Church life in Molotschna

One would think that the Molotschna Mennonite colony, whose defining characteristic was the faith of its inhabitants, would have been known for its many churches. It would not be surprising that, just like the elementary schools, each village would have supported its own church. One would think all that, but one would also be wrong.

Remarkably, relatively few churches existed in the colony during the first one hundred years of its life. Specifically, the historical records mention only eleven villages with a church, out of the sixty-five villages that made up Molotschna. The distribution of the churches is highlighted by the use of red for the village names in the map below (for a larger version of the same map, see here): Ohrloff, Lichtenau, Halbstadt, Petershagen, Schönsee, Alexanderwohl, Rückenau, Margenau, Neukirch, Landskrone, and Pordenau. Of course, this raises the question of which of these churches, if any, our ancestors attended.

Before we explore that question further, we should first clarify our terms. In what follows I will use the term church for the overarching ecclesial organization and congregation for the body of believers in a particular village. This is an important distinction because it enables us to talk accurately about, for example, the Ohrloff-Petershagen Mennonite Church, which was shepherded by a single elder but had two congregations, one in Ohrloff and one in Petershagen.

The Ohrloff-Petershagen Mennonite Church was the oldest in the colony, having been founded in 1804, the first year of the Molotschna Mennonite colony. The church leadership was known for its progressive attitudes, which led to a church split twenty years later and the establishment of a more conservative church at Lichtenau. Less than two decades after that, in 1842, the Lichtenau church itself underwent a split that led to the existence of three separate churches: Lichtenau-Petershagen, Margenau-Schönsee, and Pordenau. During the same time the Ohrloff-Petershagen church added a Halbstadt church building to its organization. How many congregations resulted from all these divisions remains unclear.

It should already be evident that most of the creation of churches in Molotschna resulted from church splits. One exception, apparently, was Neukirch, which appears to have been a satellite congregation, to use a modern term, of the Ohrloff-Petershagen-Halbstadt church. The Neukirch Mennonite Church was organized in 1863 and began worshiping in its own building in 1865, that is, during the time of Peter D Buller’s residency in Kleefeld and Alexanderkrone, which lay only a few miles to the west of Neukirch.

A little more than five miles north of Kleefeld was the village of Rückenau, home of the Rückenau Mennonite Brethren Church. The Mennonite Brethren movement, which also arose during the 1860s, was consolidated in Rückenau, leading to the purchase and conversion of a tavern into a church for the MB congregation in 1874.

At some point a congregation was also established in Alexanderkrone, but since the church did not become independent from the Margenau-Alexanderwohl-Landskrone Mennonite Church until 1890, at which point it built its own facilities, we cannot know if this congregation has any significance for our family.

The relevance for us of Margenau-Alexanderwohl-Landskrone is itself unclear, although there are tantalizing hints from Alexanderwohl, including the presence of Bullers in that village and the fact that in July 1874 Elder Jakob Buller led nearly five hundred members of the Alexanderwohl congregation to the U.S. The one thing we can know with certainty is that our ancestors were not part of the Alexanderwohl congregation after 1874, since the entire church and village left for a new life in the U.S. five years before Johann, Peter D, and company followed in their steps.

In the end, there is little we can know about our family’s church life in Molotschna. Historically our family may have been associated with the Alexanderwohl congregation, but this is only a well-based hunch (more on that later). In fact, the greatest percentage of Mennonites in Molotschna were members of the Lichtenau-Petershagen church, but many remained with the Ohrloff-based church as well. The Pordenau church is also a possibility, as is, I guess, the Rückenau MB church. Maybe somewhere a church record book holds the answers to all these question, perhaps even the record of Peter D’s birth or Sarah Siebert’s baptism.