The Reception of the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective in the Canadian Context

Abstract: In the summer of 1995 the General Conference Mennonite Church and the (Old) Mennonite Church adopted the new of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective. While this action included all Canadian congregations holding General Conference membership and also the two Mennonite Church area conferences in Canada, the following summer the Conference of Mennonites in Canada followed up with its own decision to endorse the confession. With this, the stage was set for the new statement of faith to play a major role in the formation of Mennonite Church Canada, one of the bodies that resulted when the General Conference-Mennonite Church integration came to fruition in 1999. This paper reports on how the confession was received by the Conference of Mennonites in Canada constituency and by its successor, Mennonite Church Canada, and how it contributed to the formation of Mennonite Church Canada and its programs after 1999. THE ROLE OF CONFESSIONS IN THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE CONFERENCE OF MENNONITES IN CANADA From the time of its origin in 1902-1903, the Konferenz der Mennoniten in mittleren Canada (Conference of Mennonites in Central Canada), as it was originally named, (1) seems to have taken its of faith in stride, without much deliberation. A five-member Constitution Committee, appointed at the first annual sessions (1903), assumed responsibility for recommending a confession of faith for the new church. At the annual sessions a year later the Constitution Committee came to the delegate body with its proposal. While the committee made use of the constitutional model of the General Conference Mennonite Church, (2) they did not choose the General Conference's brief Common Confession of 1896. (3) Rather, the committee recommended the Glaubensbekenntnis der Mennoniten in Preussen und Russland (4) (Articles of Faith of the Mennonites in Prussia and Russia). This statement, brought to Canada by Mennonite immigrants from Prussia and from Russia in the latter years of the nineteenth century, seemed appropriate for the new organization, as it linked them with their German-speaking mother church in the old country. The Glaubensbekenntnis had already been widely used for catechetical instruction among Mennonites in Canada before 1903. There is no evidence of debate over the decision to adopt a confession of faith from the old country. Indeed, there is little evidence of debate over as such or particular articles of faith in the early decades of Conference of Mennonites in Canada (C.M.C.) history. The ministers and preachers (Altester and Prediger) of Conference of Mennonites in Canada congregations assumed responsibility for the church's beliefs and practices. Until well into the 1950s, this ministerial group composed the bulk of the delegate body at annual sessions, where matters of faith and practice were typically discussed at a meeting of ministers the day preceding the conference business sessions. These pre-conference ministers' meetings dealt with theological and ethical issues of the time. But in the early decades little if any consideration was given to the question of revising the accepted confession of faith or formulating a new one. (5) This has led General Conference and Conference of Mennonites in Canada historians to comment that there has been some hesitancy among Conference of Mennonites in Canada and General Conference constituents to ascribe much importance to confessional statements. Some years ago, historian S. F. Pannabecker made this point when he wrote: As a matter of fact, the General Conference has not been too much concerned about precise statements of faith or their elaboration. (6) A C.M.C. historian, Adolf Ens, corroborates Pannabecker's point with respect to the Canadian constituency. In his recent history of the Conference of Mennonites in Canada, Ens observes that confessions of faith have an ambivalent place for churches in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition. …

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