Mennonite Heritage Museum selling On Holy Ground with missing pages inserted into book

Do you want a copy of On Holy Ground—with the missing three pages? Then the Mennonite Heritage Museum has an offer for you!

The museum, located in Abbotsford, B.C., is selling the new book about the experience of women in ministry in the Mennonite Brethren church with copies of the missing pages from Mary Anne Isaak’s personal reflection inserted into the book.

Museum Executive Director Richard Thiessen is behind the initiative.

“I got the idea after reading something online where someone said they felt like buying 100 copies of the book and inserting the missing pages,” said Thiessen.

“I thought to myself, well, I have 25 copies in the bookstore at the Mennonite Heritage Museum, so there's no reason why I can't do that.”

Thiessen—who is married to Karen Heidebrecht Thiessen, who has a reflection in the book—said there were several reasons for doing this.

“First, as a member of the MB Historical Commission, I had read the book before it was published, as did many others, and we had approved its publication,” he said.

“None of us felt that any changes should be made to the final draft before it was published.”

The second reason, he said, was “the book was intended to allow Mennonite Brethren women to tell their stories of ministry. It is wrong for a group of conference leaders to unilaterally eliminate a portion of a person's story, which is what MB conference leadership did by removing three pages from Mary Anne's chapter.”

Third, Thiessen saw that decision as “an attempt on the part of conference leaders to silence people with certain views of how Scripture should be interpreted and how God's love should be shared with others.”

Actually, he went on to say, “it feels more like an attempt to punish those with certain views. That's not how we are called to live as the Church, and that's not how we should be behaving towards each other.”

Lastly, he believes the church “should model how to dialogue about issues with love and respect, and censoring books is simply not the way to do that. Silencing people and punishing people is not the way to do that.”

For those reasons, he decided that Isaak’s complete story should be available to those who purchased the book from the Museum’s bookstore.

“By doing so, I hope that Mary Ann and all others who feel that they have been silenced by the Church will know that their voices are important, that we need to hear their voices, and that we need to dialogue in healthy ways with each other about how to read Scripture and live out the Good News.”

You can order your copy from the Museum by visiting its bookstore.