The Roman Catholic Church persecuted Protestants with the same fervour that the Jews and Romans had against the early Christians. The result was that groups of Anabaptists fled together from one place to another across Europe in an attempt to avoid persecution. As these groups lived and moved together, they developed into small ethnic communities with shared faith, but no country to claim as their own.

From these groups, leaders such as Menno Simons (1496-1561) emerged to guide in spiritual matters and to seek new places of refuge. The followers of Menno Simons became known as Mennonites. A distinctive belief of this denomination is non-resistance in conflict. The Mennonites would rather move than be conscripted for military service. They see themselves as citizens of Heaven first, subject to God before any human government.

My ancestors were among the Mennonites living in Russia by invitation of Catherine the Great in 1762. They were given farmland, and they hoped to finally be able to live a peaceful life, separate from the Russian culture, but that was not the case for long. In the late nineteenth century, the Russian government began to insist that Mennonite children be taught  the Russian language, and universal military service became law in 1874. To the Mennonite people, the German language was perceived as an integral part of their identity, and military service was a violation of conscience. 18,000 of them emigrated to Canada and the United States. The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, widespread famine from 1921-1923, and forced collectivization of their farms led to a steady flow of Mennonite immigrants to Canada and the U.S.

My great grandparents settled in southern Manitoba, where most of my family still lives. Some of my family moved on to Paraguay in South America in order to preserve their language and heritage after a Manitoba Schools Act in 1925 made instruction in English mandatory.

For me personally, I consider Mennonite to be my ethnic heritage, but I no longer attend a Mennonite church. I believe that over the generations, the passion to know God in a personal way, the desire to study and live by the Bible – the things that made my Anabaptist ancestors risk their lives in order to obey their conscience – those passions got lost somewhere along the way. They developed traditions, and then allowed those traditions to trump the teachings of the Scripture. There was much division in the church over trivial matters, and essential matters such as personal faith and salvation were trivialized instead.

I presently attend a church of the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination. There has been much reform in the Mennonite Church since I left, but I am quite at home where I am.