Fleeing the Influence of the World

GLOBAL ANABAPTISM STORIES FROM THE GLOBAL MENNONITE CHURCH Fleeing the in! uence of the world SOMETIME AROUND 270 Argentina. Like the Amish, Old in Orellana. Another extended !."., a young man by the name Colony Mennonites have sought boat ride to Tierra Blanca, of Anthony retreated into the to maintain a cultural distance followed by a two-hour trek across eastern desert of Egypt in order from the world, speaking a muddy roads deep in the rain to become a better Christian. distinctive dialect of German, forest, % nally ended at the site of Like many of the other “desert rejecting electricity in their homes their new settlement—Colonia fathers” who followed his and relying on horse-and-buggy Belize. $ e families are now example, Anthony was convinced transportation. During the past clearing trees to allow enough the only way he could truly 50 years, they have grown rapidly, sunlight for vegetable gardens follow the hard teachings of thanks largely to strictures against and for the wood needed to build Jesus (“be ye perfect, even as birth control. At the same time, simple houses and sheds. Far from my Father in heaven is perfect”) medical care, the families now was to isolate himself from the The story of face the challenges of insects, heat distractions, complications and and uncertainty about how they temptations of human society. Colonia Belize is not will market their produce once the Although Anthony eventually new to the Christian gardens are productive. became a saint, his e# ort to $ e story of Colonia Belize escape the seductions of the tradition. is not new to the Christian world was a failure; wherever he tradition. Like Anthony, the went, the world came to him. His land pressure, church con& icts zeal of Old Colony Mennonites biographer, Athanasius, said that and an ongoing desire to & ee to pursue a Christian life freed by the time of Anthony’s death the in& uences of an encroaching from the distractions of modern “the desert had become a city.” world have made Old Colony society has led them repeatedly I thought of Anthony Mennonites the most mobile into the wilderness. Yet their while reading a long article group in the entire Anabaptist- quest to escape the world remains in Die Mennonitische Post that Mennonite family. fraught with questions. What described “Colonia Belize,” a new Last June, seven families—50 is the future of the rain forest settlement under development people in all—from the “Little they are clearing? What if they by a small group of Old Colony Belize” colony in Belize sold their are merely an outpost, a beacon Mennonites in a remote corner of possessions and said goodbye to drawing hundreds of other Old eastern Peru. relatives and friends. For several Colony Mennonites to this remote $ e Old Colony Mennonites years, they had watched as other region in eastern Peru? How long trace their roots to Chortitza, members of their community until the world catches up with the oldest Mennonite colony in accepted telephones, the internet them? And what if the world is South Russia, settled in the late and even cars. $ e time had already there, embedded in the 18th century by immigrants from come, they decided, to % nd a new very impulse that prompted a Prussia. In the 1870s, facing home, one more removed from the church division in their quest for pressure to adopt the Russian encroachments of the world. In perfection? language and join the tsar’s army, collaboration with another cluster several thousand migrated to of families from Bolivia, the western Canada. From there, group boarded a plane to Lima, John D. Roth is Peru. From there they found a professor of history the journey continued—% rst to at Goshen (Ind.) Mexico and Paraguay in the late connecting & ight to Pucallpa College, director 1920s, and then, in subsequent at the edge of the Amazon rain of the Institute for decades, to new colonies in Belize, forest before embarking on an the Study of Global Anabaptism and southern Mexico, Paraguay, 11-hour boat trip up the Ucayali editor of Mennonite Bolivia, eastern Canada and River, where they spent the night Quarterly Review. THE MENNONITE .ORG • JANUARY 2019 39.

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