Yeah, at this point I still hadn’t started reading the Diary of Anna Baerg. My mind went off in this direction instead:
I feel like we don’t often talk about the biggest church split of all. At least, as far as southeastern Manitoba Mennonites are concerned. I feel like maybe enough time has passed that we can broach the subject, though?
I mean, church splits are painful. I know that.
I guess the complicated part is that it’s essentially a situation wherein people take sides. So people inside of the situation have chosen a side, and presumably the other side is bad. But that is not how we want to move forward, right?
Rather, perhaps, it’s more like this: no right side, no wrong side. Just… history.
(Though history is potent and tells us a lot about human nature and patterns and perhaps those who study history are best equipped to look into the future… but I digress!)
So what the heck am I even talking about?
The great Manitoba Mennonite church split of 1882. (Am I getting that year right?) Up until then, the Kleine Gemeinde was the only church in the petite darp of Steinbach. Together they had been pioneers, keeping each other alive, and witnessing countless tragedies, as they were newly arrived on the Canadian prairies. Their preachers connected the Kleine Gemeinde villages of Steinbach, Blumenort, Rosenort, and Gruenfeld — often on foot.
But, tragedy struck just one year after they had settled in these villages. Kleine Gemeinde minister Jacob Barkman (Andrew’s great-great-great grandfather) drowned in the Red River in 1875.
Without a spiritual leader, retired minster Peter Baerg (my great-great-great grandfather) was pressed into duty once more, in his old age (he was 58… I’ll have to look into this more). But his efforts were no replacement for what had been lost. When American evangelist John Holdeman was invited by the Kleine Gemeinde to bolster their spirits by holding meetings in the area, those meetings led to a split. (Just one in an eternally ongoing situation with Anabaptists.)
Thus emerged the Church of God in Christ (Holdeman) denomination. One which I still don’t know too much about, other than the fact that in all of the originally Kleine Gemeinde communities in southern Manitoba, you will now find both EMC churches and Holdeman churches and cemeteries. Typically pretty close to each other — a testament to their close history.
I’m note really sure how to formulate a decent segue here… but when I’ve been diving into my Baerg genealogy, I’ve encountered a second Peter Baerg who was a minister — of the Church of God in Christ (Holdeman), that is. He was the son of Peter Baerg Sr.
I’ve encountered this before and didn’t quite know how to talk about it. Even in reading Henry Fast’s book Gruenfeld which contains a fair bit of historical information about how this split came about, I just felt this sense of heaviness with regard to the Baerg family, in that the senior minister who was pulled out of retirement via a tragedy that rocked the community, and struggled to keep their spirits afloat, kind of failed. So much so, that his own son, named for him, became a leader in the new church… and moved to start a new settlement in Linden, Alberta.
(Feature photo: me in the Holdeman cemetery in Kleefeld, visiting my great-great-grandfather’s grave.)