall. Its dedication, on 17 September 1876, was a time of rejoicing for the young colony, for the young congregation, and for the Ältester.

People came from far and wide on horse-drawn vehicles and on foot. The Ältesters, the ministers, the deacons, and the Vorsänger gathered at the door. The Vorsänger announced the hymn: Walt's Gott in Jesu Christi Namen (Gesangbuch, #89). As the singing of the third verse began, the Ältester opened the door of the thatched roof pioneer meeting house and entered. He was followed by the aged Jacob Wiens, born in Prussia, Gerhard Paetkau, Abraham Wiebe, the Ältester's brother, Johann Friesen of Neuenberg, Cornelius Peters, and the deacons, Peter Klassen and Johann Enns.

As the singing continued the whole congregation filed into the church. Ältester Wiebe preached the dedicating message; he spoke the blessing. The feeling of gratitude that prevailed was genuine.

But as time went on, problems could not be avoided. The church and its Ältester were challenged on several fronts. One major conflict swirled around the issue of hymn tunes. Some in the congregation wanted to return to the use of the old tunes used in Russia, some not familiar in the congregation. Oral tradition indicates that Johann Wiebe did not want to return to the old hymn tunes, but was under pressure to do so. However, many in the congregation were already used to the choral tunes of Heinrich Franz before coming to Canada.

So two seemingly intransigent positions became a deeply divisive issue. Another tough issue was the application of the ban. Should the ban be used sparsely in cases of sever infractions? Should the ban be used to enforce social control as it related, for example, to the maintenance of the village settlement patter?

The Brotherhood meeting (Bruderschaft) of 5 October 1880, left the West Reserve more deeply divided. It hurt Ältester Johann Wiebe to see this disintegration. His vision was, after all, one church, one colony, one colony administration, based on the village settlement pattern.

The vision was further threatened by the influx of a large Bergthaler group from the East Reserve which had begun to come to the West Reserve in search of better land. Their worship and community ways now provided an alternative pattern, thus aggravating these growing divisions within Ältester Wiebe's own congregation.

We may question the social control exercised by the Reinländer Mennoniten Gemeinde. But consider Ältester Wiebe's concerns form his own vantage point. Was it not a most egalitarian concept? Belonging to the congregation meant living in the village. It meant sharing the good land, sharing the poor land, sharing in the community pasteur. It meant no more big private estates (chutors). It meant taking seriously the word of the prophet: Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land. Isaiah 5:8 (NIV).

We may question the Reinländer (and Johann Wiebe's) attitude to schools, the resistance to the Anglicization and secularization of the school system. But can we also see the integrity of Ältester Wiebe's position? The education of our children, throughout the centuries of Anabaptist educational history had never been the business of the government. This was the responsibility and prerogative of the parents and the community of faith. Their church school was designed to reinforce the values of the society and the milieu in which the church's children were living. It was set up to prepare young people to live healthy, productive, socially well adjusted lives within that society. It sought to plant the roots of faith in firm soil, and, one could say, was successful by its own standards.

Johann Wiebe lived to see the school controversy begin in earnest in the West Reserve. He lived to see the payment of the Brotschuld, a $100,000 government settlement loan to early settlers, and later wrote a letter of thanks to the government.

Ältester Wiebe saw land getting scarce so that young couples could no longer get 160 acres each. The land in the West Reserve had all been claimed and so he also witnessed the beginning of Mennonite settlement in Saskatchewan. His son Abraham became an Ältester at Swift Current; his son Peter would become one in Manitoba. It was the Saskatchewan Ältester Jacob Wiens who officiated at Johann's funeral service in the village of Reinland.

I want to close with a letter of condolence, a short letter that was sent to Jacob Wiebe, Ältester Johann Wiebe's son, in Rosengart, by William Hespeler:

"With sadness of heart I receive the painful news that your father who was so close to me has gone to his Creator. Please accept my deepest sympathy and also express my condolences to the church he left behind on its irreplaceable loss. He was a faithful shepherd and spent his energy, indeed, his whole life, for the welfare of this flock and as its example. I will always remember him as a personal friend and as the father of the Reinländer Mennoniten Church. I also express my sympathy to his own family and to those who lent assistance and support in his good works and I hope the his good spirit will remain an example to them."

That was certainly the sentiment of many, many people who had known Ältester Wiebe within his congregation and outside of it as well.

Endnotes

1. For Wiebe family ties with Ältester Gerhard Wiebe (1827-1900) of the Bergthaler Gemeinde and Ältester Heinrich Enns of the Kleinegemeinde in south Russia, cf. Henry Schapansky, "The Bergthaler Wiebes," Preservings No.13 (December, 1998), 60 ff., and Delbert F. Plett, "The Family of Ältester Johann Wiebe (1837-1905)", Preservings No.14 (June, 1999), 7-8. Note: Wiebe's death year was actually 1906. The complete text of the Zacharias paper was published in Preservings No.14 (June, 1999), 3-6.

2. On Fürstenland beginnings cf. C. Krahn, "Russia," Mennonite Encyclopedia Vol.IV (Scottdale, PA, Newton, KS, and Hillsboro, KS, 1959), 381 ff. Abraham Wiebe's story is told in John Wall, et al, eds. and compilers, The Descendants of Ohm Abraham Wiebe (1831-1990) (Winkler, MB, 1991).

3. The sermon was published in Johann Wiebe, Die Auswanderung von Russland Nach Kanada, 1875 (Cuauhtemoc, Chih., Mexico, 1972). There have been reprints after this.

4. The story of working out alternatives to military service in Russia is told in Lawrence Klippenstein, "Mennonite State Service in Russia: A Case Study in Church State Relations, 1789-1936", unpublished PhD dissertation, Univeristy of Minnestoa, 1984.

5. The views of those who faavoured alternative service instead of emigrating aare illustrated in Leonard Gross, trans. and ed., "The Coming of the Russian Mennonites to America: An Analysis of Johann Epp, Mennonite Minister in Russia, 1875", Mennonite Quarterly Review LVIII (October, 1974), 460-475.

6. The feelings of Wiebe and others travelling at this time may be reflected in the diary of Jacob Fehr as quoted in Peter D. Zacharias, Reinland. An Experience in Community (Reinland, MB: Reinland Centennial Committee, 1976), 33ff.

The Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society Newsletter, Heritage Posting, welcomes letters and reports pertaining to the historical interests of society members. Correspondence can be mailed to Lawrence Klippenstein, 600 Shaftesbury Blvd., Winnipeg, Manitoba R3P 0M4 or Bert Friesen, 169 Riverton Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba R2L 2E5, or e-mailed to the editor at editor@mmhs.org