This Is My Story, Part III

A rare photo of me, at age six.

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 third of my four presentations at the Sunrise Church of the Brethren October 17.

From earliest childhood I was always aware that our family and church family were very different from our surrounding culture. There were the obvious differences in the way we wore our hair and in the kind of plain clothes we wore, suspenders for boys and men, head coverings for our sisters and mothers, all signs that we were not a part of “them,” the “English” as we referred to outsiders. For we even spoke a different language, Pennsylvania Dutch, or Deutsch, when I was a child, using Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible in our Sunday services and singing our hymns in church in High German.

There were times when this was a source of embarrassment and discomfort, but it was also an important part of my identity. Being different gave me a sense of belonging to a kind of monastic community whose reputation I needed to uphold. 

Strange as it may seem, it may have also contributed to a subtle form of pride, even though its opposite, demuth (humility) was constantly being drilled into us. Thus in spite of the motto displayed in our house, "Demut ist die schönste Tugend" (Humility is the most beautiful virtue) I grew up feeling most outsiders were not quite as godly as we were, and not as skilled at farming, gardening or preparing great meals as we Amish. 

Even our singing was better, I thought. While we still used the old German hymns in our Sunday services, we were learning English hymns and singing four part harmony at home and in some informal gatherings of young people, something new we did a lot of, since we didn't have radios, stereos or TV's to entertain us. So our English neighbors might have their organ music and church choirs, but they didn’t sing as heartedly or as harmoniously as we, or so I thought.

Then there were my four formative years at EMC, which was still very conservative during the early 60’s, it being the only accredited college in the world at that time that required women students (the Mennonite ones, as most were in those days) to wear prayer coverings in public. And no one wore shorts even for athletic activities, and sports were all intramural. 

The years after my graduation, when became a Mennonite and served as pastor at Zion Mennonite (while teaching part time at EMHS) were marked by rapid and dramatic changes as far traditional signs of our non-conformity were concerned. During that time most congregations went from women members all wearing prayer coverings, especially for church services, to only a minority doing so. Plain suits for men, and even for pastors, were mostly replaced by conventional suits and ties, and we began accepting into membership couples who had been divorced and remarried but who were committed to a faithful new start in their life. And for the first time congregations began using musical instruments for some of their congregational music. 

As you can imagine, I’ve witnessed several centuries worth of change in my own short lifetime, mostly in the direction of Anabaptist congregations becoming more enculturated and Americanized. But looking back I’m concerned that we’ve gone from being at least outwardly non-conformist to now doing everything we can to prove that we’re just like every other nice vanilla-flavored Protestant group. Thus I fear many of us Mennonites have become ever less the counter-cultural expression of Jesus’s upside down, inside out, worldwide kingdom, and ever less the radical demonstration of what heaven’s will being done on earth might actually look like.

The Amish in me believes that would include dressing simply and modestly, and doing more of our shopping at thrift stores and far less at the downtown mall. That it would mean renewing our covenant with the soil, growing and preserving more of our own food, and doing less mowing and more hoeing. And that it would mean investing far less in the stock market and more in Calvert retirement funds in which we put our savings to work in doing good around the world, offering micro-lending opportunities to startup businesses in poorer countries, for example, rather than engaging in Wall Street gambling in hopes of optimal profit. 

To me, being truly non-conformed would also mean adopting a policy of moral housing, downsizing or resizing so that we would have small houses or apartments for small households and larger homes only for larger households. It might mean expecting all of us, young and old, to invest time in voluntary service as an expression of service-minded living. It might mean adult children offering more care of their aging parents in a Dawdy house arrangements, and relying less on institutionalized care of our aging. It might mean commissioning more lay leaders and ministers in our congregations and relying less on professional clergy--in fact doing away with the distinction between lay people, as in the laos, the people, and ordained persons. And it would certainly mean beginning to look a lot more like, and sharing a lot more like, the church that was born at Pentecost nearly 2000 years ago, thus modeling the church’s eternal future rather than its imperfect past.

I know this is an old man dreaming dreams. But this kind of dreaming has always been a part of my story.