Spring 2022 · Vol. 51 No. 1 · pp. 118–120
Book Review
Mennonite Brethren Bible College: A History of Competing Visions
Abe J. Dueck. Winnipeg, MB: Kindred Productions, 2021. 218 pages.
Mennonite Brethren Bible College: A History of Competing Visions is a good book, good in the sense that it can be read in more than one way. It’s a story of tribute and of lament. It’s a story tracing the relationship of church and school, revealing unwavering, trustworthy, honorable allegiance to Christ Jesus in both realms, even while strong vision and conviction came together in ways more often repellent than resonant. It’s a story that helps name why the tenuous resolution continues alongside the collective vibrancy of church and school.
The book explores the story of Mennonite Brethren Bible College (MBBC), a school of the church in its mission, a school that cultivated ministerial and membership strengths of its founding constituency while also experiencing complex tensions with that body, the Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches (CCMBC). Crafted mostly from formally documented Minutes of church and school in a notably riveting narrative, Dueck traces accounts of diverging visions and tensions that persisted throughout the College’s existence (1944-1992): to educate for ministry leadership exclusively or to educate for diverse vocational callings and disciplinary interests in ways present to the love of God and church.
A tribute, firstly, to the author, Abe J. Dueck. Dueck’s account is refreshingly honest; he neither glosses over pain and confusion nor wallows in defensiveness or bitterness. Most remarkably, he offers a critical eye on decisions and directions to which he himself contributed. Given that his own vocation as professor of history and theology was sacrificed in the closing of MBBC, this is a stunning achievement. I offer tribute to Dueck’s scholarship as much as to his grace.
Secondly, a tribute to MBBC administrators, faculty, and boards over the decades. Dueck describes them as caught in crossfire of institutional tensions, which they carried personally for decades. Based in the experience of many alumni (including myself), I will attest that students often caught wind of tensions across church and school but not of the deep burden borne by faculty. Rarely did faculty wear the strain on their sleeves whether in the classroom or wherever else they extended hospitality and friendship to students. Students were honored as cherished co-learners and received an exemplary education from outstanding teachers and scholars with deep loyalty to Christ and the church. {119}
Thirdly, a tribute to the Canadian Mennonite Brethren Church. Dueck exposes MBBC’s fragility in relation to the church constituency, yet the story line of suspicion has a flip side. There’s a fortitude to be honored in the differences pursued across church and school over almost fifty years. Dueck bears witness to a collective will to keep trying to work out differences and to search for common language of calling and purpose; the church also sustained considerable national funding. My tribute extends to all who diligently kept searching for shared vision, purpose, aspirational outcomes, and structural options towards goals of collective trust and traction.
Dueck is careful not to caricature differences of vision as “Conference versus College,” since a range of vision has always existed within both constituency and school. The book voices lament that MBBC was known more as the flashpoint for strains in CCMBC as a whole than as a reconciling nexus as Mennonite Brethren in Canada transitioned from mostly colony-like rural communities to a community church movement in cosmopolitan forms. So too, as the denomination continually sought to name a distinct identity from a blended ethos of “Anabaptist theology, Baptist polity, and pietist spirit” (Dueck quoting J. A. Toews).
I respect that Dueck doesn’t pursue speculative, alternative readings of how tensions were understood contemporaneously. Still, between the lines of his account I wonder if there weren’t people in both church and school who viewed such tensions as healthy dimensions of what it means to follow Christ as living, corporate bodies. Consider the context of the school’s name, Mennonite Brethren Bible College and College of Arts, as it was called for a time. Dueck describes this name as denoting a vision more encumbered than trusted, citing encounters between MBBC and the CCMBC Board of Spiritual and Social Concerns. Further, in referencing tensions between those who desired an earlier Bible college model and those who sought a Christian liberal arts institution during the 1980s, Dueck states, “MBBC risked not satisfying either group. A Christian liberal arts alternative would have provided a clear sense of direction and an identifiable constituency with good student potential. Instead, the college opted for continued ambiguity” (128). I respect the struggle as it was experienced by all sides. Yet I’m perplexed that it was not possible to approach debilitating dynamics as gifts that are necessary to wrestling with how—not if—the interests of Bible college and the interests of arts, sciences might more productively share space.
I consider the closure of MBBC—the end of the College as a national institution of CCMBC—a tenuous marker. The same tensions continue to exist today within CCMBC; they did not end with the closure of the school. For a church with a commitment to mission and an emphasis on {120} evangelical Anabaptism will always struggle with growing pains and disruptive edges. As these continue, I’m sorry that MBBC isn’t there as a nationally owned lightning rod to absorb some of the struggle, or even channel its energy.
Still, the story of MBBC goes on. The College eventually underwent two institutional transformations: to Concord College and shortly thereafter to Canadian Mennonite University. I trust that CMU will remain vibrant precisely because it accepts the gift of the MBBC legacy of remaining attentive to the tensions it bears. I close with a question based in a sentence Dueck quotes from the MBBC 1945-46 catalogue. MBBC seeks to provide an opportunity for earnest young men and women to prepare adequately for the high calling of Christian service as ministers, teachers, missionaries, and works in other fields of Christian work (15). The language may sound dated, but the meaning of earnest—to be sincere and intense in one’s convictions—is an apt way to describe not only the students MBBC sought but the lifeblood conviction of the Mennonite Brethren Church as it lives on. And so, I ask all readers this: Is there a call to grace amidst tensions always with us that earnest, devout followers of Christ of the Mennonite Brethren Church would do well to heed? Congratulations to Abe Dueck for writing a good story, a story that awakens new light amongst Mennonite Brethren.
