On a hot summer afternoon in the early 1940s, young Raymond Fast and his cousin were playing in the shade of the latter’s yard in Steinbach, close to the Evangelical Mennonite Brethren church (until 1937 the EMB had been known as “Bruderthaler”). The boys heard a piano from an open window of the church, playing familiar hymns. Someone was practicing for an upcoming recital. Then, abruptly, the music changed to a boogie-woogie beat, with an insistent bass line pounding like a locomotive heading down the track in the deep South. The boys rushed over to get closer to the sound. They had never heard this type of music before! As soon as the pianist saw them, she stopped, embarrassed. “We begged her to play some more,” Raymond later recalled, “but she refused and made us promise we wouldn’t tell anybody she had indulged in something so worldly.”¹

For decades before that warm summer afternoon, and a decade and more after, the piano as an instrument would remain a bone of contention in Steinbach. This was a Mennonite town, with some German Lutherans, who mostly lived in the adjacent community of Friedensfeld, and a handful of “English,” some from the Clear Springs settlement to the north, others who had come to serve as doctors or pharmacists or bankers. The largest Mennonite congregation was the Kleine Gemeinde, the church of the original settlers.

Conservative Mennonites in Manitoba forbade musical instruments in their churches, and even in their homes. Their ancestors in imperial Russia and Prussia had considered such instruments to be “worldly,” from which true Christians should be separate. Instruments provided entertainment, which in itself was a worldly indulgence, and ultimately a danger to the sincere pilgrim’s spiritual journey. They were not alone among North American Mennonites in holding this view. In the early twentieth century, Swiss Mennonites in Virginia had tolerated musical instruments, but in 1927 the Virginia Mennonite Conference instituted a ban forbidding ordained ministers or faculty of Eastern Mennonite College from having instruments in their homes. The conference did not have instruments in churches at the time.²

In the 1920s the Russlaender Mennonites arrived in Steinbach, bringing with them a more liberal attitude about musical instruments. Many of them had studied music in imperial Russia. Peter Heese, once the owner of a large flour mill, had to come up with more modest means of making an income in the new land; he began giving piano lessons in 1924.³ So at least a few Steinbach citizens must have owned pianos by then.

One of these was teacher Abram P. Friesen, of Kleine Gemeinde background, who advertised a piano at an auction in May 1923 when he moved to the United States.⁴ Other pianos popped up in the classified ads of the time: J. D. Plett was selling a used one for $68 in 1924; an anonymous seller advertised a piano for cash or half-cash, half-firewood; and P. P. R. Toews of Giroux advertised a used piano for $150 – more than $2,600 in today’s currency. In 1926, a Mrs. Turner announced that she would be in town every Wednesday to give lessons; prospective students were to come to the Steinbach Hotel, but it is not known if the hotel had a piano.⁵

A school concert was held in the J. R. Friesen Garage in 1928, at which “several pieces were played with deep emotion for the large gathering.”⁶ The pianists were “the ladies Laing and Friesen,” the first a daughter of the Laings of Clear Springs and the latter Helen, J. R. Friesen’s fourteen-year-old daughter. At another concert at the garage in 1930, David Toews gave a piano performance.⁷ The owners of the piano may well have been J. R. and Maria Friesen, whose house was next door to the garage.

The Friesens were members of the Bruderthaler church, which had already attracted young people with robust programs of hymn singing. To this point, it is likely that the only church in Steinbach to have a piano would have been the small Mennonite Brethren congregation. But now the Bruderthaler, who had worshipped jointly with the Mennonite Brethren in the 1920s, and were likely influenced by them,⁸ were ready to make their move. According to the congregation’s history,

After due consideration as to how our sister churches in the village would feel about us introducing an instrument into the church, we purchased a piano in about the year 1932 with Mrs. Frank Sawatzky becoming our first pianist. She says about her first time at the piano at church: “I sat down in the front bench with much trembling, glad for a little respite before the choir would sing. When the first number was given for general singing, Mr. Janz (the minister) gave me the go-ahead sign so I blindly stumbled to the piano but before I could get ready to play, Mr. Rempel (the song leader) started off (he hadn’t seen me go to the piano), so all I could do was follow, hoping that Mr. Rempel’s and the piano’s pitch were the same – they were.”⁹

The recently married Mrs. Sawatzky, Annie Friesen, was another daughter of J. R. and Maria Friesen, one of the wealthiest and most outward-looking families in the village. Her husband was an innovator on another front, building and flying Steinbach’s first airplane that same year. At first the church kept the piano under a sheet when not in use, so as not to draw attention to it. Very soon, however, it became an integral part of worship services, providing a foundation for enthusiastic congregational and choral singing that began to draw young people away from the more conservative churches. Choir director Jacob S. Rempel bought a piano for his own home and arranged for his twelve-year-old son Arthur to take lessons. Arthur, in time, would become the church pianist.¹⁰

Arthur’s teacher was a young man named Bill Weiss, son of the Friedensfeld Lutheran minister Wilhelm Weiss. The younger Weiss was a dedicated instructor who arranged for his students to take Toronto Conservatory of Music exams in Winnipeg. In 1933, Olga Kreutzer, Maria Schilstra, and Helen Friesen wrote these exams with good results; the next year, seven-year-old Molly Campbell scored 86 percent, while Hedwig Dyck, Helen Friesen, Katherine Janz (daughter of the Bruderthaler pastor), Arthur Rempel, and Cornelius Unruh were awarded first class honours.¹¹

Evidently there was a piano in the Hanover Street home of Mrs. Jacob T. Toews (nee Helena Hiebert), a former schoolteacher who had been dismissed from her job when her husband died in 1929 – widows were not allowed to teach. In 1934 Alma Houston commenced with lessons in the Toews home. Four years later, Rosie S. Mierau, resident with Mrs. Toews, offered “practical and theoretical music instruction.” As well, Mrs. I. I. Cutler, wife of a Jewish lawyer from Winnipeg, opened a music studio in a house also on Hanover, offering individual instruction at 50 cents an hour.¹² Mrs. Toews’s daughter, Leona, would marry Arthur Rempel in 1944 – two young people from piano households.

The Ladies Aid Society of Steinbach, formed in the late 1930s, bought a piano with the “proceeds of refreshment sales at the sports field” and donated it for community use.¹³ This instrument was installed in the public school, where Katherine Janz, now a teacher, played “little songs and hymns . . . floating with fairy-like magic through the wall that separated Grade One from Grade Two.”¹⁴

Pianos were present in some private residences, in the schools (a high school was built in 1936 and a Bible school in 1939), and at community concerts – but still not in the most conservative churches. The floodgates of worldliness were by no means flung open. But when the Steinbach Mennonite Church, whose membership was composed largely of liberal-minded Russlaender, built their sanctuary in 1941, they installed a piano. This congregation participated in Saengerfests featuring choral singing accompanied by piano, together with other congregations from the surrounding area. The church also included a violin string ensemble in their worship services for a time.¹⁵

But through the 1940s, the Kleine Gemeinde did not jump on the piano bandwagon. Conservative leaders persisted in their conviction that instruments would become a worldly distraction from the simple and humble practice integral to their Christian faith. Nevertheless, around 1940, the church’s most influential member, lumberman C. T. Loewen, bought a piano for his home and arranged for his daughter Mary to take lessons. When he was taken to task for this transgression at a Bruderschaft (brotherhood) meeting, he said: “You know, the inevitable will come. Eventually you will want a piano in the church, and I’m just preparing a player for that time.”¹⁶

The conservatives felt the heat and put up resistance. At a ministerial meeting in 1946, church leaders decided that “musical instruments [are] . . . repugnant, and therefore [we] cannot tolerate or represent them in the church [crossed out in the original], even though they were used in worship before Christ’s time, among God’s people at that time.”¹⁷ Clearly they were aware of being inconsistent in their Bible reading, acknowledging the use of instruments in the Old Testament. But they contended that Jesus, in the New Testament, had not included musical instruments in his teachings.

Even generations later the tension was remembered, as in the following passage from the novel All My Puny Sorrows, by Loewen’s granddaughter Miriam Toews. Toews transplants events to sometime around 1975, thirty or forty years later than they would have taken place:

Pianos weren’t even allowed in our town technically, too reminiscent of saloons and speakeasies and unbridled joy, but my parents snuck it into the house anyway because a doctor in the city had suggested that Elf [Elfrieda, the narrator’s sister] be given a “creative outlet” for her energies. . . . After a few years of having a secret piano, hastily covered with sheets and gunny sacks when the elders came to visit, my parents grew to love Elf’s playing. . . . Eventually the elders did find out that we were harbouring a piano in our house and there was a long discussion about it, of course, and some talk of . . . excommunication for my father.¹⁸

Historically accurate, however, are the reasons Toews offers as the rationale of church elders in prohibiting piano use in the community. Again, a parallel can be found among the Mennonites in Virginia, where “because of their use in pool halls and other disreputable places[,] it was thought that . . . they would then become temptations to young Mennonite people.”¹⁹

But then a growing evangelical and mission-oriented movement among Mennonites gave rise to a very different symbolism – pianos began to be associated with spiritual renewal. In the 1940s and 1950s this movement was gaining energy in the Kleine Gemeinde, especially in Steinbach, which, compared to churches in Blumenort, Kleefeld, Prairie Rose, and Rosenort, was considered “urban.” When he arrived in Steinbach to teach at the Bible school, a young man from Prairie Rose, Archie Penner, brought a piano with him. He lived with his brother-in-law Ben D. Reimer, and now Reimer’s daughter Doreen, aged ten, could take lessons – from none other than Mary Loewen. Penner took the piano along when he moved out, but Reimer bought another one, probably around 1950. The Bible school, begun by the Mennonite Brethren, also had a piano, exposing many young students to the instrument, even though their home churches had not accepted it. Despite official disapproval, pianos and pump organs became quite common in Kleine Gemeinde homes.²⁰

In the early 1950s, a youthful “import” from the Mennonite Brethren, John Peters, was put in charge of the Sunday school in the Steinbach Kleine Gemeinde church. At the same time, Ben D. Reimer and Archie Penner vigorously promoted a missions agenda that carried with it an acceptance of instruments as useful tools for evangelism. Also, in 1952, a small congregation affiliated with the Kleine Gemeinde had been organized in MacGregor, two hundred kilometres to the west of Steinbach, and these newcomers, removed from the immediate purview of church leadership, used musical instruments, including a piano, in their worship services.

John Peters had a vision of making the Sunday school experience more attractive to children, particularly by using music. He and a young Henry Hiebert acquired a broken pump organ and, using a vacuum cleaner put in reverse to pump air into the bellows, got it working. The organ was in the young people’s class in a third-floor room above the sanctuary – the first instrument to become part of a regular Kleine Gemeinde program.²¹ Later, it was moved into the basement for use at Sunday school assemblies.²² The ministerial knew about the organ but decided to look the other way.

But could there be a piano in the sanctuary? At Bruderschaft meetings, the issue was hotly debated. At one meeting, Diedrich D. Reimer offered a compromise: “Kjenne wie nijch mett en mülschiera aunfange?” (Maybe we could start with a harmonica?) His proposal, made in all seriousness, did not fly.²³ But now some members insisted on having a vote. The Steinbach church board asked that a vote be postponed until the matter could be brought before the ministers and deacons from all districts. After a “many-sided but calm discussion” at a meeting including all districts in February 1952, those present decided against allowing a piano in the Steinbach church by a vote of 28 to 22. As described in the ministerial minutes, “The general feeling was that such a major change would be more of a curse than a blessing.”²⁴

This, however, was just delaying the inevitable. At the next meeting the elders wondered about the MacGregor congregation: “If they are now allowed to use musical instruments in church, what kind of result will that have here?”²⁵ The elders concluded that they did not want to cancel the use of the piano in MacGregor, but they would send a delegation to explain the Kleine Gemeinde position on the matter, which included a “stand against dancing, card games, theatre, swearing, drinking, smoking, bad behaviour, and so on.”²⁶ Perhaps some of those present hoped that this lumping together of piano-playing in church with worldly entertainments would help the MacGregor congregation understand what was at stake.

In late 1952, the name Kleine Gemeinde was officially changed to the Evangelical Mennonite Church (EMC). The name change symbolized the church’s new orientation and its break with tradition, which further opened the door to the acceptance of musical instruments. At a general council meeting on December 4, 1954, Steinbach pastor Peter D. Friesen (my father) informed the assembly that a vote had been taken at Bruderschaft, and “because it is important to us for the retention of our youth, and because opposing it already seemed to destroy more than it built, the brotherhood have decided, 27 to 10, to have a musical instrument in the church.” He added that the Steinbach congregation “would like to ask for leniency and patience from the other districts.”²⁷

It may be that a piano had been purchased before the brotherhood vote. Art Neufeld, a young church member at the time, stated, “It happened that some of the deacons saw an ad in the paper for a piano at a good price, so they went ahead and bought it.” Then, it seems, an emergency meeting of the Bruderschaft “concerning the piano for the church” was held on December 16, 1954. My mother described the dilemma in her diary:

There is quite a commotion about the instrument, some believe we should just move it in while others again are more careful. It really stirs up a lot of trouble, but being such a controversial problem we are at a loss just what to do about it. So far we stemmed the idea of having one for our district alone, might agree on it more conciliable but we also have to consider our other churches so may the Lord give us grace what to do about it.²⁸

As luck would have it, the vendor of the piano did not wait for a clear “yes,” but sent a truck to deliver it. Neufeld recalled,

When the truck arrived to deliver the piano no one had a place to put it, so the driver was directed to the church building. He and his helpers began to unload the piano. Just then Ben D. Reimer came back from a preaching tour. Thinking that the church had finally voted in favour of allowing the piano, he jumped out of his car and also put his shoulder into helping the others. Later he learned that the piano was not officially supposed to be in the church.²⁹

Pastor Friesen now faced a dilemma. His conservative colleague from the Blumenort church, David P. Reimer, was scheduled to preach in Steinbach the next Sunday: “What to do? [He] was on the hot seat. He had the piano covered with a blanket. Reimer came and preached but said nothing about the blanket-covered object. The moral: ‘why hurt somebody?’ It was not seen as hypocritical.”³⁰

The Friesens were away when the piano was installed. In his next sermon, Pastor Friesen made no reference to it. Instead, he told the story of some parents who went away on a trip, leaving their children in charge of the house. The children decided that this would be a good time to introduce a new, improved heating system. So they did. The only trouble was, they couldn’t get it to work right. The parents returned to a house full of smoke.

The story seems to have appeased the traditional faction, which opposed the piano; they felt their concerns had been justified. The progressives, while they might have felt a bit chastened, did not feel obliged to do anything. A split in the EMC had been avoided. The piano remained, and Mary Loewen now began to play it at church services, just as her father had prophesied.³¹

Only a few months after this event, P. D. Friesen bought a piano for his daughter Mary Ann. This was too much for at least one ultra-conservative church member, who lobbied for Friesen to be removed from his position for setting such a bad example.³² This did not occur. In Steinbach, the traditionalists had lost the piano “war.” In other jurisdictions, however, they prevailed longer. The Blumenort EMC church only approved a piano in 1971, and the Chortitzer church in Steinbach installed their first piano in 1974.³³

In Virginia, the instrument ban had devastating effects. Pianos, organs, and other musical instruments were taken out of homes, and those who loved to play could no longer do so. The ban was finally lifted in 1947, but a legacy of bitterness remained. What was at stake in the piano war in Steinbach, especially in the 1950s? Those who believed that separation from the world was a matter of eternal consequence had been losing ground on every front – language, education, dress, commerce, missions, and more. Perhaps they saw the piano-in-the-church issue as their last chance to preserve at least some part of a traditional way of life. But the forces of change, like the boogie-woogie beat of an oncoming freight train, could not be stopped.

Ralph Friesen has contributed numerous articles to Preservings and is the author of several books, including, most recently, Prosperity Ever, Depression Never: Steinbach in the 1930s (Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society, 2024).

1. Raymond Fast, unpublished memoir, n.d. ↩︎
2. Carol Ann Weaver, “The Piano Ban,” Canadian Mennonite, Mar. 8, 2023. ↩︎
3. Steinbach Post, Nov. 26 and Dec. 3, 1924 (hereafter cited as SP). ↩︎
4. SP, May 16, 1923 ↩︎
5. SP, Dec. 10, 1924; SP, Dec 2, 1925; SP, Oct. 20, 1926; SP, June 3, 1925; and SP, June 9, 1926. ↩︎
6. SP, Mar. 21, 1928. ↩︎
7. SP, Apr. 9, 1930. This may have been David (1910–83), youngest brother of school principal Julius G. Toews. ↩︎
8. Travis Reimer, email, Nov. 8, 2024. ↩︎
9. God, Working Through Us: Steinbach Evangelical Mennonite Brethren Church, 1897–1972 (Steinbach, MB: EMB Anniversary Committee, 1972), 35. ↩︎
10. Leona and Arthur Rempel, interview, June 27, 2003. ↩︎
11. SP, Sept. 12, 1934. ↩︎
12. SP, Oct. 3, 1934; and SP, Oct. 19, 1938. ↩︎
13. SP, Feb. 2, 1938. ↩︎
14. Mary Kornelsen, Give Me This Mountain (Steinbach, MB: Derksen Printers, 1974), 74. ↩︎
15. John Froese, interview, Nov. 8, 2024; and Helga Froese, interview, Nov. 8, 2024. ↩︎
16. Elvira Toews, interview, 2001. ↩︎
17. Minister’s Conference Minutes etc., Evangelical Mennonite Conference (Kleine Gemeinde) Fonds, vol. 6161, file 71, Mennonite Heritage Archives, Winnipeg (hereafter cited as Kleine Gemeinde Ministerial Minutes). ↩︎
18. Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2014), 13–14 ↩︎
19. Carol Ann Weaver, Feb. 7, 2018, comment on Kathleen Weaver Kurtz, “The Lehman Family Piano and a Shared Love of Music That Transcended Rules,” Eastern Mennonite University, Feb. 1, 2018, https://emu.edu/now/news/2018/lehman-family-piano-shared-love-music -transcended-rules/. ↩︎
20. Doreen Peters, interview, Nov. 11, 2024. ↩︎
21. Doreen Peters, Facebook message, Nov. 8, 2024. It must have been a quiet vacuum cleaner. ↩︎
22. Mary Lynn Reimer, email, Nov. 22, 2024. ↩︎
23. Donald Friesen, interview, n.d. ↩︎
24. Kleine Gemeinde Ministerial Minutes, Feb. 2, 1952. ↩︎
25. Kleine Gemeinde Ministerial Minutes, Mar. 1, 1952. ↩︎
26. Kleine Gemeinde Ministerial Minutes, Mar. 15, 1952. ↩︎
27. Kleine Gemeinde Ministerial Minutes, Dec. 4, 1954. ↩︎
28. Margaret Friesen diary, Dec. 16, 1954. ↩︎
29. Art Neufeld, interview, Oct 28, 2000. ↩︎
30. Art Neufeld, interview, Oct. 28, 2000. ↩︎
31. Menno Hamm, interview, Mar. 4, 2000. ↩︎
32. Mary Ann Goertzen, email, Feb. 20, 2013; and Donald Friesen, interview, Sept. 21, 2014. ↩︎
33. Royden Loewen, Blumenort: A Mennonite Community in Transition (Steinbach, MB: Blumenort Mennonite Historical Society, 1983), 599; and Ernest Braun, email, Nov. 14, 2024, sourced from Gustav Dueck, Chortitzer Mennonite Conference, 1874–1990 (Steinbach, MB: Chortitzer Mennonite Conference, 2004), 65. ↩︎