Brother Aaron rang the bell calling the children to Summer Bible school at Meckville Mennonite Church, a small red brick church at the base of the Blue Mountain in northwest Berks County, Pennsylvania.

We sang,

There’s a church in the valley by the wildwood
No lovelier place in the dale
No spot is so dear to my childhood
As the little brown church in the vale

It was true.  I loved that church.  I loved Bible School and Sunday School and the little church with the maple trees around the parking lot and the cherry tree across the road which usually had ripe cherries just about the time of Summer Bible School.  I loved the Bible stories, Adam and Eve in the Garden, Noah sending the dove from the Ark after the flood, Abraham and Sarah, Joseph and his coat of many colors, Moses and Joshua, the parables of Jesus, the Journeys of Paul, which Brother Cletus so ably taught us about in Summer Bible School.   All these things and the community of brothers and sisters were the seeds of my faith which could be planted in fertile soil and grow into a plant yielding many more seeds.

But wait.  Brother Aaron, why do we sing about the “little brown church” in the vale?  The church is red – red brick.  I was a literalist in those days. Brother Aaron the Bishop carefully explained to the questioning Mennonite boy that red was the color of Satan, so our church could not be red – and if you looked carefully, brick is not really very red, but kind of brown.  One did not argue with the Bishop, not in a Lancaster Conference church anyway, so that explanation stood for the moment.  But a different kind of seed had been planted – a seed of doubt.  When a little boy sees something and is told that he is actually seeing something else, it can only mean trouble later on.  If the Bishop can just make up stuff about a small thing such as the color of bricks, how is he to be trusted about larger things, such as how to read the Bible and what kind of clothing or behavior is “worldly”?  This is how a Mennonite boy becomes a cynical Mennonite young man.  So when Bishop Aaron’s black Ford sedan needed a new motor and the Ford dealer loaned the Bishop a black Ford sedan with a bright red interior there was unholy gladness in my heart.  And I have to admit that I shared that unholy gladness with some other Mennonite young men.   But I get ahead of myself – that was much later on.

Meanwhile I was learning important stuff about what Mennonites – at least the variety meeting at Meckville, a church in the Lebanon District of Lancaster Conference, did and mostly, did not do.

Mennonites did not have TV.  It was ok to watch news events such as a space launch on TV at a neighbor’s house or at public school but not to have a TV in our house.  This created some problems at school when we were given an assignment in second grade to write down our favorite TV show and our least favorite TV show and why.  At least I didn’t get into trouble like my friend Galen Walmer did when he wrote on his paper that he didn’t like American Bandstand because the girls wiggled their (buttocks) too much – except he didn’t say buttocks.  He used the word for donkey and pointed out to the teacher that the word was in the Bible.  I liked Galen.   But the no TV rule also contributed to a lot of creative play around our farm.    My brothers and I had little towns in the woods where we play acted for hours and days in the summer when school was out and there weren’t chores to do. My brother Ken always had a restaurant.  He made and sold little kebobs made with spice bush twigs and raisins or wild raspberries.  We paid with a special kind of grass we found in the pasture.  But the currency was only good for several hours.  Dried up grass was rejected.    I also developed a lifetime love of reading.  I often read a book a day during the summer time.

Mennonites did not fight – or at least did not kill people.  This distinction was necessary for me because I had to rationalize why it was okay for my big brother Clayton to punch Kelly Posey in the nose when Kelly was picking on me on the school bus.  But in spite of being a Mennonite boy I used to play Civil War at recess with Galen Walmer and Paul Smith.  The way it worked is that we were all generals – Galen was General Lee, Paul was Stonewall Jackson and I was General Grant.  Even though we were play  acting I didn’t think it was right to fight to defend slave owners.   We made swords out of sticks from the woods next to the playground.  Everything was okay until one day Galen Walmer asked me which branch of the military I was going to join when I grew up?  I think I may have mumbled something about not having decided as yet.

Mennonites did not drink alcohol, smoke, gamble, swear, including oaths, sue people, or dance.  None of these seemed very relevant to me as a boy so I did not think about them much.  But I did have the memory of Galen Walmer’s experience about the hazards of watching dancing on TV so I supposed that maybe the Mennonites had it right about that one.

Mennonite girls and women did not cut their hair and wore head coverings “because of the angels,”an explanation which did not make a whole lot of sense to me but apparently it said that in I Corinthian’s 11 so that was pretty much that.   Not much was said about the hair of men and boys except that it should not be long because then it might look like a woman and men and women were not supposed to look the same.  The only other reference to hair for boys which I remember was that one should not have a duck-tailed haircut like Elvis Presley because Elvis represented rock and roll and people danced to rock and roll.

Mennonites of all ages and gender were expected to dress modestly but this was much more relevant for women and girls than men and boys.  For women and girls it meant the hair up and under that head covering (long flowing hair was seen as provocative to men) but also cape dresses well below the knees and dark stockings.  For men and boys it mostly meant not wearing shorts or going without a shirt in the summer time.  Public beaches and swimming pools were a source of contention and negotiation with parents.

There was a general admonition of dressing plainly, which did apply to men and boys.  So the plain coat was encouraged for men but often not required except for church leaders and teachers at church schools.  Coats with lapels were often allowed for ordinary members although long ties were generally not allowed.   Curiously, bow ties were permitted.  This rather obvious inconsistency had a funny outcome on our Lancaster Mennonite School senior trip to Washington D.C. in the spring of 1969.   The trip just happened to coincide with a fashion trend of wearing turtleneck shirts. A good many of us reasoned that while wearing a bow tie was kind of nerdy, a turtleneck was just the opposite.  But we hadn’t quite reckoned on the visual effect of one hundred or so young men touring Washington, D. C. in sport coats and white turtlenecks.  We must have been a sight.

All of these various proscriptions and prescriptions fell under the heading of non-conformity to the world.

 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.  Romans 12:2  (KJV)

There were many sermons by Bishop Aaron which fell under the general topic of non-conformity and worldliness.  Bishop Aaron was particularly fond of categorizing worldly behaviors and attitudes as the “ROAD TO APOSTASY.”  None of us were quite sure where Apostasy was and it was never defined but it did seem that the road there must have been a fun place based upon the proscribed behaviors occurring there.

Somewhere around the time I was starting junior high school I began to realize that there were other kinds of Mennonites who did not look like we did.  Of course I was sort of aware of this already as many of the Mennonites in and around Lancaster County were a lot more casual about some of the rules which we adhered to as a Lebanon District Lancaster Conference Church.  Things such as cape dresses, long ties, etc. And the coverings seemed to be smaller and perched up on the top of the head more.  Sometimes the hair was even allowed to be down altogether, and not as long, almost as if it had been trimmed a bit.  One noticed these things.  One year around that time we took a family trip to Indiana.  It was there that I was introduced to the idea of a really different kind of Mennonites – General Conference Mennonites.  And we weren’t even anywhere close to the great state of Kansas.  We were in a restaurant and my Dad wondered if the family across the dining room might be GC Mennonites.  We looked of course.  They don’t look Mennonite at all, so why do you say that Dad?  He said, “because they said grace before the meal.”  I was still at an age when I believed pretty much everything my Dad said so I assumed he knew what he was talking about.

By the time I was in high school I was starting to struggle a bit with my identity as a Mennonite. I was pretty close to a number of my public school classmates and for the most part they seemed to be fairly decent people who went to church with their parents.  Galen Walmer’s parents were devout Lutherans.  This was confusing to me because Lutherans weren’t all that much different from Catholics in my Mennonite mind, except that they didn’t have priests.  They baptised babies just as did the Catholics.  And we were pretty sure that Catholics really weren’t Christians, partly because they baptised babies and partly because of lurid stories about Mennonites married to Catholics who had to agree to raise the children as Catholic and if they failed to follow through the marriage could be annulled and the children taken away from the non-Catholic parent.   My mother was quite strong on this point.  As recently as 1981, when I took a job teaching at DeMatha Catholic High School, she asked “Don’t you know what the Catholics did to the Mennonites?”  I said, “Mom, that was the 16^th century, and besides, it was the Reformed Church under Ulrich Zwingli which was the toughest on our Swiss Anabaptist ancestors.”  I was asked by the marching band director if I would be interested in playing the baritone horn – he would supply the horn and free lessons if I would agree to join the marching band.  I went home and asked my mother.  She did not think it was a good idea as the “girls in the marching band wore uniforms with slacks” and that might “cause problems at church.”  So that was that.  The Vietnam War was going full tilt in the spring of 1967 and there was much discussion of how we were winning but I found myself thinking that the antiwar movement on college campuses made a lot of sense.   I outed myself to classmates as a pacifist based on my Christian beliefs.  Interestingly, not as a Mennonite, but as a Christian.  It was not such a popular position to take at that public high school so I was a little relieved to be heading off to Lancaster Mennonite School in the fall for my junior and senior years.  In some ways LMS was even more confusing to me, as it was a sort of melting pot of Mennonites – mostly Lancaster Conference but some more conservative and a quite few more liberal than our Lebanon District brand under Bishop Aaron.   About the same time a split was brewing in the Lancaster Conference.  There was a group calling itself the “Mennonite Messianic Mission” which was being invited to speak at some of the more conservative Lancaster Conference churches, including Meckville.  The speakers emphasized that they wished to bring “renewal” to the Lancaster Conference, not start a new conference.  Some of us weren’t so sure and we also started noticing some other things which seemed to point to an organized effort to undermine support for Lancaster Conference.  At Meckville we always held counsel meeting before the semiannual communion and foot washing service.  At the spring counsel meeting in 1968 Bishop Aaron quizzed me at some length on several rumors about LMS, almost as if he were attempting to gather information for a specific purpose.   And indeed, in the summer of 1968 a group of four bishops, including Bishop Aaron left the Lancaster Conference because it was too liberal.  Yes, the irony does not escape me today.  If one reads the history of the split in GAMEO it states that “the separation was by mutual agreement.”  That may be so but someone apparently forgot to inform the congregations involved.  Our church at Meckville was split nearly equally between those wishing to remain in the Lancaster Conference and those wishing to leave.  My father and mother and our family were among those wishing to remain in Lancaster Conference.  We were hearing rumors that the assumption was that the affected congregations were mostly in agreement with the bishops.  Several months went by and we were getting no information from either Bishop Aaron or the Lancaster Conference so the ones wishing to remain with Lancaster Conference signed a petition to the Conference Moderator stating our preference.  This was sometime in October or early November.  Just after lunch on November 26, 1968,   I was taking an exam in a Current Events course co-taught by Myron Dietz and Dan Wenger.  Brother Dietz’s exams were always essays and I usually enjoyed taking them.  However on this occasion I had neglected to read one of the assignments very carefully – a book by Vance Packard titled “The Waste Makers.”  So I left that question until last, thinking I would do the best job I could on the other questions to make up for what would surely be a lack of rigor on that particular question.  Just as I had come to this uncomfortable accommodation there was a knock on the classroom door.  It was a messenger summoning me to Dean Noah Good’s office.  My mind was racing.  What had I done now?  Surely I would not be summoned out of class during an exam for some minor infraction of rules in the dormitory?  (Which was where I mostly got into trouble).  No, it was a call from my brother Clayton with devastating news.  My Dad had suffered a massive heart attack sitting in his truck at the docks in New York City.  He was transported to the hospital but did not survive the short trip there.  When I got back to the classroom Brother Wenger was waiting for me.  He knew what had happened and told me I should not finish the exam – they would grade it based on the questions I had completed.  Not the way one wants to get a better grade but that is what happened. But as my sister and I drove home to be with our family that afternoon I left with a feeling of love and support from the LMS community which would help me face the loss and helplessness I was feeling.  I had no idea that things could and were about to get worse for me and my family.

Several Sundays after my father’s passing our pastor at Meckville stood up to give the sermon.  He announced that he had discarded his planned sermon and instead was going to preach based on what the Holy Spirit had “laid on his heart just that morning.”   He then proceeded to engage in what can only be described as a rant stating that the death of my father was a clear sign of God’s judgment on our congregation for opposing Brother Aaron  – it was akin to the murmuring of the Children of Israel against Moses in the wilderness.  In particular, those who had signed the petition to Lancaster Conference needed to contact the Conference Moderator and strike our names from the list.  I am not making this up.  I wish I were. I also wish I could say that this was the last time this kind of thing happened to me.  But at Laurelville in 2005 the Allegheny Conference Minister “wrestled with God” before giving a sermon using a baby as a prop to illustrate the concept that only a man and a woman can produce a baby (as if any of us were contesting the point).   As Yogi Berra would say, “Déjà vu all over again.”   And the lesson is the same, I believe.  When people start “wrestling with God” or “listening to the Holy Spirit” all by themselves outside of the Christian community, bad things happen.

Between Meckville in 1968 and Laurelville 2005 a lot has happened of course.  What didn’t happen is perhaps more interesting.  I did not leave Christianity or even the Mennonite Church.  I have often asked myself why.  And the answer is of course, the seeds.

We can keep the seeds but leave the decaying seed coats behind.  The seeds are the truths which live on in spite of broken relationships and loss.  The seeds are the nurturing communities which remain even as we fail, suffer loss or as our leaders fail us.  There is much I appreciate about Meckville Mennonite Church – the memories of the little red brick church in the dale, the singing, Bible School, Sunday School – my favorite Sunday School teacher as a boy was the son of Bishop Aaron – most of all, the Christian community and the peace witness. And my experience at Lancaster Mennonite School and Eastern Mennonite College as well as classmates and faculty from both schools who are still friends, are seeds which I will always treasure.   As for Allegheny Mennonite Conference, as painful as the disciplinary process was in 2005 and as close as the reinstatement vote was in 2015 – I firmly believe that there are a lot of healthy seeds there which we can plant in the fertile soil of our communities and the harvest will be great.  We have become a stronger congregation and we have moved hearts and minds, not by defending our position, but by being faithful to our Christian mission as we understand it, following Jesus and being a welcoming community of Christians.