My mother left the Mennonite church of her parents when it sunk in that the German language was more important than the faith. My father’s parents had been Wesleyan Methodist, but that church got swept away with the Social Gospel and ened up as part of the United Church of Canada. When I was 11 we all joined the Anglican Church of Canada, which is where I received my early training in the Christian faith. That turned out to be more mirage than reality, though I still look back fondly at those years.

My grandmother, three aunts and one uncle were members of Mennonite churches. Most of them were people I enjoyed being with, though one aunt clung to a strict form of Mennonitism along with a strong conviction that life had not treated her fairly. This aunt, and my Grandma, wrote letters to my mother in an old German cursive script that I could not decipher, and Mom answered in the same form of writing. Grandma spoke excellent English with me, but when she was alone with my mother she spoke only Plautdietsch. Thus I grew up knowing there was a faith known as Mennonite, but had no idea what it was. I wonder if my kinfolk really knew either. A couple centuries of being the “Quiet in the Land” and not talking about their faith left them with nothing much but their genealogies and the German language.

In my 20s I became disillusioned with the whole idea of Christianity, at least with anything that I was seeing that went by that name. Curiosity led me to search into the history of the Mennonites and I discovered that there once had been people called by that name that held to a faith in Christ that was so important and precious to them that they could joyfully suffer persecution and martyrdom. And the persecution and martyrdom came because other churches that called themselves Christian were driven to a fury by their inability to counter the gospel taught and lived by the Mennonites. I was fascinated by that history and concluded that if there were any true Christians in the world today, they would be found among the Mennonites.

But which Mennonites? A couple of times I attended the Mennonite church in the city closest to where I was living. I was intrigued by the simplicity of the worship service, not at all like the liturgical Anglican worship that I was usd to. But I was invisible, no one seemed to notice that I was there.

After we were married, my wife took things in hand. She had never heard of Mennonites from anyone but me, but decided that we needed to go to church and if I wanted to go to a Mennonite church she would find one. We were in a different town, a different province by then and there were Mennonites all around us, just not in the town where we were living. She called a minister, made an appointment to visit and we began attending the church he pastored. We enrolled in catechism class and went once a week all through the winter. We were making headway, about to become members of a Mennonite church. The Sunday before baptism the minister called us aside and told us that we would not be baptized since we had been baptized in childhood. I was dumbfounded, everything I had learned about Mennonites spoke of the baptism of believers, not infants.

We began to look for another church. We visited one church, but once was enough. Then we found a church with a group of young people whose lives had been transformed and they loved to talk about it. Things were going good until the church fired their pastor. As far as I could understand, the thinking was “We’re Mennonites here and we don’t do enthusiasm!”

We tried yet another church and there we were baptized. Little things troubled us, though. Church members openly said that Menno Simons wasn’t relevant to our day, but Billy Graham was. My wife had doubts about her conversion, including frightening dreams about the end of time and she wasn’t ready. The pastor assured her that she wouldn’t even have dreams like that if she wasn’t a Christian. He was wrong, as became clear to us later.

We moved again and attended yet another Mennonite church. Very nice people, like all the churches we had visited, but very flexible theology. During this time we met a group of men from the Church of God in Christ, Mennonite who were during disaster relief work. We had long visits with them and found ourselves drawn to them, but had trouble accepting all that they believed.

Then we became aware of a group of conservative Mennonites and I decided they were what we had been looking for. We moved into a congregation of these people and I knew immediately I had made a mistake. When my wife asked the bishop’s daughters when they had been born again, they replied that they didn’t know, they had just grown into it. How does believer’s baptism work in a setting like that? One Sunday the bishop mentioned in his sermon that wearing the plain clothes required by their group was proof of being born again.

That was enough for me, I began searching the Scriptures, reading the writings of Menno Simons, and visiting a minister of the Church of God in Christ, Mennonite a couple of hours away. It became clear to me that the things I had stumbled at were taught in the Bible and believed by faithful brethren of years ago. I was settled, but my wife was troubled because she knew she was a Christian but could not point to an experience of the new birth. It took a visit with this minister and his wife to bring out a struggle she had after we had visited with the people doing disaster relief work. As she thought about it, it became clear that was the time when her life had changed and she had become a real Christian, not just someone who wanted to be a Christian.

After this we were united in seeking membership in the Church of God in Christ, Mennonite and we have now been members for 44 years. Our daughter was born again a few years later, accepted a proposal from a young Christian man a few years after that and now three of their four children have been born again and baptized.

That is my experience of finding my way through the thicket of churches calling themselves Mennonite without having any idea of what that means and finally finding a church that holds to the ancient Anabaptist-Mennonite faith.