"The Russian Mennonites story, the Golden Era." - Chester Weaver

Lesson Transcript

Guide me, O the great Jehovah, pilgrim through these barren. Good morning. Welcome to Hope for Wondering Amish. Thank you for everybody that came on this morning. This morning we're having Jester Weaver on from Texas. He is the school teacher in what was the name again? Abiding Peace Virtual School. Yes. And then he's also on Anabaptist Perspectives, if you want to go on there and see any of his teachings on there. And he goes to Anabaptist Identity Conference usually.

So we're blessed to have him on this morning, and we're going to be listening about something about the Russian Mennonites, I guess, is what you're having. So you can introduce yourself a little bit on that. Also, if people that are calling in by phone line, if you guys could mute yourselves, that helps us so that we don't have that popping up on the screen or making noise. And at the end, we'll have it open for discussion, so you can comment or anything like that if you want to. And we'll just pray at this time.

And then if you want to, Jester, you can also just introduce yourself a little more if there's something more you want to say, and then get started. Okay. Okay. Let's pray. Lord in heaven, thank you for this morning. Thank you for Jester Weaver coming on. And just help him to bring out what's needed for our lives and our souls and help us to just grow from that. Help each one that's on here or people that listen in, that it helps them. Just want to pray this all in Jesus' name. Amen. My name is Chester Weaver.

I teach at the Abiding Peace Virtual School, which is a school for people who don't have access to brick-and-mortar schools at the high school level. And so I teach algebra and history and literature and that kind of high school subjects. I live in Itasca, Texas, which is south of Fort Worth. We moved to Texas in 1987, and we've been here ever since, except for eight years that I spent in Indiana teaching.

It's the first time in my life that I ever lived among old-order Amish people, and that was a learning experience. When I lived there, I lived near Goshen and had access to the Mennonite Historical Library at Goshen, which is a tremendous resource. And I have been involved in Anabaptist history as well as the general 2000-year church history for a while. And I know the Swiss brethren story. For Amish people, you're a part of the Swiss story. I come from the old Mennonites.

I come out of what is called Lancaster Conference. That's where I grew up. And then in 1994, I crossed the threshold into the Amish Mennonite world and started to learn to know an entirely new group of people. So I feel it's been a privilege to be on both sides of the divide. Both sides have the same roots, but with a difference that happened with the Amish separation back at around 1700, two different ways of thinking, two different cultures developed. Okay, that's us. Well, there's three basic Anabaptist groups.

It's the Swiss, like we talked about already. Then there's the Hutterites, which have been more to the east in Moravia. They have a completely different story, but they're just as Anabaptists as we are. And then we have the Dutch Mennonites, where Menno Simons was, which is in Holland. And that's a completely different story. Well, what I'm going to do this morning is just take one snapshot out of that story. And so we, as Anabaptist people, help ourselves quite a bit if we're conversant with all three stories.

We don't do well if we only know our own story. What has just burdened me, I feel terrible about this, many of our own people, the Swiss people, don't even know our story, let alone the other three stories. And so the job of a teacher is to work himself out of a job. If I would have had better use of my cameras, I would have introduced you to some other books. I think I'll just hold it up at least a few. If anybody wants to begin learning about the three stories, I have two books to recommend for beginners.

Okay, so this book, Introduction to Mennonite History by Cornelius Dick, Third Edition, is a good place to start. It's a general story. It's not a particular story. It doesn't zoom in. It's the big picture. It has pictures in the book. Okay, this will discuss the Swiss, the Dutch, and the Hutterites. Another similar book is Smith's Story of the Mennonites. This one is a thicker book. It's just as easy to read, and my preference is this particular book. And again, it's an overview.

It's not a particular up-close view, but this gives you a big picture view of the entire story. Now, if we're going to get up closer, the people that I'm going to be talking about this morning are the Dutch-Russian story. And so we have some smaller books. You can see this is just a thin book, The Introduction to the Russian Mennonites. So I'm going to be just telling a story about these people today. And if you want a little bit bigger picture, it's this story, Mennonites in Canada by Frank Epp.

You can also get the story here. All right, so I'm hoping that you can read more of this on your own. So for this particular story this morning, I have entitled The Russian Mennonite Story: The Golden Era. And so I wish I had maps that I could just show you how these people moved, but I'm just going to give you a verbal picture. If you can imagine Netherlands in Europe, and the Netherlands are north of France. The Netherlands are next to Belgium. They're west of Germany. This is where Menno Simons was.

All right, these people, as persecution arose, like in Flanders, the Flemish, they were almost completely wiped out. The people who were not killed moved north into the Netherlands. Well, the Netherlands also experienced persecution, so these people fled east. And the place they settled in the east was called Prussia. Today, we would call it Poland. Well, by 1700, the Vistula area around Danzig, Poland today, was the highest population of Mennonites in the entire world.

And from there, the Prussian government tolerated these people for a while. They invited them there because these people knew how to drain land. In Holland, the Mennonites were very much involved in draining the land and building windmills to pump water out of ditches and to create farmland. Well, the government wanted these people to do the same thing in the Vistula River Delta in Prussia, and so they went there. But they were only tolerated there. They were not allowed to make converts.

If their children married outside the church, if their children married outside the church, their children could not be members of the church. And so that encouraged these Mennonites to only marry other Mennonites. And the Dutch-Russian people are ingenious people. It seems like they, by keeping their genes intact, they became very smart people and enabled them to excel in agriculture. Well, with the passing of time, Russia invited these people.

Catherine the Great was from Prussia, and she knew how good of farmers these were. And so she invited these people to Russia because Russia had just won a war, and the land was empty north of the Black Sea. And she wanted to fill this land up with these Mennonites. And so she gave them some privileges. One of them was she promised that they would not have to be involved in the military, and everybody could have free land, and she would help them get there, pay their cost, provide building materials for them.

And it was quite an invitation. And so she invited a number of them to come there. So I would show you on the map where that is. But I'm just going to have to let it with that. So I gave this what I'm giving here today previously, I think, in Anabaptist Identity Conference. This is just one of several. And I chose this one because of its relevance to us today. Okay. The first two of the four settlements in Russia from Prussia happened with the encouragement and financial assistance of the Russian government.

The first two. The immigrants were granted a long list of privileges, including the right to operate their own commonwealth within the greater Russian commonwealth. In reality, they became a state within a state, a kind of state church of their own creation. Now, this arrangement violated the founding principles of the Anabaptist movement, which was complete separation of church and state. How could they operate a civil government which included law enforcement with only their own church people?

Well, that's quite a story, but we'll just leave that for now. Russia, by offering its generous terms of settlement, was not operating on a humanitarian basis. Russia was seeking to become great and powerful, to become more progressive, like the European lands further west. And so the Russia government was helping itself when they invited the Mennonites from Prussia to come because these farmers from Prussia were experienced, capable farmers who could help to modernize Russia.

However, in accordance with the social and religious culture of the times, when the Mennonites got there to Russia, they lived and worked in isolation from their Russian neighbors, to the point of many Mennonites not even being able to speak the Russian language. Their villages did not include native Russians. Furthermore, their German Lutheran and German Catholic co-immigrants lived and operated much the same. The Mennonites were only a small fraction, about one-tenth of the German people who emigrated to Russia.

Eventually, these German islands in Russia came to haunt the Mennonites, even though they were legal Russian citizens. Harry Lowen wrote, "The majority of the Russian Mennonites around 1870, that's like 150 years ago, were patriotic and loyal to the Tsar, but they did not identify with the Russian people and did not accommodate themselves to the culture." One of the ways they did that is by keeping their own language.

They spoke Plotitic, and like I just said, many of them could not communicate with their Russian neighbors. There were so many of them who lived in these colonies and villages that they could live and work in the world without ever needing to speak Russian. Okay, so I'm going to describe now each of these four settlements just a bit.

The earliest settlements here, the first two, especially the first one, were the poorest because they're the ones who were settled first, and they were people from Prussia, young families who could not own land in Prussia because the government would not allow them. And here there was free land in Russia, but they were very poor when they came. And the last group that I'm talking about were the wealthiest. Okay, so the first group, first settlement, first colony in Russia is called the Kortitsa colony.

Sometimes people call it the old colony. Old colony has nothing to do with old order, like old order Amish or old order Mennonite. It's just the first colony. By the end of 1788, 228 Mennonite families ended their long trek southeast from Prussia. That's a long way. It took them weeks and weeks to get there, traveling with horses and wagons and oxen. Eight villages of earthen huts sprung up before that winter.

Now, remember, this is Russia, and Russia has cold winters, but they got there early enough to make earthen huts. These pioneering families experienced the most difficulties, including the absence of any preachers. Now, think about that. These people came with basically no leaders. The writer Horst Gerlach wrote, "The emigrants were in the truest sense abandoned, poor in body and soul." But by 1796, eight years later, when Empress Catherine the Great died, 118 additional families had arrived.

By 1824, when the settlement process for Kortitsa ended, 400 families had come settling in 18 villages. Now, when we talk about Russian villages, what that means is one central street and houses along each side. The front of the house, usually we think the front of a house might be the broad, the long side of the house. But for these Russian people, that's the end of the house that faces the street. There are lots of flowers in the front of the house.

The houses all sat back away from the street, but in the back end of the house, connected to the house, was the barn. And so the animals, there was a wall that separated the house from the barn, but the animals and the people lived in the same building. And then their farms, there was a little bit of land right there, but most of their farms were out beyond the village. And these various people went out to their various plots to work their plots, but it was not right at the house. Okay.

So by the end of the next year, when they, this, I'm sorry, I'm getting lost here. Okay, this same village pattern can be seen among the old colony Mennonites to this day. So wherever the old colony people settle, they still use this same pattern. I've been to Mexico, and it's not just the old colony people. I was with the Kleinigamendi people, and they have villages in pattern the same way. Now, let's go to the Molashna people.

Okay, by the end of 1803, 163 new families had reached Kortitsa but did not intend to stay there. This new cluster of immigrants were headed a bit further east to Molashna. By the end of the next year, they were 342 families strong. The second group stayed at the Kortitsa settlement while they built the Molashna settlement, which was a great advantage. By the time the immigration from Prussia ended in 1836, 44 villages had been established.

Children from the original pioneers planted other villages, so that by 1863, the Molashna colony was strong with 2,000 families and over 8,000 inhabitants. Around 1840, the Russian government settlement projects came to an end. Further settlements would need to be self-supporting. In 1848, Prussia, where these people were coming from, ended the privilege of exemption for military service based on religious confession. When that happened, a new wave of immigrants came to Russia.

This time, the Mennonites asked the Russian government for permission to emigrate to Russia, to a new location, not at Kortitsa, not at Molashna, but to a new area. And the Russian government permitted 100 families to come. These families came to the third place called Amtrakt. Okay, the first 22 families were led there by a man by the name of Claus Epp, and he left Prussia in 1853. So this is like 175 years ago, approximately. Other well-to-do families soon followed until by 1858.

That's about the time the civil war was beginning in this country. 1,000 Mennonites were settled in 10 villages in the Amtrakt area. Economic prosperity followed right behind. And from that colony, Claus Epp Jr. led a group of immigrants further east to present-day Turkmenistan to await the return of Christ in 1889. And there's a whole story. There's an entire book written on that. It's entitled The Great Trek. You might find that interesting. Okay, the fourth settlement is called Alt Samara.

If I would have the map, I would show you. These two settlements were east and north. The Amtrakt was not as far north and not as far east as this fourth settlement, Alt Samara. So this Alt Samara was basically east of Moscow, Russia. So this is up into a colder territory. In 1859, Claus Epp led other families east of the Alexandertal area. By 1870, 100 families had settled in 10 villages on the broad plains of the Samara area.

Alt Samara was the last settlement from Prussia, though individual immigrants, especially from East Prussia, Lithuania, Newmark, and Poland, came to the four settlements up through 1880. Interestingly, some Swiss Mennonites of our background, who had earlier moved east to Volhynia, became a part of this larger picture as well. Now, you'll notice that these last two settlements were wealthy. Well, with the passage of time, it seems like Mennonites create wealth wherever they go. And governments have discovered this.

And that's why the Mennonites were invited to Russia. And to this day, if you drive down through Mexico, down through desert, suddenly in the desert, you see this prosperity. Well, Mennonites live there. They know how to water the ground and create thriving farms and create wealth right in the midst of the desert. I know this is not literally true, but it seems like Mennonites know how to make corn grow out of rocks. They're just ingenious people.

Okay, so if you have ingenious people like this who are prospering, there's all kinds of other supporting industries that grow up with it. And so if these people are agricultural, then the supporting industries are going to be agricultural supporting industries. And so in the Kortitsa colony, the industrial firm Lep and Wollman was producing 50,000 grain swathers by 1900. Eight years later, 151 Mennonite industrial firms were located in the single town of Kortitsa.

By this time, Mennonites were serving all of Russia, providing 6% of all the agricultural equipment for the entire nation of Russia. It's just remarkable. But at what price did the Mennonites acquire their wealth? When the Mennonites came to Russia, they had no experience in self-government. Previously, they had been tolerated by governments who grudgingly gave them space in return for the tax money they provided.

Governments know that they need men and money, but they also know that they will not get men from Mennonites, but they will get money because Mennonites are great tax revenue producers. And so governments like Prussia and like Russia allowed these people to come so they could get their tax money. But with the privileges that they were offered, what should they do when the government said they can govern themselves?

In America, we live independently among the general population, and we don't have to govern ourselves. We obey the secular government. Well, in Russia, it was not that way. They were so free that they were supposed to run their own government. But what should they do to make that work? They can govern themselves however they wanted to, but they had no experience. The two original scouts from Prussia, Barsh and Hopner, became the first political leaders. Somebody has to take leadership.

I said these people who came from Prussia to Kortitsa, somebody had to take some leadership. Well, these people, very poor, they soon did not like Barsh and Hopner. They were soon deposed, charged, and jailed by the church leadership. So there's no church-state separation in this colony. Horst Gerlach wrote, "In the beginning, it seemed very strange to the people that one brother should be placed above another brother. Somebody had to charge and collect tax. Somebody had to build and maintain roads.

Somebody had to apply fire and insurance regulation. Somebody had to provide the schools and the hospitals. Somebody had to care for the poor, to keep social order and punish offenders." So how would they manage these civil responsibilities? Remember, the Russian government just stood back and says, "Okay, you guys govern yourselves." Okay, so here's their plan. The Russian government had stipulated that a Mennonite family could own 175 acres in one farm, which could not be subdivided.

Thus, each Mennonite farm owner would have one vote. The voters in each village would vote for a mayor and his assistants, as well as a colony administrator who would work with government officials who were standing in the background. Note that the owner needed to be a Mennonite because the tsar had granted land only to Mennonites. Thus, to own land, one needed to be a member of the Mennonite church. And you could not vote unless you owned land.

In the second colony at Molashna, there was a man who lived there whose, I think he was just young when his family came from Prussia to Molashna. This man's name was Johann Cornes. He, like I said, was born in Prussia and migrated with his parents to the Molashna colony in 1804 while the colony was in its earliest days. His father owned the typical 175 acres and acted as the community doctor. But Johann was noted earlier early for his diligence, intelligence, and sense of responsibility.

When he married, he quickly became a successful farmer in his own right. Whatever he set out to do prospered. When he was 41, he established an experimental farming station where he raised purebred horses, purebred cattle, and purebred sheep. He imported the best animals from all over Europe, including fine merino sheep from Spain. By 1847, he owned 500 horses, 8,000 sheep, and 200 head of cattle, and also cultivated 25,000 acres of land. He operated a tree nursery from which he sold trees to fellow Mennonites.

When the Mennonites went there, the native steppes were treeless. And so this is new to have trees. Well, this man sold trees. By the end of his life, he had provided 5 million trees, many of them fruit trees. He also introduced the potato as a food crop to Russia. He promoted irrigation because the steppes were semi-arid. He promoted crop rotation. In other words, he just knew how to farm well. And the Russian government officials who were looking on were impressed. Here is a very valuable man.

And so when Cornes was only 28 years old, the tsar, which is the Russian, we could say like our president, appointed him chairman of the agricultural society with authority to regulate farming in all the German settlements, Mennonite and non-Mennonite. Since the tsar appointed Cornes to his post, not the church, he had almost unlimited powers. But some church leaders resented his influence. They thought he was promoting economic growth at the expense of church concerns.

Some leaders thought that he was working too closely with non-Mennonites and the non-Christian Nogai, which are similar to our Native Americans or Indians that were native to that area. So when the leaders opposed him, he threatened to have them exiled from the colony. So what's supposed to happen in a situation like this? Cornes set out to improve Mennonite education as well, which amounted to simple, at the beginning, was just simple rote learning to the tune of the hickory stick.

He studied the latest European educational theories and published rules on how to teach. He introduced new textbooks, programs of study, as well as trained and licensed teachers. He helped establish school for girls. He established a high school and a teacher training institute, which became a model for other high schools and teacher training institutions. In turn, the developing Mennonite educational system became the model for all of Russia. Mennonite teachers began to teach in non-Mennonite schools.

Teachers quickly became influential in colony life. Educated men replaced farmer preachers in the pulpit and in other community posts. By 1900, this is just 125 years ago, Mennonite young people began to attend Russian and European universities to prepare for the professions. Johann Cornes's critics did not like all this. His Mennonite critics saw him as proud, stubborn, and determined to destroy the Mennonite way of life.

When he declined other official government positions, he would say, "I'm nothing but a Mennonite farmer who, at my baptism, promised not to govern or carry arms in accordance with my Christian faith." So he was a solid Mennonite, even though people criticized him. Tsar Alexander I came to visit him at his house, and Tsar Nicholas I received him as a special guest at the tsar's palace.

When Cornes died at the early death, when he died an early death at age 59, many people, Mennonites, Jews, Russians, Molokans, and the Nogai followed his body to the cemetery. A marble shaft with the top broken off, symbolizing his unfinished life, marked his grave. Now, Johann Cornes's life story symbolizes the larger Mennonite story in Russia. How? Well, I have four things to share. First of all, number one, the Mennonites came as a persecuted people from Prussia. Russia welcomed them, giving them a home.

In return, the Mennonites loved the tsar, even singing his praises. Number two, many Mennonites became quite wealthy in Russia. Some of them believed that their prosperity was a sign of a godly life and that God was blessing their diligence and industry. Their prosperity had no end. Life was like one continuous soft summer evening. Number three, many Mennonites developed an attitude of superiority over their non-Mennonite neighbors.

They considered the neighboring Lutherans and Catholics as a notch lower than themselves, socially, culturally, and religiously. Their non-Mennonite hired hands, the native Russian people, were definitely inferior to themselves. And number four, to be married or hold office in a colony, a person needed to be a Mennonite church member. Thus, being a church member often seemed unconnected with being a Christian. Mennonite morals sank into the mud. Some Mennonites believed that farming and godliness go together.

What was to be done when Mennonites multiplied and they doubled, just like Amish people do today? They doubled in number every 25 years. Farms, by law, could not be subdivided. Then, when all the available land was purchased, what could be done? Please remember that only landowners had a vote. Soon, a large number of Mennonites had no land and thus no vote. By 1860, two-thirds of the Mennonites in the original two colonies had no votes.

Thus, the colonies had a land-holding class, including ministers, and a powerless, landless class of especially younger families. Something had to be done. Johann Cornes maintained that a person did not need to be a farmer to be a Christian. He proposed that manufacturing would provide employment for young people. But the manufacturing business could not keep pace with the mushrooming population.

When the landowning leaders refused to deal with the landless problem, the landless Mennonites took their issue directly to the Russian government. In other words, the Mennonites couldn't handle this, so they went to the civil government in Russia. At this point, the Russian government allowed subdivisions of the 175-acre land farms, allowing their own lands to be sold to the landless buyers, and permitted Russian nobles to sell land so that daughter colonies could be created.

In the 1870s, when one-third of all the Russian Mennonites left Russia to the United States and Canada, the land situation was temporarily relieved, but the damage had been done. Where was the Christian ethic of love for neighbor in all of this? All right, so that brings us to another consideration. Two more considerations. So the first one, when Russia threatened the Mennonites with the loss of their military exemption, the Mennonites basically decided they're going to leave Russia.

And then, when the government heard that these prized Mennonite farmers are going to leave Russia, they relented and gave some concessions. So that in the end, only approximately one-third of the Mennonites left Russia. And then it was a bidding on between Canada and the United States. The United States got 10,000, and Canada got about 8,000. 18,000 left Russia. The rest stayed. Okay, so that's another story, completely different story. I want to go back now to Russia.

So the second item we need to talk about here is, in a deplorable decline, moral decline, what happens? Well, Klaus Reimer in the Molashna colony provided leadership for the first renewal movement, which happened in 1812. And this renewal movement has become known as the Kleinige Meinig people. That means little gathering, little brotherhood.

Well, whenever the Russian government got rid of or threatened to deprive the Mennonites of their military exemption, this renewal group, this Kleinige Meinig group of people, all of them, the entire Kleinige Meinig group, moved to North America. A bunch of them settled in Canada with the East and West Reserve right above North Dakota, and some of them went to Nebraska. Okay, so that's another story. So we'll just leave that story.

About 50 years later, a larger renewal movement, now known as the Mennonite Brethren, formed. This is about the time the Civil War was starting in this country. Now, when this renewal movement began, the traditional Mennonites did all they could to discredit this new group that was forming. They had also done that to the Kleinige Meinig, ridiculed them. And in both groups, especially the second group, they persecuted them. Mennonite Brethren teachers lost their positions.

Mennonite Brethren business owners were boycotted, and some Mennonite Brethren men were jailed and beaten by other Mennonite villagers. The traditional Mennonites went to the Russian authorities to blackmail them there. But instead, the Russian government recognized them, these nuk people, as a legitimate Mennonite group. For years, hard feelings lingered. The feelings were made worse when Mennonite Brethren began to include non-Mennonite background people into their church membership.

All the while, the Russian government was noting how these non-resistant Mennonites were treating each other and that not all these people—I'm sorry, let me go back over. The Russian government was noting how these non-resistant Mennonites were not at all non-resistant with their own people. At one meeting, officials told the Mennonites, "We have rooms full of files concerning quarrels and fights within your settlements.

Why should the Russian government grant them exemption from military service when the Mennonites pled for extension of their long-held non-military privileges?" But spiritual renewal had come to stay. The Mennonite Brethren renewal movement not only improved the spiritual quality of their own movement, but it eventually improved the quality of spiritual life among the people from which they had separated. The Mennonite Brethren movement was barely off the ground when terrible news came from Tsar Alexander II.

The Mennonite privileges granted many years before would come to an end. The Russian government would no longer grant military exemption. Furthermore, the Russian language would need to be taught in the schools. It was terrible that after all these years, the Mennonites still did not know the Russian language. The Russian Minister of War exclaimed, "You have been in Russia 70 years and still cannot speak Russian. That is a sin." The Mennonites knew of only one solution, the solution of their history: move.

Move to North America. And as I said, when the Russian officials learned that they were about to lose their entire group of exemplary Mennonite farmers, they relented with some concessions. And so the government would allow the Mennonites to serve a four-year term of alternate service in forestry work. When the government relented, like I said, only one-third, 18,000 of the Russian Mennonites left for North America. Those leaving were the more conservative and the more conscientious of both the Mennonite groups.

The entire group of Hutterites left, along with the entire group of Kleinige Meinig. Johann Cornes had helped these Hutterite people to reorganize themselves, and they had a colony of their own right close to these Mennonites. But when this one-third of the Mennonites left, the entire group of Hutterites also went to North America. In conclusion, by 1900, those who remained in Russia, that's the ones who did not go to North America, were gently chiding those who left. "See how we're prospering here?

You made unnecessary trouble for yourselves by leaving and starting over in a strange, distant land. We still have our religious freedom after all. We have good education, good music, good books, good farms, good businesses, and an improved religious community. Everything is better now than what it used to be." And they were correct. The solid, the social, economic, and religious life of the Russian Mennonites was stronger than ever.

But 17 years later, the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution happened, and those prosperous Mennonites came to a terrible end. And that's another story for another time. So I think I'll end it right there and open it up for any kind of questions. I wish I could show you pictures as well as these maps that will illustrate the prosperity, the estates, big buildings, just to illustrate the prosperity in Russia. All right, I'll just stop talking here. Okay, well, that was an interesting story.

I'd like to listen to some more of that, so. Well, yeah, I'm willing to come on again if you want me to. And I could tell many of these other stories. I alluded to several other stories. I just chose this one for today. Yeah, it's very interesting to listen to you. You can tend to tell if somebody's a teacher or not, so used to it. So my question was, in what country is Prussia? Prussia? Today, it's called Poland. Okay. If you go to Danzig in Poland today, that's where the center was.

The Vistula River Valley is where these Russians—this we call Prussia. Prussia, as a country, does not exist today. So what that area is today is called Poland. Okay. Yeah, well, I wanted to make a dub for everybody else that wants to have something to say or comments to make or questions to ask. So is there anyone else that would like to ask something? Well, good morning, Chester. That was very interesting, and I would love to hear you share on more of these subjects.

I personally haven't read hardly anything on Russian Mennonite history. I've heard people talk about it, and it's always a subject that has interested me. You mentioned that you've been to Mexico and, I guess, visited some of the Russian Mennonites down there. Yes. I guess, well, you mentioned you see similarities as far as the way to set up their colonies down there. Yes. Yes.

How would you—just a question for you—how would you—like your exposure to the Russian Mennonites in Mexico, how do you feel as far as their spiritual well-being? Do you feel like they're doing well? Or what would your response be to that? And what? Okay, so this is a really big question. So to give you a little bit of context, when the Canadians deprived these Mennonites of their privileges when they came to Canada, they fled to Mexico in 1923.

And so a lot of these people had a lot of their qualities from Russia, but when they went to Mexico, Mexico was like a desert. And in Mexico, they went into poverty. And with poverty, they lost a lot of their power, their spirituality. And to answer your question, it just has turned into an awful situation spiritually in Mexico. Now, their schools don't do the job. I can hardly tell you—I don't know how proper it is even publicly to talk about this—they've come to the end of their string.

It's like they have turned their backs on the wisdom that they once had. They have a concept among themselves that ignorance is bliss. The less you know, the better. And literally, I've never met anybody like that. And so they have funneled themselves down narrower and narrower and narrower and defied what Proverbs 1 says. Proverbs 1 says, "My son, get wisdom, get understanding, get knowledge." You can read this in your Bible to understand this yourself. Check me out.

But he says, "If you don't do that, you're going to eventually get into trouble." Well, that's exactly what has happened to the Mennonites in Mexico. And then he says, "When you're in trouble, you're going to pray to me," God says, "and I'm going to laugh at you because I've already told you what to do, and you didn't do it." And so the way I look at it, God's already laughing at these people in Mexico.

And many of these people now have moved on to Bolivia, and they're carrying their story with them now into Bolivia. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of these people in Mexico. Thousands and thousands and thousands of these people in Bolivia. Some of these people have moved into West Texas around Seminole. Thousands of them out there. Okay, now, at some of these places, like Seminole and in a few places in northern Mexico, there is spiritual life that has been revived.

One of the best illustrations is in northern Mexico. They have a publishing house called Central Scholar. And Christian Light Publications has been received into these schools. The people who are willing to learn, who are willing to pursue some wisdom, who are reversing this ignorance is bliss thing, and they're actually renewing themselves. And the MCC for years tried to help them, and they refused them.

But these people now, the old colony people, have been accepting old-order Amish and old-order Mennonite teachers into their schools. A few years ago, I was in Ohio where there was a board meeting of these people. Amish, this whole system of improvement educationally is run by the old-order Amish. And I asked if I could be present. And they said, "Well, do you speak Pennsylvania Dutch?" I said, "No, I don't." Well, they said the proceedings will probably be in Dutch.

I said, "Well, I would like to come anyway." So the old-order Amish board members sat in the front, a row of tables, and a big U was set opposing them. And the teachers in these Russian schools came and sat. And these teachers, one by one, stood and gave a report of what they were doing. I think the third teacher was an old-order Mennonite girl, and she looked at me and she said, "Do you know Dutch?" And I said, "No, I don't." And so she spoke in English.

And because of that, all the rest of the teachers spoke in English. And I got a chance to listen in to some of these stories. They are just amazing stories. There's a miracle going on in Mexico, but the Amish are not going to tell you what's happening. It's just some very, very good things have been happening for years already. But the people who don't want this good have been fleeing on to Bolivia. That's a long answer to that question. Yeah. Thank you for that.

So the people you're describing, they're the old-order colony Mennonites. I'm aware that there's like Kleinige Meinig in Mexico or Sommerfelder. Yes. Old colony. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Thank you for that. Okay. So, Chester, did you want to bring it to an end? Was it a closing prayer? Sure. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we've looked at the story of our Mennonite cousins. And Father, there are things from that story that we should be paying attention to.

And I'm not sure if we are, Father, and I pray that you would wake us up. You would give us humility and grace to pay attention to what has already happened so we don't have to repeat this story. So our Father, I pray that you would bless these people who participated today, that they could pursue further some of this story and learn. I understand that sometimes we learn better from other people than we do from our own story.

And I pray that that would happen, that you would grant an interest by our people in this story so we can learn. I understand that your way is to learn and then live instead of living and learning the way we naturally do things. So our Father, be patient with us, be merciful to us. And I pray that you would somehow open our eyes to the story that we should be paying attention to because we know that those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. So give us grace. Bless this effort of wandering Amish.

Bless this effort to be a blessing to many. So we commit ourselves to you for your blessing and your provision. In Jesus' name, amen. Oh, the great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land.