Mennonite Sins

I've been feel badly for a while now because I am afraid my posts may sound like I think that Mennonites have it all right or something. For the record, I often refer to the Mennonite view on theology, not so much for your benefit, but just as general information for anyone who is out there since I think it is a branch of Christianity that is never thought about at all, unless it is thought about in terms of the Amish.

There are things which I think that the Mennonites, but not exclusively the Mennonites, got right - there are a lot more things than just non-resistance that Mennonites hold dear and which I think they got right. I think it is easier for me to focus on what they got right because when it comes down to writing about what I hate about Mennonites, it all gets mooshed up with personalities, and ethnic peculiarities and there are so many things that aggravate the heck out of me about the Mennonites that I know (keeping in mind there are as many differences in theology about a lot of things among Mennonites as there are fish in the sea) that it is hard to know where to start.

Among Mennonite congregations there are all the sins that every other church has, people who say one thing and do another, people who are respecters of persons, business owners who will cheat you at their place of business because "business is business" and see no contradiction between that and their so-called faith. Did you ever hear the joke about how a Mennonite is someone who can buy from a Jew and sell to a Scot and still make money? Sometimes jokes exist because they hold more than a grain of truth to them.

One of the specific things that I think is wrong in the traditional Mennonite practise of Christianity is adult baptism as it is practised or was practised when I was growing up. For all I know there are Mennonite churches who don't do it that way and never have so I'm lucky this isn't a debate board or I would have twenty zillion Mennonites popping up with their version of Mennonitism. So consider everything I say to have the standard debate board disclaimer: yes, it is entirely possible that not all Mennonite churches practise x,y,z as I have experienced it. I am not omnipresent in all the congregations at all times throughout the world.

So baptism in the Mennonite church as experienced by my parents and all the generations before them, meant that you had to be an adult and know what you were confessing your faith to. That did not include children of any age. It did not include the mentally disabled because they are God's children already.

In practise, adult baptism meant that Mennonites would get baptised just before they married since you couldn't be married in the church unless you were baptised. In practise, that meant that baptism came to mean nothing but that someone was getting married. If the church has a stranglehold on marriage and the only way to participate as a member of your community is to get baptised, then you do it - but it isn't necessarily because you have thought about it at all.

However, I don't know that this in many ways is something that only the Mennonite church has dealt with since before civil marriages became the norm, recently, most people got married in a church and most churches would not marry people unless they were members. So membership became important. It became important to be seen as an upstanding, contributing member of the community - but baptism, sadly, has not become an act of faith.

This is why I don't see infant baptism as so terrible. What is the difference between the infant who doesn't know what he is being baptised into or the adult who is being baptised because that is what is expected of him, not because he has come to an understanding and love of Christ?

Before they were baptised, they had to be able to recite from memory, the responses in the German catechism. Baptism was done by sprinkling in the church of my parents. There are and were churches who baptised by immersion. In fact, the debate about sprinkling and immersion caused a deep schism within the Mennonite churches, and was the cause of suicides.

Some of those who held that only baptism by immersion was valid convinced some who had been baptised by sprinkling to be re-baptised by immersion. Those who had then been re-baptised by immersion were told by the leaders in their church that they had committed an unforgivable sin, and had killed Christ twice over in being baptised twice. Spiritually left in a place where there was no winning, and in their minds, no hope of Heaven, and excommunicated by their original church in which were all the people dearest to them who were forbidden to eat, sleep or otherwise have contact with them, some people killed themselves over this.

I made an attempt to see if there was an article on the whole immersion/sprinkling controversy and suicides on the Internet but I couldn't find anything before I ran out of patience. I don't know how wide spread this was, but I know what I know because it happened to neighbours, and I remember that in my own life time it was still a controversy and hard feelings still exist between the Mennonite church who felt that sprinkling was an invalid baptism and the other churches who didn't.

The specific Mennonite church that I grew up in was far too legalistic and is still today from what I hear. Mennonites have not believed in the once saved always saved doctrine since it was unknown before Calvin and was never held by any Christian group before Calvin. That is not to say that God's grace does not cover us, only that we are warned repeatedly not to fall from that grace. It is one thing to know that we are all sinners and it is another to continue in sin under the false belief that we are saved anyway.

However, the church I grew up in took it one step further - they taught that no one at all can ever know that they are saved and are going to Heaven. For people who are spiritually hungry, what kind of message is that? That message alone drove people to kill themselves. They knew they were sinners, but to be told that no matter what they did or didn't do, they could never ever be sure of Heaven? Why try then? For people who are so thirsty for God to come to the living water and be turned away by self-appointed gate-keepers - that is unforgivable. If there is no knowing ever that you are saved, then life has no purpose at all and Christ has died in vain.

It infuriates me to think of what was taught in the church. It infuriates me to think of my grandfather when he lay on his deathbed, weeping because he feared death - feared death because, as any saint, he knew he was a sinner and fell far short of God's grace - but he had never been told by the church that God's grace and infinite mercy covers those sins we commit every day. If we could be perfect, Christ would never have had to come in the first place.

I don't want to give the impression that all Mennonite churches taught that way. I don't know if they did or didn't. I only know what the church I grew up in taught and I know that that was not uncommon. It was considered the sin of pride if you proclaimed that you were saved and you knew it.

Anyway, I knew even as a little girl that what they were preaching was wrong and it absolutely enraged me. Of course little girls had no say in the church but I knew.

Anyway, that's about all I can write for today. My intent was to list all the things I don't like about the Mennonite church because far too often it seems to me, I end up questioning you about some of your beliefs and if it comes across to me as though I think Mennonites have it all right and you have it all wrong, then I can imagine how it must come across to you even though I know I don't mean it that way.

Layla