In Search of the Remnant

Several years ago I started getting notifications from Google about my website http://www.secondlooks.biz which includes a photography site, a resume site, and a writing site, as well as contents that accompanies my ebooks sold on Amazon. Google wanted me to include language and design that would optimize my web-page content for mobile as well as desktop platforms. Mostly self-taught, I had dabbled in HTML and CSS and Javascript and had even taken a class as far back as 2010 and had many hundreds of web-pages, but somehow getting the mobile platform statements right on those pages eluded me. When I incorporated those statements, my pages ended up looking worse on mobile platforms such as my iphones and ipads. The upshot was that I removed the statements and Google quit including me in their web-search results so that people could no longer find my content, even with a specific phrase. :( 

While this seems to hold true for my blog site as well, I have decided to migrate some of my work into blog pieces to hopefully increase the chances of being found and preserving some of these writings. as I am now in my early seventies and retired. The following piece was one I wrote in the early 1980's and was entitled "In Search of the Remnant."

In search of the remnant...

by Jeanne Winstead

 
It's October 1, 1988, our wedding anniversary, and it is snowing. I'm 38 years old. My husband and I argued bitterly in the motel the night before about having a baby, leaving me to spend a restless night and wake up to a cold, empty feeling, like I was being deprived of life itself...at least a normal one, filled with children and grandparents. We get up, pack our bags, and drive down the road. Outside of Shipshewanna, there's a sign that says "Mennohof Museum." We stop. I climb out of the car totally unprepared for what awaits me in that place. As we wander through the rooms, we find an orientation center that shows a film on the lifestyle of the Amish…a 16th century jail...an old Mennonite worship service. This part of Indiana is Mennonite and Amish, but in what should be an alien environment to me, I hear instead, an old familiar voice. As I look at the displays around me, the words pop incredulously into my head, "This is my faith!" How did it get here, disguised in funny clothes and quaint customs, I wonder? My mind flashes back to 1962 . . .

I'm twelve... thirteen. Standing in my room... all alone in a foreign country. The voices in the next bedroom are arguing. I hear the words very clearly, "Bert, I want a divorce."

Strange it should upset me, I wasn't very happy there. But life as I know it begins to crumble all around me. Chile is the land of earthquakes, and I feel the floor literally teeter beneath my feet. Then the voice in my head... "God loves you."

I fall on my knees, but then I force myself back up on my feet and shove it away.

"I don't need You! I don't need anybody!"

My father drives me and my mother to the Santiago Airport in silence. An ash from his cigarette falls on my foot and burns a hole in my stocking, reaching the flesh. I wince. No one says anything. My last memory of him...

I hear the voice again some months later after I have come to live with my maternal grandparents in rural Indiana. One fall/winter evening we go to see a movie called In His Steps at the Kingman Christian Church. I know I need to give my life to God.

"OK, but I'm not ready yet," I argue inside my head.

With whom?

Then it's Easter week, 1963 or 1964. Elvis is popular, but the Beatles are gaining with my age group. I idolize and worship TV and movie stars. A small GARBC Baptist Church in Yeddo is having an all-week revival meeting. Friday night my grandfather wants to go. There's a TV show I want to watch. But then something my Sunday School teacher Raymond said at the small Friends Church we attended pops into my head. (Raymond is also my best friend's father.)

"If God gives you 7 days, can't you give Him back 1 hour?"

OK, I decide to be generous and give 2 hours that week. That night at the revival meeting, as the visiting evangelist preaches, my resistance is completely broken down. I start to weep. As the invitation plays, and the people sing, "Just as I Am," I slip out of my seat and go down the aisle to the front. The local minister, Pastor Barnard, takes me to a side room and leads me through a simple prayer. It's almost anti-climactic. All this resisting and fear, and now...

I look at Pastor Barnard and say, "But I didn't feel anything!"

He reassures me that it took, perhaps goes over it again.

. . .My mind comes back to the present, at Mennohof. I'm hearing how the Amish choose their life style and clothing as witness of their Christian faith to the world. I hear how in the 16th century they were called Anabaptists because they believed in adult baptism. Many of them paid for this act with their lives at the hands of Catholics and Reformers alike. Again my mind flashes back to the Yeddo Baptist Church. . .

I'm sixteen or seventeen. Pastor Barnard is teaching a passage from the Old Testament about Elisha - when he has to flee wicked Queen Jezebel. He thinks he's the only faithful one left, but the Voice tells him that He has reserved a remnant.

"God will always reserve a faithful remnant, no matter how bad things get," Pastor Barnard says. "We draw our truths and beliefs from a faithful remnant called the Anabaptists."

The elusive Anabaptists...The only other reference I'd ever heard of them until now. I didn't know who they were. I thought maybe they pre-dated Christ, existed throughout the Middle Ages, and in modern times came to be called Baptists.

The Baptist Church at Yeddo teaches a strict life-style. No mixed swimming, no movies, no wearing shorts, no drinking, no playing cards, but lots of friendship and singing. Sunday night services and Wednesday night prayer meetings. When it comes time for me to go to college, a Christian counselor at my secular high school influences me to pick Bob Jones University over IU. Bob Jones is a conservative, fundamentalist school in South Carolina. While attending there as a freshman, I am attracted to the field of Interpretative Speech and decide to major in it. Almost right off the bat, I face obstacles and hurdles. Turns out, you have to pass a platform at the end of your sophomore year, to be accepted into the major. I find out that my voice is too nasal, I have a short palate. My voice and diction professor Robert Pratt works with me patiently to overcome the nasality. The upshot is I pass my sophomore platform, but am put into the Speech Education program.

"You'll make a wonderful teacher," they tell me.

They do put me on stage, and I perform in plays, Sunday afternoon vespers programs, operas and oratorios. They tell me I have a good singing voice and should do something with it.

At Bob Jones I don't hear anything about Anabaptists. But I do hear about the Council of Carthage around 300 A.D., the Renaissance and the Reformation. And I hear plenty about modernism and neo-evangelicalism, neo-orthodoxy, and fundamentalism. Those are all fairly recent developments of the early 20th century. At BJU I arrive at my understanding of the Christian Universe, at least the Protestant part of it. Simply put, Fundamentalists are those who believe there is a God, the Bible is His inspired Word, and the events described in it are to be taken very literally, unless the text itself says otherwise. Modernists are those who question all of that. Neo-orthodox/Neo-evangelicals are those who compromise with Modernists.

Bob Jones does not accept black students or allow interracial dating. This bothers me.

"It’s just not a good time to bring in blacks," and, "we intend to build a school for them too," the administration tells us. But I still feel guilty, no matter how they justify it. Only I’m hooked. I want that speech degree more than anything. And...I feel safe here.

My sophomore year, I go with a group of fellow students to minister to black children, and also to a black nursing home in Easley, South Carolina on weekends. Once, we get permission to pick up the kids and bring them on campus to a Sunday Vespers Program. Strange, bringing them to a place where they cannot attend as students.

My senior year I am getting braver. It's 1972. The whole campus has to go hear a speech by some high South African official. He does such a good job presenting his government's position on Apartheid, he gets a standing ovation. Lindsay Austin, my friend from Indiana, and I are seated by an aisle close to the front. As far as I know, we are the only two people who remain seated and don't clap in that whole 2000 seat auditorium. The faculty always sits up on stage in a block of seats, during chapel and special convocations. They look out at us. Lindsay and I just sit there silently looking right back at them.

I wonder, are Lindsay and I a remnant, like the Voice told Elisha, at that moment? Or are we just trouble-makers?

After I graduate from Bob Jones, I enter an inner city youth ministry in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I live and work there for three and a half years, then relocate close to my family in Lafayette, Indiana, and end up working at Purdue University. I meet my husband-to-be at a Presbyterian church singles group in town. Benny has been divorced twice, the last time, after adopting and helping raise his wife's children. Naturally he isn't too keen on jumping right back in. We live together for a year before we gather up enough courage to take the leap. The Presbyterian Church in Dayton, where Benny has been a faithful member for twenty-some years, handles all of this very well. They encourage us to attend, but basically mind their own business. Eventually, the minister Bill Beswick conducts the wedding ceremony, and for the first time, at age 33, I am married.

As time goes on, I notice the Dayton Church has some very different attitudes toward things than what I was taught. When I bring this up to Bill, he floors me with the comment, "Yes, but you've outgrown those."

Have I?

My mind comes back to the exhibits at Mennohof and is immediately transported back to the 16th century. . .

The date is Jan 21, 1525. The whole world is in a state of flux and turmoil. People are afraid. The old standbys don't work any more. Over the centuries, demands for reform keep mounting. And then some years back, in 1517, it really starts to happen, when a man named Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenburg, Germany. Tonight, in Zurich, Switzerland, a group of sincere men meet at the home of Felix Manz. They have a problem to discuss. At this time, Christianity is a state religion. Mandatory. Every citizen is baptized into the church at birth, no choice, no question. However, these earnest individuals who have gathered tonight have come to believe that joining the church should be the completely voluntary action of an individual who is aware of what he is doing. Their problem is that the Zurich city council has just made it a civil offense for an infant not to be baptized. The reasons are more economic than anything else. The council has appointed a popular major reformer Ulrich Zwingli as their leader, but they are unwilling to make changes which will offend surrounding cantons with whom they trade and do commerce.

That night as the men talk and pray about what they might do to satisfy their conscience and their God, Georg Blaurock spontaneously asks Conrad Grebel to baptize him, for God's sake. The remaining people present follow suit. (1) As one of my sources later points out, this action is a bit unusual, because while many criticize the practice of infant baptism, no one as yet has come up with what to do in its place. (2)

The term Anabaptist, I find, means Rebaptizer. These people are soon called by that name. Persecution immediately follows, killing some of these men, scattering others, and the Anabaptist movement is born. Its hallmarks are: Christianity as a matter of personal choice/faith (as evidenced by believer's baptism), nonviolence, separation from the world, and separation of church and state. In place of government enforcement of religious practices, Christians are accountable to one another for living a holy life.

. . .

So, how does all this reach forward through thousands of years and touch the lives of people in the 20th century, in particular a fourteen old year girl from a divorced family recently come to live with her grandparents in rural Indiana in 1963? And how does she spend 38 years in the church, even graduate from a Christian college, holding beliefs that came from the Anabaptists, never questioning how she got them or where they came from? Until one surprising moment of epiphany in a roadside museum?.

I talk with my Mennonite and Presbyterian friends and minister about it. Eventually, I schedule some vacation time and visit the Purdue library. What I read there is even more amazing than my walk through Mennohof. Bear with me now as we re-cap a little history.

The "Reformation is a backward-looking movement," (3) I read, a cry for the church to return to its original purity, which is perceived as having been lost.

If so, at what point did it stray? The Anabaptists would tell us to travel even further back, back to 300 AD. . .

It's the early years of the Christian church. Christians have been persecuted, but the church has continued to grow rapidly. But now things are different. The Romans have a new emperor, Constantine. No one knows why, but he is sympathetic to Christians. In a very short time they go from being persecuted for their faith, to being favored and protected by the state. Maybe he needs some common tie to bind all the diverse peoples of the Roman Empire. Christianity seems like the vehicle to do it. Constantine makes everyone a Christian. Suddenly people from all backgrounds are assimilated into the church. It becomes an impossible task to educate everyone on even the basics. (4) "Vast masses of people in the church are little more than baptized heathens." (5)

The fall of the Roman Empire doesn't help the matter of separation of church and state. (6) When the state flees to Constantinople, the church is left to pick up the pieces. At one point during the Middle Ages, the church owns half the land and half the wealth in Europe! (7)

But the year of 1525, when we first meet the Anabaptists, is a different time. The winds of change are blowing across Europe. People have lived through the crusades and the black plague. Life is so scary that some even pray the plague won't pass them by. (8) Many feel that the end of the world is near. At the same time, the world is moving away from the "other world" focus of the Middle Ages, to pay more attention to this life. Under the humanism of the Renaissance, the arts and sciences flourish, and biblical scholarship is recovered. All of the major reformers have a humanist education. (9)

In all this milieu, I read, the Anabaptists fit in as "the left wing of the Protestant Reformation." (10) They are also reformers, who believe Reformation isn't going far enough, fast enough. (11) Under persecution, their numbers spread across Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and Holland. The group in Holland, guided by Menno Simons, become known as "Mennonites." They meet British Separatist John Smythe, a contemporary of many who came over on the Mayflower. He is rebaptized, or as some of us would say, born again, and soon other British subjects are rebaptized as well. In 1609 these people start churches in Holland and England. They become known as Baptists.

Baptists in the United States eventually split up into the Southern Baptists and the Northern Baptists over the issue of slavery. The Northern Baptists become known as the American Baptists. In the early 20th century controversy over orthodoxy and modernism, the fundamentalist movement is born. A fundamentalist group splits off from the American Baptists in 1932 to become the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, or the GARBC Baptists.

Thus through millions of chances and permutations, in 1964, a young girl decides to give an extra hour to God that week, and go with her grandfather to a GARBC Baptist Revival Meeting... and we complete the circle.

We've all heard of Luther, Zwingli, Hus, and Calvin - but did you know there was a Georg Blaurock, a Conrad Grebel, a Felix Manz, a Michel Sattler, a Hans Hut, a Pilgram Marpek, a Dirk Willems, a Menno Simons?

Did you know many of these people were executed as common criminals under civil law, in both Catholic and Protestant nations, for their beliefs in adult baptism, separation of church and state, and other views we all take for granted today?

When Felix Manz was drowned, a major Protestant leader sarcastically called it his "third" baptism. Georg Caracob Blaurock was banished from his home in Zurich, Switzerland.  (12) Michel Sattler, who held the movement together after persecution threatened to tear it apart, was tortured and burned at the stake for sedition. His wife was drowned a few days later. (13) Evangelist Hans Hut was killed "accidentally" in his jail cell. (14) Dirk Willems was burned at the stake after rescuing his pursuer from an icy river. (15) Pilgram Marpek who formulated and refined and spread many Anabaptist beliefs was forced into hiding. (16) Menno Simons, founder of the Mennonites, spent out his life as a hunted man, constantly in search of shelter for his wife and children. Only 1 son and 1 daughter survived him. (17)

I suppose there are many conclusions one could draw from all of this. One of them I simply can't resist pointing out. During this present time, when religious people seek to make the will of God (as they understand it) the law of the land, perhaps we of the church should pause to remember that the alliance between church and state has not always served us well. In my mind's eye, I can conjure up an image of a hoary-haired Anabaptist cautioning us that Christian faith and Christian conscience are matters of personal choice. While a "Christian coalition" or a "religious right" might seem like a good idea to some, down the road that fusion of church and state may once again turn around and bite us.

As John Smythe so eloquently put it in 1612 before he died...

"The magistrate, by virtue of his office, is not to meddle with religion, or matters of conscience, nor to compel men to this or that form of religion or doctrine, but to leave the Christian religion to the free conscience of every one, and to meddle only with politcal matters." (18)

So where are Benny and I now? Still married. Still childless, although I now think that probably all worked out for the good (now a step-grandparent three times over). And still in the church. For me it’s been good to learn about my roots, those forces which shaped my destiny. It’s also both ironic and somewhat healing, that I now find myself, quite by "accident," a member of a denomination started in 1767 by a Mennonite evangelist and a Reformed minister. At least once in history, the two sides have come together.

 

 

 

Bibliography

1An Introduction to Mennonite History: a popular history of the Anabaptists and the Mennonites, ed. C.J. Dyck (Pennsylvania, 1966) p. 34.

2Ibid., p. 31.

3Ibid., p. 9.

4Ibid, p. 11.

5Ibid.

6Ibid., p. 11.

7Ibid., p. 12.

8Ibid., p. 77.

9 Ibid., p. 21.

10 F.S. Mead, Handbook of Denomination in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York, 1945), p. 32.

11 An Introduction to Mennonite History: a popular history of the Anabaptists and the Mennonites, ed. C.J. Dyck (Pennsylvania, 1966) p. 24.

12Ibid., p. 21

13Ibid., p. 43.

14Ibid., p. 48.

15Ibid., p. 86.

16Ibid., p. 74.

17Ibid., p. 85.

18 F.S. Mead, Handbook of Denomination in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York, 1945), p. 32.