This Is My Story, Part II

photo of the Amish Mennonite meeting house near Stuarts Draft

Regina Harlow, an ordained member of the Church of the Brethren, and I were recently asked by the Brethren-Mennonite Heritage Center to share our stories around four themes, 1) peace, 2) covenant community, 3) alienation from our surrounding culture and 4) being a neighbor in a world of need. She grew up Old Order Mennonite and I was raised in an Amish community. This is the second of my four presentations at the Sunrise Church of the Brethren October 17.

When I was four years old my parents moved to an Amish community in eastern Kansas and slowly began recovering financially from years of drought and the devastating effects of the Great Depression. Nevertheless,  they missed the close knit community life they had experienced in their congregation in Oklahoma’s Nowata County, a close-knit church family that managed to stick together and support each other in extreme hardship and poverty. One of my cousins wrote an article for Mennonite Life about those dustbowl years in Oklahoma, with the title, The Lean Years of Prosperity, referring to the community's spiritual and emotional wealth. 

In Kansas, while we began to do better financially, my parents agonized over fears of the potential negative influence of the young people in that Amish community on our growing family. My older siblings were already in their teens, and my dad and mom worried about whether they would join many of their peers in the kind of partying and “rumspringa” that was all too common there, and how and whether they would find good marriage partners in that congregation.

So just over 75 years ago, my parents Ben and Mary Yoder decided to make a 1400 mile move from Garnett, Kansas, to Stuarts Draft, Virginia, with their family of eight children.

I was six then, the youngest, and my oldest sister was 19. My father accompanied a freight car packed with our furniture and other belongings--including some farm machinery, two of our horses and the family dog--half way across the country to the Shenandoah Valley. My mother herded the rest of us on the long trip east by passenger train.

Their primary reason for moving was to become a part of a church family that would better reflect their values, and not to better themselves financially, though with my uncle Ed Mast's help they were able to build a small dairy and poultry operation on a 120 acre farm that supported our family. We always struggled financially, but when they sold the farm and went into semi-retirement, they found themselves rewarded for their hard work and many sacrifices.

Meanwhile, all but one of my seven older siblings had found good marriage partners in that Augusta County congregation and established stable and healthy families. My one older sister who remained single became an admired nurse and midwife who served in numerous locations both in the states and abroad. My two brothers and I each became ordained ministers, as did eight of my parents' grandchildren.

If it takes a whole village to raise a child, I believe it takes a whole congregation to raise a faithful child of God and a follower of Jesus. The church of some 30 households that nurtured me and my siblings in Augusta County wasn’t perfect. Our Sunday services were unremarkable, the Sunday School classes held every other Sunday had no professionally prepared study material (just the German Bible), the sermons were by untrained and unsalaried ministers, and the singing was slow, unaccompanied and all in unison.

But we grew up with remarkably good people, individuals and families who had moved to Augusta County from communities all over the east coast, and who were constantly doing things for and with each other, threshing, hay making silo, filling quilting, neighboring, doing building projects (events they called “frolics”) and visiting in each others homes virtually every Sunday noon. Our nearest neighbors, Sam and Mattie Yoder, not related to us, became our best friends, and were among the kindest and most Christlike people you could find anywhere, as were many of our Mennonite neighbors.

It was partly through the influence of a Mennonite public school teacher I had in the 7th grade at Stuarts Draft Elementary, Paul Wenger, that I decided to enroll at Eastern Mennonite College, which I did at age 21. After graduation in 1964 I married the wonderful woman I met there who became my wife and together we joined a local Mennonite church. Both of us taught at Eastern Mennonite High School, another highly nurturing group of people.

Our congregation at Zion Mennonite, where we lived and served for over 20 years (while doing part time teaching at EMHS) was a wonderful source of support for us and our children, as was the close-knit house church we’ve been a part of for over 30 years. 

In 2019, after never having had a medical procedure in my life more serious than a tonsillectomy, I had triple bypass surgery at UVA, followed by another surgery several months later to remove the parotid gland in my left jaw that proved to be malignant and required extensive radiation treatments, I/we were overwhelmed by the generous support of our friends and especially of the church community. 

So if I were asked, “Which should come first, one’s biological family or one’ spiritual family?” I’d have to say both--equally--the nuclear family desperately needing the nesting and the nurturing of the family of faith if it is to survive and thrive.