ReformedMennoniteMember

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Reformed Mennonite article

You wrote to me on my User page: "I am a Reformed Mennonite and would like only factual information put in about our church. There is no evidence that the fictional work of Tilly has any basis in truth. The girl was never a member of our church. Also the numbers are wrong on our membership. I had corrected them and you took those out. Also the info on Tolstoy you took out, which is factual. This information can be found in letters written by Tolstoy, our ministry, and in the book The Russian Secret. I would appriciate only facts being posted. Thanks you TJ Askren current members of this church"

I did not restore the text about a fictional work by Helen Reimensnyder Martin, text which you had previously deleted without any comment. This text was restored by another. The text, in a section of the Reformed Mennonite article entitled Literary portrayal, referred to Martin's novel Tillie: a Mennonite Maid (1904), explicitly declaring that the novel harshly depicted many Pennsylvania Dutch groups including the Reformed Mennonite Church. It did not explicitly declare the harsh depictions to be unfair, but that can certainly be inferred, as the text included comments that her depictions of groups in the novel are perceived by many as harsh and misrepresentative. All of this is factual and true. Of course Miss Martin was not a member of the Reformed Mennonite Church; even one hundred years after the novel was published, few would suppose that.

I did, however, restore text about Kathryn Lasky's bizarre novel Beyond the Divide, text which you had previously deleted without any comment. Although you don't ask about that book, the text deleted and then restored plainly states that the novel mixes up several plain church groups and presents a fairly unrealistic tale. Though it is not a trustworthy guide for information about any church group, it is probably better to state this fact than leave the fact unstated.

I did not alter church membership numbers at all. A quick check of the history of the page shows that there have been no recent edits of the membership numbers other than your own. (A few edits, not mine, request fact checking of your edits.) Perhaps you added but forgot to save your edits. This can easily happen. You may verify the substance of recent edits (as I just did) by clicking the history tab of the article.

I did edit your text about Tolstoy. It was unsourced, relying, as it said, on "private letters in the possession of current church members," hardly a credible way to source such an astonishing declaration in a general reference work. You wrote: "Tolstoy was very taken with the writtings and beleifs of the Reformed Mennonite Church and after his conversion to Christianity spent many years, along side his daughter, into old age, passing out tracts written by various members of the church. Tolstoy had considered receiving baptism into the church. ((source:The Russian Secret))." I edited your words to: "Leo Tolstoy, in his book The Kingdom of God is Within You, praised the religious pamphlet Non-Resistance Asserted by Reformed Mennonite member Daniel Musser." The latter is easily verifiable.

Several of your edits refer to "our" church. It is best to avoid first person "my" or "our" in an encyclopedia. It is also good to adopt a neutral point-of-view. The articles Beachy Amish Mennonite, Weavertown Amish Mennonite Church, and Moses M. Beachy are examples of articles on small church groups that affect a neutral point-of-view, not unsympathetic, but accurate and informative in an impartial way. EdK (talk)