Faith, Life and Witness in the Northwest, 1903-2003: Centennial History of the Northwest Mennonite Conference (review)

In this book T.D. Regehr, noted historian of railroads, hydro-electric companies, and the wider Canadian Mennonite community, lends his professional skills to a small group of Mennonites. The Northwest Mennonite Conference is an Alberta-based, eighteen-congregation, 1100-person Mennonite denomination. It is an unusual western Canada Mennonite group because its members have their roots not in the Dutch-Russian stream, but in the Swiss-American-Ontario trajectory; it is a descendant group of the so-called Old Mennonite Church. The book is a careful and thorough chronicle of the Northwest Conference's beginnings, its orderly growth, its range of church leaders, and indeed of each congregation's fate. As a 'centennial' history, the book gives each of the decades fair coverage.

The book is also a confessional history, addressing the members of the Northwest Conference as much as a Canadian church history readership, and certainly more directly than a general Canadian history readership. Regehr is not a member of the Northwest Conference, but he is sympathetic to its members and openly respectful of the religious calling of these non-conformist people. He uses their language to judge the historical event. In this book the people are named 'sincere and dedicated Christians in the Mennonite and Anabaptist traditions' (11), their 'primary allegiance belongs to the Kingdom of God' (79), and they offer 'loving service, given in the name of Christ' (231). Regehr states his intention to 'keep alive the memory and promote understanding of the faith and witness' of the conference's members (445).

Should a national history journal review such a confessional history? One could argue that because the book comes close to being an apologia for the Northwest Mennonites, it should not. On the other hand, the book offers something important for the wider readership. It is first a history of the national Canadian Mennonite community, in a nutshell. This tiny Mennonite conference captures the transition of the majority of Canadian Mennonites during the twentieth century, changing from an isolated agrarian sect with a strong code of non-conformity to the wider society's fashions and ways, to one that acculturates into the wider urban world with a religious message aimed at the perceived needs of a modern, multicultural, technologized world. Second, it is a history that frankly discusses the deeply religious cosmology of its subjects, an agenda sorely missing in much of Canadian history; these people believe in biblical authority, damn consumer culture, embrace a 'theology of humility,' love a mystical Christ, nurture a primary and compelling loyalty to church, imagine a virtual boundary between themselves and others, claim God as 'master of history,' and regard their bishops' obligations as sacred. They are people willing to pay a personal price, even time in an Alberta jail, for their religious conviction in pacifism, simplicity, and service. Third, Regehr is still the outsider to the group; at every turn he offers historical context for the church's struggle and even tests some of the grand theories - frontierism, metropolitanism, assimilation, capitalism, modernization - through the history of these folks.

In addition to these themes, Regehr uses his role as outsider historian to identify the ironies, conflict, inconsistencies, and ingenuity within this articulate minority. A bishop is defrocked for considering the 'holiness movement'; struggling farmers are cajoled to resist the 'worldly' association of co-operative associations (113); young missionaries head into the pristine wilderness, the north, to confront its inhabitant, Satan (190); university students use the scriptural calling to 'prove all things' to confront elders (272); pacifist Mennonites church planters work with information from the RCMP; quiescent sectarians embrace pentecostally inclined Hispanic immigrants and boost Aboriginal art in the cities (274); their first urban church, in Calgary, becomes home to homosexual members. In relating the ironic and the conflictual, Regehr does much more than enliven the text; he shows the bumpy road toward modernization and urbanization of an agrarian...