280 / The Conference in Retrospect

colonial Mennonite Church to any noticeable degree. Isolation and language barriers obtained too widely for Mennonites to be reached. Nor is there much evidence of Mennonites being influenced directly by early nineteenth-century revivals. Only in the late nineteenth century when such a movement could be led by Mennonite Englishspeaking preachers who were from the bosom of the church itself was it possible for revivalism to make its contribution.

The influence of Dwight L. Moody came to the Mennonite Church (as noted elsewhere) in good part through John F. Funk, the Mennonite publisher, preacher, and leader, who had been a onetime associate of Moody in mission Sunday school work in Chicago. As early as 1872 Funk held meetings among the Mennonites that resembled Moody's methods of evangelism. The great ingathering work of John S. Coffman and others took place in a manner which the church could accept and the growth that followed did much to assure a future to congregations all but facing extinction.

The awareness of and exclusion of destructive influences. The conference's documents of all periods show that leaders were quite sensitive to those movements and trends which threatened the character of historic Mennonitism. "Compromise" in politics, economic life, fashions, military service, marriage, and social life has been persistently opposed by leaders and faithful laity. The exclusion of theological heresies has always been necessary by the conference in order to maintain itself.

The above are offered as a partial explanation of how the church found its way in the first one hundred and fifty years of the Ohio and Eastern Mennonite Conference. During these years the environment was rural. The problems of survival were related to the frontier and its settlement throughout the nineteenth century. The environment of the twentieth century is increasingly urban. There is the gradual shift from the open country to villages, small towns, and larger towns, with even some growth in the suburbs of the major cities. The presence of small fellowship groups in the larger cities is only in its beginning stage. The kind of city churches to be planted, the nurture of congregational life, the extent and nature of the urban witness-these are some of the problems the Ohio and Eastern Mennonite Conference will face as urbanism grows and as its churches grow in the urban environment.

America has been a land where numerous religious groups have come to perpetuate their way of life and fulfill their sense of