“Faith and Confessions” celebrates a milestone for Preservings: our fiftieth issue. From its humble beginning as a six-page newsletter of the Hanover Steinbach Historical Society, Preservings has evolved over the past thirty-two years into a biannual tribute to Mennonite history, from early Anabaptism to contemporary iterations within the Dutch-Prussian-Russian branch of the Mennonite experience. Our first editor, Delbert Plett, understood the communal act of learning and remembering history as a pillar of identity, for individuals and communities alike. He intentionally elevated neglected topics, adding hidden histories like the role of Mennonite matriarchies to the canon of narratives of religious and secular leadership. This commitment continued under the editorship of John J. Friesen and Hans Werner, who addressed understudied topics such as kitchens, gardens, and childhood. Such explorations of domesticity offered a holistic understanding of the environment in which faith, family, and business evolved, encouraging contemplation of the worldly and the divine in a historical context.

While editors sketch out issues, it is our authors, from trained academics to grassroots storytellers, who colour inside (and sometimes outside) those lines. By sharing their research journeys with the community, their discoveries of original source material, and explorations of family lore, Preservings writers have grown new branches of inquiry, uncovering unexpected topics, like Harold Dyck and Glen Klassen’s contribution to this issue on memorial lakes named after Mennonite soldiers. Historically speaking, participatory, community-driven publications have thrived among Mennonites and other Anabaptist groups. Born of a movement that challenged the prevailing religious and political system based on collective interpretation of the Bible, reading and discussing texts has held special importance in these communities. The painting by Rembrandt on the cover of this issue, depicting the seventeenth-century Dutch Mennonite preacher Cornelis Claesz Anslo gesturing towards his wife, Aeltje Gerritsdr Schouten, and an open Bible, illustrates this theme.

Early Anabaptists might have placed scripture above ritual, dogma, and hierarchies, but they also demonstrated a common desire to chronicle, to witness, and to produce written accounts of faith. Spiritual leaders quickly produced texts that articulated theological positions, elevated examples of faithfulness, and consolidated identity. Hans Kräl’s idealized account of early Hutterian community life illustrates this impulse to legitimize beliefs and a way of life deemed heretical by hostile secular and religious powers. In his reflection on the commemoration of five hundred years of Anabaptism, Andrew Klassen Brown shows that we can explore the theological differences between ourselves and early Anabaptists because of the richness of the texts they produced to define and defend their beliefs.

Defining core beliefs, as Karl Koop demonstrates, is often not as straightforward or as unifying as one might hope. The codification of belief into a confession of faith can underpin identity and create the foundation for ecclesiastical unity, but it can just as easily foment dissent, as the infamous War of the Lambs attests. Creating consensus in a historical moment is difficult, just as interpreting these accounts centuries later presents its own challenges. To understand these texts, we need to not only appreciate the historical time and place of their authorship, but also the literary allusions embedded in them, as Chris Huebner shows in his contribution. Examining the well-known story of Dirk Willems, Huebner challenges us to contemplate the symbolism of fire and water in their historical and literary context and to follow the fate of hats in the etchings of Martyrs Mirror. We are not, however, as Brown reminds us, bound by Jan Luyken’s intention: hats, too, can change meanings.

The meaning attached to family heirlooms is a theme explored in Reinhild Kauenhoven Janzen’s search for a lost family Bible. Many families have mysteries in their pasts, stories passed down through generations, in which fact and fiction are hard to distinguish. Relying on tips collected from an international array of relatives, scholars, archivists, and librarians, Janzen pursued historical breadcrumbs in the rich archival and literary repositories of St. Petersburg. Each institution she visited represents a different era of state-driven power: the imperial eighteenth-century neo-classical National Library, the atheist-inspired museum of religion established by the Soviets, and the imposing Russian State Historical Archives of the Putin era. Janzen’s journey, similar to the texts of early Anabaptists, reminds us that politics casts shadows over the histories that inspire our contemplation of faith and of family.