BOOKS, FAITH, WORLD & MORE

AN ACCOUNT FULL OF IRONIES

Daniel Hertzler

Review of The Earth Is the Lord’s: A Narrative History of the Lancaster Mennonite Conference, by John L. Ruth. Herald Press, 2001, 1390 pp., $59.99

How do you cherish and pass on to your children a radical heritage? Do you cling to it and try to keep the world at bay? Or do you live openly and cooperate with the neighbors? And what happens if you become well-to-do? John Ruth’s history of Lancaster Mennonite Conference begins to offer answers. Ruth has gathered up an extensive list of heroes and successes along with some apparent renegades as well as some failures.

In his 22-line review of this book in The Mennonite (March 19 2002,) Gordon Houser observes that the book reads like a family history and that it “leaves outsiders, such as I, feeling like, well, outsiders.” Yet he grants that “Even so, there is much to learn in this important book.” It is easy to see how Gordon, a first-generation Mennonite living in Kansas, might feel that way. Yet if he were to dig a little deeper, he would discover that the influence of Lancaster Mennonite Conference has extended even to Kansas. For example, as this book shows, Tillman Erb, who emerged as a leader in the South Central Conference, came straight from Lancaster.

For myself, I have never been able to ignore Lancaster Conference. I grew up nearby, and I later found that my mother’s Shenk and Brenneman ancestors had come through Lancaster even though she herself came to Pennsylvania by way of western Ohio and eastern Virginia. Also I discovered that Allegheny Conference where I am now a member was organized by bishops from Lancaster. And when I worked for Mennonite Publishing House, one of our biggest customers was Lancaster Conference.

As Ruth shows, the term conference came to have a dual meaning. It was “the name for both the network of Mennonite congregations centered in the county and the twice yearly meeting for counsel, discernment, and decision by their ordained leaders” (601). Although these meetings became institutionalized on a twice yearly basis in the nineteenth century, a meeting for “housekeeping council” was held as early as 1742 (319).

According to the Mennonite Encyclopedia, such regular gatherings first appear among Mennonites in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “The original intent of the word was apparently to indicate the purpose to ‘confer’ or counsel about matters of common concern . . . particularly matters of faith and life” (Vol. 1, 669). As used among Mennonites today, the term conference carries a dual meaning, with the identity of a given network of congregations probably the more general use. Yet discernment has become a regular issue when there is disagreement among the network over issues of faith and life.

In the Conestoga Amish Mennonite community near Morgantown, Pennsylvania, we were well aware of Lancaster Mennonites. We invited their preachers to speak in our churches and members of our youth group sometimes helped with service projects in the conference. We found much in Lancaster to identify with, although one issue particularly troubled us. Numbers of Lancaster Mennonites farmed tobacco—on that good land!

As Ruth observes, growing tobacco was one issue Lancaster Mennonites were not able decisively to deal with. The conference made pronouncements on clothing and other cultural matters such as attendance at movies. But they were not able to produce a clear definitive statement against growing tobacco. Evidently there was too much money at stake.

This was ironic, as Ruth would imply. Indeed the title he has chosen suggests irony, as the history will demonstrate. After nearly two centuries of persistent—and earlier deadly—persecution in Switzerland, the Lancaster Mennonites finally landed on some of the best land in the Americas.

Ruth takes space to describe the Swiss experience. Even though the last Anabaptist martyr—Hans Landis—was killed in 1614, repression continued. Swiss Reformed pastors led the charge. As Ruth describes it, they could not tolerate people who would not attend their churches, who baptized adults instead of babies, celebrated the Lord’s Supper on their own, and would not serve in the Swiss Army. Such stubbornness was more than they could tolerate, and they had the Swiss government on their side.

After the Thirty Years War, which ended in 1648, numbers of Swiss Anabaptists were allowed to move to Germany, where they helped to rebuild that devastated country. But the area open to them soon filled up.

Finally, in the early 1700s the way opened for them to migrate to Pennsylvania. Some settled north of Philadelphia and would form Franconia Conference. Others pushed on westward to the banks of the Pequea Creek. They paid for their land, but if they had wanted to know they could have learned that Native Americans had only recently been pushed off this land. Some of these Mennonites soon became prosperous.

As irony would have it, they seem to have found it more difficult to maintain their tradition of severe faithfulness in the open society of Pennsylvania than under repression in Switzerland. Centrifugal forces have been at work throughout their North American history. Two influences have been particularly attractive to the children of these sober Swiss Anabaptists: the lure of the civic and economic systems and the lure of more exciting religious experiences. As the book documents repeatedly, those who left for either reason seemed soon to forget the urgency of following the more radical teachings of Jesus.

Yet the tradition has persisted. Some stayed with it and others were invited in. I found as I perused this tome that I repeatedly got lost in the succession of bishops, Herrs and Ebys, Brubachers and Landises, but I kept coming back to the stories of those who rose to the challenge of discipleship.

This is a warts-and-all history. An analogy for this historian might be a surveillance camera. He surveys the landscape in all directions and takes note of anything that moves—at least if it impinges on the story. The question of faithfulness is always before him: what from the past must be preserved and what may be adjusted? There is never a completely unified perspective. After surviving the troubles and schisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lancaster Conference faced new challenges in the twentieth. Particularly troublesome were outside religious and educational forces.

Two contrasting impulses were expressed in the Lancaster Conference of the twentieth century. One was the urge to draw more boldly the cultural separation from society. The other was to practice more vigorously the commission at the end of Matthew to “make disciples.” At the end Ruth shows that the former ultimately failed, although major divisions represented convictions of persons determined to practice cultural nonconformity. But the main group could no longer consistently prescribe veils and long hair for women and collarless coats for men—even for bishops.

“There was special pathos,” Ruth writes, in the final days of Bishop J. Paul Graybill, whose vision included both separation and evangelism. “In a weakened condition he grieved over a sense of missing his goal of leading a once unified group of plain people to new dedication. . . . Yet there were those with appreciative words for his sincerity and his passionate dream for a culturally separated church” (1117).

The second impulse succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, although more dramatically overseas than in the local communities. At the end of the century, both Tanzania and Ethiopia had more members in churches planted by Lancaster than did the home conference.

In the book’s epilogue, irony prevails. Mennonites who had cherished the land for close to three centuries no longer had the same urge. Many were selling to developers or to Amish who still wanted to farm it. As Ruth observes, “On land matters, the enthusiastic new independent churches had nothing to say, and those Mennonites who did speak generally muted their voices. It was much easier to dwell on ‘the plan of salvation’ or charismatic ecstasy and let the disposition of the earth to those who speculated on its monetary value” (1125, 1126).

Yet Ruth would remain hopeful, and he closes the last full chapter with the words of “devout truck and chicken farmer” Bishop H. Raymond Charles, who attended Mennonite World Conference at Wichita, Kansas, in 1978 and was impressed to see who was there. “The realization dawned on Raymond that the tiny flock of Lancaster Mennonite had spread until they had representatives in about a fourth of the 225 countries of the world. . . .

“‘This is the nearest to heaven I’ve ever been,’ Raymond remarked to Paul Kraybill. . . . And the end, Raymond would reflect, was ‘not yet.’ Even if his people would enter no more fields, the network of Christian faith already established was going to ‘spread, spread, spread’” (1118).

—Daniel Hertzler, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, and his wife Mary live on a 3.6 acre farm in Westmoreland County where they cultivate the earth. Mary specializes in flowers and he in vegetables. In a typical Appalachian spring they fight frost with blankets and/or sprinkling with water before the sun is up. This year was especially bad and Mary predicts the day lilies will not bloom at all.