 Season 2 here at Anabaptist Perspectives is coming to a close, and our final episode will be releasing at the end of this month. Now Anabaptist Perspectives has reached thousands of people all across the globe, but each episode costs hundreds of dollars to produce. And as we look into beginning production on Season 3, which is the next set of 50 episodes, we need your help. Over the next month, we're hoping to raise $10,000 to give us the funds we need to continue production on Season 3. So you'll probably notice a several month gap as we work to produce the next set of episodes. Whether it's a few dollars through our Patreon page, or a one-time donation through our website, every bit counts and we greatly value your support. We truly couldn't do it without you. Thanks so much for watching, for your generous support, and we'll see you in Season 3. Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here with Chester Weaver and you've spent quite a number of years teaching school and have a deep interest in Mennonite history and that type of thing. We're going to do a deep dive into some history on this one, and you mentioned some of this in our Fundamentalism episode, but that's the apostasy of the 1960s and then the renewal of the 1970s. First of all, can you just kind of set the backdrop for us? Where are we at? What preceded this up to that point in the 1960s in the Mennonite Church? Okay, that's a very good question. All that I shared with you on the previous thing on Fundamentalism, what we're going to share tonight is an outgrowth of all this Fundamentalism emphasis, Liberalism emphasis, and the clash. Ideas always have consequences. So people should probably go back and watch that one first. What happened in the 1960s was not a drop out of the sky, it was not something sudden, it was just the natural consequence of failure on a number of levels before. So I'm going to trace some of this, and I come from Lancaster Conference myself. I do not have an Amish background or an Amish Mennonite background, so this is a part of my personal story. This stuff that I'm going to be talking about actually happened. I witnessed it firsthand whenever I was a teenager, and that's very relevant today because I'm hearing again today some of the same things I heard back in the 1960s. The same thoughts, same ideas, some of the same terms. First of all, may I share with you a timeline? This is not original with me. Corey Anderson produced this. So we have an Amish Mennonite deal, and you notice up here it says the mainstream Mennonite. You notice over here it's Protestant. So back in the late 1800s, the Amish people sorted themselves out. There was only such a thing as Amish. The change-minded Amish, two-thirds of them went this way and eventually joined us. One-third is what is now called Order Amish today. These people are now over 300,000. They started out with 3,000 people, and they're now over 300,000. Two-thirds of them went up this way, and now they with us are dying people. And what I like to pursue now is just the consequences of ideas. So I don't need to explain this chart, but I want to give you a context, and it's the Amish Mennonite people who have not experienced the story that I'm going to tell you, but they have no reason to repeat our story because our story is well-documented. And the Amish Mennonite people need to pay attention and not repeat our story. And this is what bothers me when I'm hearing evidence that we're not learning. So my wife went to Lancaster Mennonite High School for grades 9, 10, 11, but her parents would not allow her to graduate because of what was going on there. Now I know this is just external stuff, but externals kind of illustrate what's going on inside. So here are some pictures. This is from the book Passing One the Faith, The Story of a Mennonite School, Lancaster Mennonite School by Don B. Crabill, a respected historian. So just with a quick flip of the pictures here, you'll notice that we go from this kind of external to this picture in 1965 to this picture in 1968 to this picture in 1969, this picture in 1971. Some of these things are personal to me. I can tell you about who some of these people were. Wow. It's like a slow, slow shift. The book was published in 1991. It's completely different. Completely different. A man by the name of Daniel Hess, who is a teacher at Goshen College, contacted CBS News and asked them to consider doing a documentary of the old Mennonites over this time. They produced this DVD. It's called Mennonites, The Peaceful Revolution, 1967, CBS television. The outside world was noticing something was going on with these people, and so this is the outside view, looking in on these changes that are growing out of liberalism and fundamentalism at work. At the very same time from within is this book, God and Uncle Dale. Have you ever read this book, God and Uncle Dale? I can very much identify with what's in this book. The story setting is in Alberta, but what was going on in Mennonite conferences across the entire nation is put into a story here, and you can just feel the emotions of it. So this is the inside view versus the outside view. After that was done, then John Howard Yoder wrote a little write-up. He said it's probably the only time that all Mennonites or most Mennonites did the same thing together. They watched this mirror on television. And sometimes they even brought televisions into the church house, and they had just few years before that, had rules against television, and now they're watching the electronic mirror as it's portraying them. 1972, in 1989 and 2006, a man by the name of Conrad Kinnege did a profile on Mennonite Church USA, Road Signs for the Journey. So now we're talking about non-externals, we're talking about all kinds of other things that are going on among Mennonite people. He did all these questionnaires he sent out in 1972, 1989, and 2006, and it gives you a visual of what was going on on the inside. After this book was done, then they did another one in 2014. All I have to tell you is all this is a document of death. Our people are dying. They're not getting people in from the outside. The cry back in the 60s, we need to be relevant. We became so relevant, we have no message. And now we've brought into homosexuality, we're ordaining women, women homosexuals to be our leaders, and people aren't staying. Churches have to have something to offer people, and if you have no message, why would you join a church like that? And so it's just a sad commentary. I would like to conclude by saying, sharing with you some things, the best way to attack Anabaptist values is to attack Anabaptist symbols. The issues, there are three primary issues back in the 60s that we faced. One of them was television. Gotta have television. Secondly, women were, their covering size was shrinking and they were cutting their hair. And thirdly, divorce and remarriage. Those were the cutting edge issues. Now much else was involved, but the Liberals began to attack Anabaptist values through its symbols. For example, head covering sounds like it's a minor thing, but it turns out to be more major than we first think. Even Galassanite is attacked through head coverings. If you attack the head covering, you're attacking Galassanite. The degrading of Anabaptism, Anabaptist symbols is propaganda. And intended to change the perspective of Anabaptism as a whole is very subtle. But these people knew what they were doing and they actually got it accomplished. It's very sad. Look at this. This is the Family Worship Magazine, July, August, September 1968, prime change. Look at this picture. A picture is worth a thousand words. This lady is the head of her family. She has cut hair, no covering, two children, and she's happy. And you feed this kind of literature to the whole church. Eventually, this becomes the model. There's more than just externals here. There's deep things here. And these people use that. Culture is religion externalized. We study culture to learn what motivates people to do the things they say and do. So when you deal with culture, you're actually dealing with people's belief systems. The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. And that is exactly what happened to our people. They bought into this. And nobody was in the Galassan height enough to submit to God. It became what you call postmodernism. People just went with the flow. And a few people were brave enough to stand up, and I'll get to that shortly. How to abandon Anabaptist theology is undermine biblical authority, which includes the person of Christ, make traditional ways of reading the Bible seem simplistic and inadequate, encourage Anabaptist history, lose the two-kingdom concept, and throne self and throne wealth and national welfare, nationalism, justify self-defense and promote just war theory, adopt the good moral causes of the surrounding society, and identify with it. In other words, you just blend in with what's around you. Those and churches who do just what I read, who have lost sight of their history, are experiencing amputation from their historical trunk. They must die. And that is what happened, is happening presently to my people. Their only hope for life is reattachment. I have five symptoms of death here. Death is okay. It's okay to die. Little energy to fight for life anymore. Life, uncomfortable lies, acquiescence in the inevitable. Number five, feeble response to stimuli. Those are all symptoms of approaching death. And I'm sorry, my people are just about dead. So what happened? There were a few men across the nation, both in the West and in the East, who saw through what was happening here, and decided they're going to stand up and take the heat that comes with standing up to people. Conferences were powerful. They stood up to them and they got ridiculed and criticized like you would not believe. And the reason I'm sitting here today is because of their bravery and their courage. And even the Amish Mennonites have been impacted by the courage of a few men who have done what it took to appeal to our own story, our own history, a living relationship with Jesus Christ. One of the heroes that I have in my experience is a man by the name of Aaron Schenck. I saw him and his wife with a non-dualistic approach to life and history. And they modeled it, and that's powerful. Okay, so that happened in the 70s. And because of that, we have publishing houses, like Rod instead Publishers, Christian Light Publishers, and other publishers, Lamp and Light Publishers, The Grace Press. And we have powerful things happening in the world today. As an outgrowth of that beginning, somebody had to be brave enough to start it. And now, enough people have the vision that it's kind of rolling on its own. However, I'm afraid that we're in an identity crisis again. We need to be talking about some things like Golasenheit, like fundamentalism and understanding what liberalism and fundamentalism is, because we're needing some thinkers, some students of history to understand where we are today and give us some leadership to where we should be going. What similarities do you see with us today, as we do back then? Is there specific things you think you can do? There are several things. One of them is we don't have television, but we have movies. And we don't have television, but we have internet, which provides pornography just as bad or worse than what television did. And there are so many young Anabaptist people who are involved in some kind of pornography. Okay, if we don't deal with that, we're not going to make it. Okay, so some of our leaders back years ago said, salvation is a dualism thing. Just have it in your head and your heart, don't have to live it out. It's okay. Ideas have consequences. We're suffering today. I already talked to you about the head covering. We have head covering shrinking again. They're not off yet for conservatives. At least they're on, at least a single of them. But back in our story, if you watch, they went smaller and smaller and smaller until they eventually disappeared and then they cut their hair and blah, blah, blah. It just went from there. Another thing is becoming a part of the political process. It's a really big one right now. Yeah. Got to vote. Got to have good men in office. That's a total loss of the two kingdom concept. Another one, if a church does not stand for moral issues like divorce and remarriage, they don't stand for homosexual issues either. Now at this point, the conservative Anabaptists are standing strong as far as I know in resisting homosexuality and all its implications. But we're getting an awful lot of pressure on it. Another thing, back in those days, sports became important. And now we've got sports becoming important again. You look at people's heroes, you find out where they are. And you have sports heroes, national heroes. You don't have Christ and Christian history heroes. You know where people are. Those are a few illustrations of where we are today. Maybe we're getting into the weeds. But is that a failure of them not living for something more? Or is that a generational thing where they weren't shown something? Exactly. It's my generation's problem. Okay. Okay. It's because young people are going to those places because they have not seen it modeled. It's my generation. My generation has failed. There is such a thing as fight, right, flight. The first generation fights for the truth. The second generation inherits it. It's right. But the third generation, it's flight. They run from it. And that's where you think we're at right now? I think we're into the right stage of beginning the flight. The only way this works is if every generation fights, understands the issues and fights for the truth. Which is what this whole project is all about. Exactly. Yeah. Do these interviews. Get people to start, at least start thinking about it. Exactly. Even if we don't necessarily change their minds. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. But there needs to talk. And I feel an increasing burden as an older person to tell this story. At least we have some books here that tell this story. But there needs to be some flesh and blood tell this story, too. I owe this story to you. Yeah, because I didn't know most of this, honestly. I've lived through it. We have family consequences of this. This stuff is real. This is not just intellectual or something happened in the past. I know where this went. And I don't want to see it repeated in your generation. It's not a fatalism thing where we're just needing to go there without it doing anything. I appreciate places like Sadler College are at least calling people back to some thoughtful consideration of these things. And faith builders are doing the same thing. Asking people to read the story in the past. And instead, we're messing around with movies and social media. And we're not paying attention to important issues. Intentionality. Wow. It shows me, once again, how important history is and understanding where we come from and watching these trends. And even if we disagree with them, we can at least still learn something about where we came from. And I think that's really important. So I really appreciate you taking the time to dig all this up and then also be willing to share it with our audience. That's really my pleasure. My pleasure.