Twilight of an Era. The Final Years in Friesland, 1692–1744

Abstract

While Labadist fortunes overseas waxed and waned, the mother colony at Wieuwerd was entering a crucial phase of its existence as the year of 1692 dawned. Central to it all was a disenchanted former member, Petrus Dittelbach.¹) His involvement in the community had been comparatively short (some five years) and punctuated with disagreements. It cannot have been easy for an ordained man to submit to elders with no recognised training, but from his own subsequent account we sense more than a trace of pride in the former pastor of Nendorp, and regularly we find Yvon and others admonishing him for disobedience. His wife and son, who had followed him to Friesland more out of duty than desire, were openly hostile to the disciplinarian ways, and it was over the issue of discipline of children that Dittelbach finally chose to leave the Labadists around 1688. Wieuwerd thereafter regarded him with the utmost suspicion, and when Yvon heard that an adherent at Emmerich had offered Dittelbach hospitality, he straightway wrote to remonstrate, calling the renegade ‘an enemy of the Work of the Lord.’ On his preaching trip to Amsterdam in 1689/90,²) Yvon had given the stewards at the door express orders to deny access to Dittelbach.