In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Mennonite believers who had migrated to Russia began to come under pressure from the Russian government, through its policy of "Russification." This exacerbated an existing conflict between those who believed that the church should be the "salt of the earth" (in the world, to win the world to Christ), and those who believed that the church should be the "strangers in the earth" (followers of Christ, who must maintain their separation from the world).

When the prairies of North America opened up to these Russian Mennonites, they migrated yet again, bringing their conflict with them. With their introduction to the Christian culture in North America, these Mennonites began to associate with either the conservative (evangelical, fundamentalist) elements or the liberal (National Council of Churches) elements. In particular, the author follows the followers of the Peters/Wall ("salt of the earth") movement, in its evolution, through to its final name change in 1987 to the Fellowship of Evangelical Bible Churches, when the word "Mennonite" was dropped entirely from its name.

My own ancestors were among these Mennonite wanderers, and the history provided in the book agrees with the family history I heard at my grandfather's (a son of George Peter (G.P.) Schultz, and true partisan of the Mennonite creed) knee, though the book goes into wonderful detail. The author does an excellent job of showing the evolution of this denomination, explaining its causes and results at each step.

My main complaint against this book is that it completely lacks an index. This, coupled with the author's fondness for acronyms, makes it very hard to go back and reread about a specific person, organization or event. That said, though, this is a fascinating history of little studied denomination.