My Father’s Spiritual Journey

As I mentioned in my previous post, my father, David Jacob Toews, was born into a Mennonite family in Russia in 1914. Mennonites have a very strong sense of family, and maintaining their tradition is very important. As a group they suffered greatly throughout the centuries, moving from country to country to evade persecution, but they survived because of their strong, quiet determination and resilience. By sticking together as a group and supporting each other through many trying circumstances, they endured.

A big part of Mennonite life is their religion. The photo at the top of this post is of a Bible study class in 1924 led by my father’s younger brother, Johann Toews, a Mennonite minister and teacher in Russia. For Mennonites, family and religion go hand in hand, and the strength that comes from that connection was instrumental in enabling this hard-working group to persevere through serious hardship and persecution.

For a family member to leave the Mennonite religion is not a decision to be taken lightly. Nevertheless, it seems my father did just that.

However, it eventually became clear that more Canadian soldiers were needed to help win the war in Europe, and the government was going to have to send all available men. A number of men in the armed forces refused to go overseas which also caused great tension within the ranks. In addition, people in Quebec and other French-speaking Canadians, as well as German and Ukrainian-speaking Canadians across the country were against mandatory conscription. Mennonites would be among those who would not want to take up arms since it was against their beliefs.

David returned to Peterborough on Jan. 3, 1945 and, after making hasty preparations, they were married on Jan. 6. May’s parents and a few relatives were the only ones who attended the wedding on that chilly day.

The war ended later in 1945 and, as it turned out, David didn’t have to go overseas. He was discharged from the army in Oct. 1945.

One of the first things David and May did after he was discharged was to travel to Leamington to introduce my mother to the families of his brother, Jacob, and sister, Agnes. Their courtship had been so short and their wedding so quickly planned that the families had not had an opportunity to meet May yet.

A Variety of Jobs

I was born in 1947 in London, Ontario, and and a cousin told me that my father worked at the Kellogg’s plant there. However, in the 1949 census, he is listed as a student pastor in Little Britain, a very small community near Lindsay where May’s parents lived. Apparently he tried to find work as a pastor, but perhaps he wasn’t able to support the family on that income.

I was also aware of my father’s various career moves. He tried his hand at being a rural salesman for Rawleigh and Watkins products, then Canada Life insurance. None of my father’s jobs seemed to bring him satisfaction or fulfillment. As a result, he began to do some preaching as a layman in addition to his sales jobs, filling in on Sundays at churches that did not have a permanent pastor or where pastors were on holidays.

In a previous post I describe one of my memories from those trips that includes the Everly Brothers. I also recall some of the dinners we would be treated to at a church member’s house after the service. The people in the congregations were always very kind and generous with us.

A Major Spiritual Transition

At this point I should explain how big this spiritual transition was for my father. These lay preaching engagements were for Fellowship Baptist churches, the most conservative and fundamentalist branch of Baptist churches in Canada. However, they were much more liberal than the very conservative Mennonite religion that he had grown up with. My father’s search for a spiritual direction had taken him from the strict Mennonite tradition of his ancestors to the fundamental Baptist Church denomination. However, his spiritual journey did not end there.

Moving to Bothwell

Unknown to me, my father decided to apply to become a pastor with the Canadian Baptist Churches of Ontario and Quebec (CBOQ). What was amazing was that the beliefs of the churches in this organization are very similar to the United Church of Canada. My father’s spiritual search had brought him to an even more liberal denomination.

I’m not sure what was involved in making this application, because the necessary activity probably did not draw my attention. However, what resulted was that our family moved in October 1957 to the small town of Bothwell in southern Ontario. My father was to take up the position of pastor for two Baptist churches, one in Bothwell itself and the other in a small community nearby called Clachan. Not too long after we moved there, a third church was added to his responsibilities – Louisville which was located a few miles down Hwy. 2 towards Chatham. His Sundays were very busy!

While we lived in Bothwell, my father would spend long hours in his small study taking courses from McMaster University so that he could be ordained as a minister. On May 14, 1959, he achieved that goal, the culmination of his spiritual journey, and was ordained as Rev. David J. Taves. (He had changed the spelling of our surname from Toews to Taves by then.)

We regularly visited his brother and sister and their families in Leamington, and to me it always seemed there were lively discussions about religion during those visits. David’s family had remained staunch members of the Mennonite Church and probably had difficulty understanding why my father was seeking out another path. The discussions were always in German, their native language; so I wasn’t able to follow the specifics. I always wanted to study German so that I could eavesdrop, but it never happened. I’ll explain why in my next post about our move to Bothwell.