Ontario's Conference of Historic Peace Church Families and the "Joy of Service"

Abstract: This essay briefly examines family relationships of four executive leaders of Conference of Historic Peace Churches (CHPC) in order to raise questions about gendered nature of Following a review and interpretation of oral and biographical sources, essay describes ways that mothers and wives of these leaders influenced and supported their non-resistant beliefs and their ecumenism; in particular, it shows how their wives provided an environment that allowed CHPC executives to participate in J. B. and Naomi Martin called joy of service. (1) Although women are rarely identified in written records, interviews and other biographical materials suggest that women not only provided context for their husbands' public work, but they also reflected theologically on their role in way that minimized great personal costs entailed. ********** Early in 1944 Harold and Mila Senor Sherk were travelling down highway with their four children. The three teens--Iva, Arthur and Harold--sat in rear of car, with little Mildred perched up front between Harold Sr. and Mila. The Sherk children have never forgotten moment when their mother turned around and told them that Daddy was going to be travelling to India. Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) had asked him to spend two years there to help in its relief program. Harold was a Mennonite Brethren in Christ pastor and he and Mila had served in a half-dozen Southern Ontario parishes in their eighteen-year marriage. More recently, Harold had agreed to become secretary of Ontario's Conference of Historic Peace Churches, and he had spent past fifteen months as a chaplain for conscientious objectors assigned to alternative service camp 80 kilometers north of Sault Ste. Marie. (2) The family lacked a solid community base, and now they would be left behind while Harold travelled halfway around world. This vignette illustrates assumptions about roles that have undergirded work of church. Mennonite history has long focused on theology, ideas and work of leadership, while paying little mind to women who labored silently in background. (3) As historians Kimberly Schmidt and Steven Reschly recently have pointed out, the development of an Anabaptist vision of women's history is in its infancy. (4) Historians concerned with Mennonite women are turning to highly developed and self-conscious field of women's history, as they attempt to understand both women's contributions to Mennonite history and historical context. (5) Historians of Mennonite women are taking up challenge to pursue questions of what women do and think, raising them to equal prominence with classic historical questions that have addressed what men do and think. (6) Studies such as Marlene Epp's Women without Men on post-war Russian Mennonite refugees to Canada, and Rachel Waltner Goossen's Women against Good War on American female conscientious objectors during World War II, have employed feminist analysis to show how is socially constructed, and even how gender roles were transformed during times of war. (7) Their work illustrates that identities--masculinity and femininity--are more than opposites. These authors show that meaning of men's and women's thoughts and actions can be understood only in relationship to one another and to societal events surrounding them. (8) By asking questions about women did and thought, we can incorporate them into historical narrative. The idea for this paper emerged while Linda Huebert Hecht and I were conducting interviews for Mennonite Central Committee Ontario history project. Heating about Conference of Historic Peace Churches' work during World War II from perspective of members of major leaders' families, raised new questions. As Epp has noted, while the collector of stories holds power of synthesis and interpretation, . …

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