Footnotes / 299 19. The Conference in Retrospect and Prospect

1. For a comprehensive summary of schismatic movements in the Mennonite Church see Harold S. Bender, "Lessons to Be Learned from Past Divisions," GH, LIII (May 17, 1960), pp. 441, 442, 461. Of the eighteen schisms listed by Bender, the Holdeman, Egly, Wisler, and 1923-27 divisions affected the Ohio churches most.

2. For a summary of such transitions and the "secularizing" influence see J. Winfield Fretz, "Reflections at the End of a Century," ML, 11 (July 1947), p. 34. Fretz's study is sociological and deals with a part of the Mennonite Church in eastern Pennsylvania from which many of the Ohio congregations are descended. It is a study of how a division was precipitated by an ingroup which believed it could make certain "necessary" changes without the loss of religious values. These changes included missionary and evangelistic activity; the establishment of Sunday schools; the use of musical instruments in the church services; the hiring of salaried ministers; freedom from prescribed forms of dress; and less separatistic attitudes toward society in general. After a century Fretz concludes that in this particular venture "there has been loss of ground. The accommodation process has almost been completed. The conference, as a religious group, has gradually adjusted itself to its environment. Adherence to the principles of simplicity, nonconformity, mutual aid, discipline, and nonresistance has been weakened to the point of a faint flicker. In the recent war, out of 401 men drafted for military service, 94 percent accepted service in the regular armed forces while only 6 percent adhered to the principle of biblical nonresistance. As to evidences of simplicity, nonconformity, and mutual aid there is no indication that there is a testimony of greater or less vigor than is being given by any other evangelical Protestant group."

For another view of the process of change in the same Mennonite group see Leland D. Harder, "The Quest for Equilibrium in an Established Sect: A Study of Social Change in the General Conference Mennonite Church" (unpublished PhD dissertation in Sociology of Religion, Northwestern University, 1962). Like Fretz, Harder accepts the Troeltschian church-sect typology as a framework of reference but he sees social change as due primarily to structural disequilibrium and not to environmental-cultural pressures. According to Harder, "If the sect type of structure is defined both in terms of a distinctly voluntary religious membership and in terms of separation from society, it is involved in a structural disequilibrium that must inevitably lead in one direction or the other" (p. 31).

3. For studies on how religious groups similar to the Mennonites have undergone changes of. Frederick B. Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House: The Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia, 1682-1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1948); Frederick Denton Dove, Cultural Changes in the Church of the Brethren (Elgin, Ill.: Brethren Publishing House, 1932); Jessie H. Ziegler, The Broken Cup: Three Generations of Dunkers (Elgin, Ill.: Brethren Publishing House, 1942). The work by Tolles is helpful to an understanding of how the gathering of wealth was associated with a decline in religious zeal among certain of the Society of Friends or Quakers. The volumes of Dove and Ziegler portray the transtitions in Church of the Brethren communities as they adapted to education, communication, and changes in their cultural environment. The Society of Friends, the Church of the Brethren (Dunkers), and the Mennonites all came to the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

4. Concern for a fresh approach to the problems of unity and discipline is reflected in Edward B. Stoltzfus, "Grace and Discipleship: A Study of the Relation of God's Grace to the Believer's Life in God's Service." Unpublished ThM thesis, Princeton Theological Seminary, 1963. The author, a minister in the Ohio and Eastern Mennonite Conference at the time the thesis was written, addressed his study to the problem of schismatic trends in the Mennonite Church which he felt were related to conflicting currents of theological thought: Orthodox Evangelicalism, Liberalism, Fundamentalism, Neoorthodoxy, and Biblical Realism. The thesis develops the theme that God's grace, available to the sinner and to the redeemed body of Christ, is the recourse for building a disciplined church and dealing with schismatic trends.

5. Suzanne de Dietrich, Discovering the Bible (Nashville, Tenn.: Source Publishers, 1953), p. 20. For an expansion of this concept as seen in the context of biblical theology in both old and New Testaments see another work by the same author, The Witnessing Community (Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster Press, 1958).