Committee to World Mission: A Focus on International Strategy

T.D. Regehr is a history professor at the University of Saskatchewan and
the author of For Everything a Season: A History of the Alexanderkrone
Zentralschule and Mennonites in Canada, Volume 3, 1939-1970.

In 1988 Mennonite Brethren from some fifteen countries assembled in
Curitiba, Brazil, for a conference or consultation on their
international missionary endeavors. The Mennonite Brethren began as a
small group that broke away from the larger Mennonite community in
Russia in the 1860s. Many of its members migrated to North America in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, forming one of the
three large North American Mennonite conferences. (There are also a
large number of smaller Mennonite groups and conferences.) Evangelistic
and missionary activities were strongly supported by the Mennonite
Brethren, who, according to statistics cited in Committed to World
Mission, had by 1988 sent a total of 837 men and women to “foreign”
mission fields for a total of 7949 years of missionary service. The
result has been the establishment of strong Mennonite Brethren churches
and conferences in many parts of the world—notably Zaire, India, and
Japan—which complement the churches in North and South America.

Study papers and inspirational addresses at the Curitiba consultation,
together with short testimonials by some of the participants, and
summary introductions and conclusions by the editors, make up the
contents of this book. The subtitle places great emphasis on mission
strategies, but in fact the work is more celebratory than analytical.
The editors admit that it is designed to raise awareness rather than to
resolve issues.

The most important, but never clearly articulated, undercurrent of
thought at the consultation concerned the balance between preaching and
evangelism, on the one hand, and charity, relief work, and the struggle
for social economic, and political justice on the other. Mennonites have
generally supported both, but within the larger Mennonite community some
groups and conferences have given greater support to the charitable and
relief work of the Mennonite Central Committee, while others, and
particularly the Mennonite Brethren, have given priority to evangelistic
endeavors. The papers presented at the consultation admitted the
importance of both, but clearly and emphatically gave top priority to
evangelism.

Internationalization and the problems of crossing cultural frontiers
received much attention at the consultation, but the discussion rarely
got beyond pious generalizations. The personal testimonials indicate
that those who attended found the experience intense and exhilarating.
This was a celebration of a century of missionary endeavor, not a
critical or detailed assessment or analysis of that endeavor.