War Canadian Mennonites: from Rural to Urban Dominance
Post - War Canadian Mennonites: From Rural to Urban Dominance Leo Driedger University of Manitoba In 1941 rural Mennonites dominated in Canada. Ninety percent were rural, and most of these were farmers. By 1981, a mere forty years later, over half were urban and less than one-fourth were still farming. The seventies were the watershed between rural and urban dominance. A majority of Mennonites today have lived through this enormous post-World War I1 rural-urban shift. Let us trace the demographic implications. Urbanization began in the Tigris-Euphrates region about 3500 B.C., resulting in the Sumer or Mesopotamian civilization out of which the early writings which influenced biblical history began. Abraham emerged out of the region of Ur. The civilization of Egypt along the Nile followed on its heels with the beginning of cities around 3000 B.C. Much of Jewish and early biblical history occurred in this fertile crescent between these two earliest urban civilizations. Gordon Childe (1950) outlined ten characteristics of early urbanization which occurred in all early beginnings. These characteristics can also be applied to the emergence of Mennonites from rural agricultural settings. With urbanization came denser populations, division of labor, stratification, trade, writing and numeration, the exact sciences, building of monuments, taxes, the state and war. While Christianity began in the hinterlands of Palestine, it was intro- duced to the Greek urban world by Paul, so that Ephesus, Thessalonica, Phillipi, Corinth and Rome became important urban Christian centres, where trade flourished and other urban activity, including the art of writing, developed. Writing, as we know was most important in the transmission of the biblical message.
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