Amish Mennonite

Amish and Mennonite weekend

2008-12-31T18:11:00.004+01:00

Since my sabbatical has been over for four months, I have not done much with this blog, and at the moment I do not have any grand plans for continuing to maintain it on a regular basis, though who knows what the future will bring.

But I do have one update, and that is that I am planning at weekend at our congregation, Benton Mennonite Church, on the connections and disconnections between Amish and Mennonites. It is called "Amish and Mennonites: Common origins, divergent paths," and it will take place on Saturday - Sunday, January 24 - 25, 2009.

Steve Nolt and John Roth, professors of history at Goshen College, have agreed to come and speak both on Saturday morning and Sunday morning. On Saturday afternoon I will be joined by an Amish historian to discuss Amish and Mennonites today and on Sunday afternoon I will report on my trip to the congregation and anyone who is interested. You might consider it a short version of this blog.

The only cost for the weekend is that if you want the Amish-cooked meal on Saturday, you need to pay $15 unless you are a member of Benton Mennonite Church. The community is welcome to attend any of the events. Full information about the weekend is at our web site, http://www.bentonchurch.org/ or go directly to the brochure and registration.

On comparing Europe and America

2008-09-14T05:14:00.003+02:00

Recently a family member asked me if I thought America was the best place to live, and I said no. So they asked why I didn't leave. This seemed strange to me. Why would I leave just because I didn't necessarily think it was the best place to live? After all, I'm not all that interested in finding the best place to live and then living there. I was born and raised here, and it is a good place to live, even a great place to live. And I love it.

This conversation rang in my ears as I traversed Europe and wondered about how my ancestors decided to leave the Old World and come to the New. This has made a huge difference in who I am today, what language I speak, and even how I think. I wondered how I would like living in Europe. It seemed to me that I could enjoy living there. Of course just to be completely open, I have yet to travel somewhere where I could not imagine living, whether in Central or South America, Canada, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago or Utah. There are so many beautiful and interesting places on this planet. Okay, I must admit that I am way of a place as urban as New York City, though I have heard there are nice parks.

Mark Twain travelled to Europe in his time. In those days there were many people who were fawning over the Old World, and how it was superior to the US. Twain of course didn't take to such nonsense. He was very critical of Europe. He thought the food was horrible. But the prices were cheap, and so at one point when he was in financial trouble he lived in Europe to help make ends meet.

My how times have changed. Today it is the opposite, in my opinion. Living in Europe is very expensive, with the weak dollar this summer making it more difficult. But the food was fantastic. Europeans are not as good at fast food as Amerians, and in fact they seem to preserve the idea that meals should be slow and social affairs. But overall they are good at making good solid food. Americans are more willing to allow taste to suffer for the sake of convenience, and even, I would say, for the sake of appearance. The Red Delicious apple should be called the Red Atrocious. It is a beautiful apple that travels well but it tastes like wet sawdust.

Switzerland was a place where you could take public transportation almost anywhere. Even the most remote Anabaptist cave was within about an hour's walk from the closest bus or train. I love taking the train, and so there is a lot to love about Switzerland. I enjoy toy electric trains but I also love real trains. And of course the mountains in Switzerland are beautiful. But when I stayed with a Swiss family they had photos of the American plains so that they could remember the wide open spaces of America.

So while there is much to love about Europe, I find myself happy to be back home. There is much to love about America. The wide open spaces, the open society, the friendliness, the creativity, and the willingness to help each other out. The land is wide and beautiful, wild and varied.

A theme of Swiss Mennonites was Psalm 24: The Earth is the Lord's. It was their way of saying that God is the owner of the land and not their oppressive overlords. I think of it as a way of resisting immigration out of Switzerland. But it is also a way of affirming that the earth is the Lord's, and that God is found throughout the planet. This allows us to take seriously stewardship of the land wherever we are found. It means that as Christians the whole earth is a place where we can find a home. And in fact Christians are found throughout the world. I hope that my time in another country can help to foster more understanding between nations.

This is likely my final blog, at least for now. I am thankful for the time I had away and I am thankful now to be back home, in Elkhart County, Indiana, this part of the earth where my family was planted some 160 years ago. It is an interesting place, and a place where you can find beauty, if you are looking for it. The earth is the Lord's indeed.

Just how Swiss are Mennonites?

2008-09-13T21:03:00.005+02:00

In my last blog I suggested that one way some Mennonites who were part of the Amish Mennonite tradition might still carry the Amish tradition with them is through their approach to discussion. I thought that some show a high ability to constructively dialogue and others have a tendency to avoid discussion altogether, preferring to just leave the relationship to working through it.

Now I want to look at a similar question for that part of the Mennonite church in America that comes from Switzerland, which is probably the majority of American Mennonites, though a slim majority today. Something that was unexpected to me as I learned a little about Switzerland during my 5 weeks there, is just how Swiss many Mennonites continue to behave. We no longer carry the language, nor many of the foods or specific traditions. But a number of aspects of Mennonite identity and behavior are national characteristics of the Swiss.

Here is the symbol of the Swiss nation, such as it is, the national assembly of the Swiss Confederation in Berne.

Now I do not want to suggest that Mennonites are simply Swiss. After all, there are some ways in which Anabaptists broke decisively with Swiss national culture, and of course quite a number of Mennonites were expelled from Switzerland for these differences.

I want to mention two obvious differences here at the beginning. The first is that one German word for Swiss, along with Schweizer, is eidgenossischer. What this word means literally is "oath comrades." This goes back to the oath ceremony of the three original Swiss cantons where they committed to helping each other gain independence from the Habsburg family of Austria. So taking an oath is part of the identity of the Swiss, and now these Anabaptists say that Jesus tells us to refuse oaths. That is not a way to win friends in Switzerland.

The second difference grows from the first. Part of taking that oath was a commitment to defend one another. This may seem strange to modern Americans, who perhaps think of the Swiss as the people who never fight in wars, but at the time of the Reformation the Swiss had a reputation as some of the most ruthless warriors of Europe. They were known for two things. First was their "take no prisoners" approach. We use this word carelessly, but it means that the Swiss would kill their enemies rather than imprison them. This was cheaper, but more ruthless. Secondly, they would keep the spoils of war. After all, their opponents were dead. This means that if you were fighting the Swiss the cost of losing was much higher than an opponent who was willing to imprison you once they had defeated you.

In the 1470s, some 50 years before the Reformation, the Swiss and their allies defeated the much larger forces of Charles the Bold of Burgundy and his forces. So their military prowess was well respected. So Swiss mercenaries were hired throughout Europe. It became so prevalent and the Swiss became so concerned about it that eventually the practice was outlawed. The one exception is that the Pope can still hire Swiss mercenaries, and so there are the famous Swiss Guards in Vatican City. I presume that the guards come from the cantons that remained Roman Catholic.

So now, in what ways do I think American Mennonites carry Swiss ways with them? Of course this is first of all seen in our family names, what we sometimes call "Mennonite" names. But they are really Swiss names. One of the strange things about being in Switzerland was having almost all the names sound familiar.

What got me started on this theme was reading Margaret Oertig-Davidson's book, More than Chocolate: understanding Swiss culture, which she wrote to help expatriates in Switzerland know how to get along there. I opened the book to a section on decision-making, and how if newcomers aren't careful, they may discover that the Swiss made a decision without saying it out loud. There is a kind of consensual decision-making that avoids outright conflict. As I read this, how I wished that someone had written such a guide from my Mennonite congregation, so that people could understand how we make decisions.

Supposedly our congregation follows Roberts Rules of Order. However we almost never vote on something until we are confident that everyone supports it. There is no idea that once you have the majority of the group behind your proposal that you can move forward with it. You must first respond to every concern voiced. And if you can't get consensus, or at least near consensus, then the decision is not made.

There is in Switzerland much more of a communal sense, that everyone is in it together. Many decisions are made by a vote of all the people. The country is ruled by a Federal Council, a group of seven equal-ranking people. Each one takes a turns being president of the council for a year. This emphasis on consensus, democracy, and communalism has a positive and negative side. When the Swiss fail, it is because they did not do something soon enough. In political systems where power is given to a few, both great success and great failure is possible.

One joke says that Albert Einstein said that if there is nuclear war he wants to live in Switzerland, because it takes 20 years for anything in Europe to land in Switzerland. The person who told me this joke went on to say that when the Swiss adapt a new technology, they then do it very well.

The book also talks about the importance of rules in social control in Switzerland. People are comfortable with the idea of following set rules of bevavior that must be followed. There is also a willingness for people to intervene and make sure the rules are followed, when a foreigner may think that it is better to just mind your own business.

The scholar Albert Debrunner thinks that this idea that the rules should be enforced by the people comes from the Reformed tradition in Switzerland. In Geneva John Calvin laid down strict rules of conduct and the elders went from house to house to make sure the rules were obeyed. Oertig-Davidson says: "Zwingliism and Calvinism were both characterised by communitarianism, in which it is not the priest who decides, but the whole group." (118)

The Swiss are also wary of self promotion. This kind of individualism goes against the communalism of the people. I find this attitude among Mennonites as well, where people compete to be the humblest rather than the best.

The book also describes the independence of the Swiss. They are not quick to ask for help, believing that they can handle things on their own. This is also part of the Swiss Mennonites in America. My dad was a pastor in a Mennonite congregation where most of the people were not from traditional Swiss families. He said it was a lot more work because people would ask for help from the pastor when they felt they needed it. In more traditional congregations you had to find out from other people when something was wrong.

A similar aspect of this is that Oertig-Davidson describes the Swiss as a coconut culture. By that she means that the shell on the outside is hard; it is difficult to get to know people. But once you are in the inside it is soft. She calls British and American culture peach cultures, soft on the outside. They are people who easily learn to know new people and very quickly start calling people friends.

My sense is that Mennonites are very American in this behavior. I am more of a peach than a coconut. But I would also guess that my Swiss heritage has influenced me in the coconut direction so that I am more coconut than many Americans.

And of course while the Swiss are not pacifist in theory, they are for all practical purposes pacifist. The last war they fought was in 1847. They are known as a place of peace in Europe.

These are just a couple of things I have noticed. I could mention more but I think I give the idea.

Now I do not want to say by all this that Mennonites behave like the Swiss. We are American in many ways. But I think there is something about our Swiss heritage that means we are more communal and less individualistic.

I also do not mean to suggest by this that this means that these aspects of Mennonite behavior are cultural rather than religious. They are both, since religion is always enacted in culture.

And finally, I do not mean by this that I think Mennonites must find ways to un-Swissify ourselves, making sure that we are somehow without culture so that we can welcome people of other cultures. There is no such thing as a cultureless person. And there is no reason to think that it is better to be simply American rather than Swiss American. In fact I think we will be much better at welcoming people of other cultures if we have a healthy and positive sense about our own culture, not so positive that it is chauvinistic. But it is also important to not be so negative about our cultural heritage that we denigrate it.

Church Discipline as Loving Dialogue

2008-09-13T13:25:00.001+02:00

I want to write a few concluding blogs where I reflect on the bigger questions that have been at the back of my mind during my sabbatical. The first of these is church discipline, the issue that divides Mennonites from Amish. The Amish, in theory, practice a strict shunning, or complete social avoidance of those banned from communion. Mennonites, in theory, just forbid the banned from communion.

I say in theory about both groups because in my experience neither group is uniform in this practice. Participating in the Mennonite Church for 41 years, I have never seen someone banned from communion, though I do know that people have sometimes not participated when they felt they could not.

The father of one of my high school friends was a Mennonite who had been banned for leaving the Amish. Shunning in their family consisted of not eating at the same table. But otherwise they treated him normally. When I recently spoke to an Amish bishop in Shipshewana, he spoke about the shunning of his son. It sounded like the actual shunning consisted of the fact that they could not pass the common serving bowl directly to his son. They had to set it on the table before he could pick it up. To me this seemed like a way to follow the letter of shunning without the spirit of it. This is a long way from what I understand Jacob Ammann to have meant when he spoke of complete social avoidance of those banned.

One of the surprises of my time in Switzerland was learning that what the Anabaptists called persecution the Swiss Reformed called church discipline. They were attempting to correct the Anabaptists, making sure they attended "real" church, which is to say the Reformed church. The Swiss Reformed were famous for their strictness. One of the instruments of Anabaptist persecution were the Chorgerichts, or church councils. The pastor would gather with congregational leaders after the sermon and they would discuss who in the congregation was not behaving properly. So whether the sin was fornication, stealing, or being rebaptized, they dealt with it.

These are some of the instruments of church discipline in the Swiss Reformed Church in Berne. This is the Kafigturm, one of the prison towers in Berne that held Anabaptist and other prisoners.

And this is the Blutturm, or Blood tower, one of the notorious torture chambers used against Anabaptists and others.

So while it may be that the emphasis on church discipline has a lot to do with the Reformed roots of Anabaptism, the methods of disciplines adopted by Anabaptists were very different. The practice of shunning, which seems unconscionable to so many moderns, was in fact a very peaceful type of church discipline compared to drownings, beheadings, burnings, imprisonment, confiscation of property and family, and forced exile. Anabaptists refused to use state power for the church's purposes, and for that matter refused even to participate in the state's use of coercion against its citizens.

It may seem strange that the Swiss Anabaptists, who had avoided any divisions for their 170 years of existence, should divide on a small distinction between shunning and banning. Of course I write as someone who is part of the group who did not see any reason for the division. Why did Ammann insist on such strictness, we wonder?

Of course Ammann was not the first to insist on this strictness. He found support for his ideas in the Dordrecht Confession of Faith, a confession from the Dutch Anabaptists. Menno Simons, from whom Mennonites take our name, actually agreed with Ammann more than with his Swiss Anabaptist opponents. In fact, Menno Simons also shunned the entire Swiss Anabaptist church, as Ammannn did 150 years later. In that sense the Amish are more Mennonite than many Mennonites.

But not the Swiss. Unlike their brothers and sisters who migrated to France, Germany, and America, the Swiss did not take the name Mennonite and they did not adopt the Dordrecht Confession of Faith as their authoritative confession. Though they did continue to use it.

There is a collection of Anabaptist writings called "Golden Apples in Silver Bowls," that seems to come from the Palatinate but has Swiss connections. It contains several martyr testimonies, prayers and instructions on their use, and the Dordrecht Confession, though it softens the language in certain places in more of a Swiss direction.

It also has one of the most open statements about church discipline I have seen in Mennonite writings. The anonymous editor says: "If there were someone who had a thievish, adulterous, murderous faith, which would give him liberty in his faith to steal, murder, commit adultery, and similiar abominations: him or her I dare, out of fear of God, neither defend nor condemn, neither judge nor damn, outside the guidelines of my Lord's Word (the New Covenant). If such a person can support his faith on the basis of divine speech, I will let him work it out and carry the burden himself, even if my own feelings are contrariwise."

When I first wrote the above paragraph, I was going to say that this statement was a statement against church discipline. But I realized that I was wrong to say it that way. This is a statement about church discipline, and it even supports church discipline, but it is someone who has withdrawn all coercion from their use of discipline. The writer will only allow themself to use speech against this person who is so wrong about their faith. They have renounced not only sword and fire, but also social avoidance and even banning, all coercion. But what they have not renounced is their tongue. They will speak to the person and expect the person to speak to them to defend what they believe and do.

As I think about my own views of church discipline, I am sympathetic with the anonymous editor. When I was in a congregation that had a young member join the military, which for Amish and Mennonites is sin, I neither ignored it nor did we ban him from communion. Instead I spoke to the young man hearing why he wanted to do this, and I of course tried to dissuade him. And then with his foreknowledge I spoke to the congregation letting them know that we disagreed with his decision but we were not revoking his membership.

As I already wrote, I have yet to see someone be banned from communion in a Mennonite congregation. At times someone has been asked to step back from teaching or other forms of leadership because of divorce or military service, two forms of broken relationships.

So I find myself in the Hans Riest camp of the Amish - Swiss Brethren split of 1693. But I still have some hesitation. And the first hesitation has to do with this question of speaking to one another. What I admire about Jacob Ammann is that he was outspoken about his areas of conflict. He didn't hide his concerns for the sake of unity. He thought they should be dealt with openly and honestly. That is much better than simply ignoring sin or pretending like it isn't happening.

Of course on the down side, Ammann was very quick to move to shunning someone, so that very quickly Reist and others found themselves silenced by Ammann. Some years later Ammann renounced his hasty decision making, realizing that he had not adequately worked with the people that he shunned. He asked for forgiveness from Reist and his other opponents. Ammann did not renounce his conviction about shunning, but about the way he did it.

So what did Reist and others do? Nothing. In fact Jacob Gut in a letter recommends to his fellow Swiss Brethren that they do nothing. So now the Mennonite faction was using silence against the Amish faction, though in a behind the back way. That is, Gut was writing to those in his faction, rather than dealing directly with his opponents.

In that way I admire the honesty of the Amish, the way that they admit that there is disunity and sin when that is what there is. The practice of shunning is a way of taking the rupture seriously and hoping to resolve it by taking it seriously. There is the possibilityof reconciliation in this method which is impossible using Jacob Gut's form of behind the back silence.

In my introductory blog I mentioned the story of the Amish Mennonites, a group of Amish who in the 1860s began to move away from the conservative Amish, who eventually became known as Old Order Amish. Clinton Township, Indiana, where my family has lived since the 1840s, about 5 miles from my home, was one of the sources of this split. I wondered whether these Amish Mennonites, who by the early decades of the 1900s had merged with the Mennonites and simply dropped Amish, were in any way Amish. Is there something about their Amish history that remained with them, or was it completely gone?

As I came to the end of my sabbatical I felt like I had found nothing Amish about these Amish Mennonites, until I kept thinking about this issue of mutual dialogue. In the face of the intensity of the Amish commitment to church discipline and shunning, I think people adopted several ways of working with it.

One thing to say is that they were not like American Mennonites, many of whom, at least those from Swiss background, adopted hierarchical relationships foreign to their Swiss origins--they developed bishops who had charge of a whole district of congregations and who held ultimate authority on questions of banning, communion and baptism.

Contrariwise, the Amish developed no such hierarchy. The Amish have bishops, but bishop for them is the word we would use for senior pastor. A bishop has charge of one district, what we call a congregation, and because a district must fit into each home, since they have no church buildings, it never grows beyond 40 families. All districts are about the same size. And if you look at what the Bible says about bishops there is no sense that they must be a leaders of more than one congregation. That is tradition that developed after the Bible was written.

It is my impression that people who are Amish or come from Amish background have adapted in another way to this intense scrutiny of their lives. They either find the conversation needed to make these decisions too difficult, and so they are silent about any disagreement, or they become very articulate, and are quite able to discuss disagreements and concerns.

In general I have seen the majority of Amish background people as wary of conflict. Recently our congregation saw several Amish background people leave because of a worship innovation. When did they tell us about their concerns? After they started attending other congregations. They had moved in the direction of needing to be in unity or needing to leave. There was less middle ground for them.

But I noticed this tendency towards silence within my own life last year at the San Jose Mennonite Church USA convention. Silence popped up in unexpected ways. First, I met with a childhood friend who in adulthood became openly gay. He is one of a number of friends who have done this. From my perspective I am comfortable with their decision and I can understand why they do it. They have found themselvs to be homosexually inclined and they are open about that. So when I met my friend I wanted to show that even though I am a Mennonite pastor, a denomination that condemns all homosexual practice, that I would not let that get in the way of our friendship. We had a very nice lunch together. He asked me about my family and work, and I asked him about his work. It was only afterwards that I realized that we never talked about his homosexuality. I did not ask him if he had a boyfriend or ask anything that might clarify his family situation. In that sense I realized that I had practiced silence on this question that I worried might divide us.

I had a similar incident a couple of days later when in San Francisco we met with someone who had volunteered with Christian Peacemaker Teams and had been a member of First Mennonite Church in San Francisco. At some point in the conversation he said, "Now, don't freak out or anything, but I converted to Islam." From my perspective we did not freak out since we did not yell at him or ask him why he did such a terrible thing. What did we do? We didn't say a word about it. We just went on talking as if he had said nothing about it. I decided later, as I reflected upon it, that we had freaked out. By not saying a word, we had exercised a form of silencing, a form of silencing that is perhaps friendlier than the Amish practice of shunning, but also probably also less redemptive, because it is not honest about our perspectives.

And so I think of John Howard Yoder, the well-known Mennonite theologian, and his relatives. His sister's family is in the congregation where I pastor and and in another congregation where I am overseer. They are articulate and more comfortable with conflict than most people I know. And I think this training partly comes from the culture of the Oak Grove Amish Mennonite Church, where John Howard Yoder and his sister Mary Ellen Meyer grew up. This is an Amish congregation that eventually was no longer a member of the Mennonite conference because it was so congregational that it did not learn to work with the Mennonite hierarchy like some other Amish congregations did. In my mind this ability to talk about disagreements within the congregation rather than relying on hierarchical authority would seem like one result of the intensity of Amish discipline.

So these are like two poles in responding to Amish discipline. For some people it means keeping silent until you just can't stand it anymore, and then leaving or being shunned. And for others it means learning the ability to talk through disputes in a way that keeps people together. You need to learn the art of loving dialogue. In my mind, then, John Howard Yoder's ability to dialogue both with his own traditon and the wider Christian tradition is an outgrowth of the Amish commitment to deal with sin and disagreement in a way that is open and redemptive.

My other concern about being soft on church discipline grows out of William Cavanaugh's book, "Torture and Eucharist," where he describes the failure of the Roman Catholic Church in Chile to adequately confront Pinochet and the military as they tortured the body of Christ in that country. Eventually the church began to gain a voice in opposition to Pinochet and certainly it played a role in his ultimate downfall. But throughout this time the church continued to give communion to those who tortured. Within my group of mainline Protestant pastors who read the book with me, there was not much sympathy with the idea of banning from communion. For my part I started to think that maybe there are sins that reach the height of banning. This is what Cavanaugh was promoting in his book.

When a group wrote a resolution against conferences disciplining congregations for having gay members, I found myself sympathetic with the concern though disappointed with the wording. I am not against conference or congregational discipline when it is understood in the way that the Golden Apples in Silver Bowls editor describes it. I would envision sustained dialogue on disagreements, a dialogue that may last for decades, but that continues to be loving and based on Matthew 18. The dialogue itself is a form of discipline and it is necessary. What I am very hesitant to do is ban either individuals or congregations who come to have different convictions from the main body of believers. I would choose to let the word of God dwell within those with other perspectives until it comes to bear fruit in their, and our, lives. So speaking the truth in love is becoming increasingly important to me, and at the same time one of the hardest things for me to learn to do.

Finally coming to the end of the sabbatical

2008-08-14T15:42:00.002+02:00

In a couple of day my sabbatical comes to an end and I will be back to my duties as co-pastor at Benton Mennonite Church. I have had a great time these past months, but I also look forward to working for a living again.

My time back home in Indiana these past several weeks have also been good. We got home on a Saturday night. I went to the College Mennonite Church since it is close by. It reminded me of the Weierhof because it is also an older congregation where the announcements focus on who had died and who is sick and in the hospital. I also saw some good friends and had a great visit with their Sunday School class. The sermon was by a guest who is biking across the USA with his family. It was a message encouraging us to have hope and courage in life.

Then after these few days at home unpacking we left again for five days of travel to and from Texas. We only spent one day in Texas for my niece Julianne's wedding. She is my last Texan niece to marry. We had a nice time with my brother Randy and his family. We got to see his new house and some of the art he is collecting. The boys had a lot of fun in the pool, and in this case the boys includes me the dad.

Then I was home for about a week, with one night of camping with Jacob at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. The campground was full on a Thursday night, with only walk-in sites available. I have never seen it so full during the week. The beach was fantastic the next day.

Then I left for the Hermitage in Three Rivers, Michigan. I have had a sabbatical in 2000, 2004, and 2008. Each time I have spent a week at the Hermitage. I used to stay in the St. Joseph barn in one of the rooms or apartments. But now I ask to stay in the Hut the whole time. The Hut is in the middle of the woods of about 40 acres. It's about a ten minute walk from the barn where the meals and showers are found. There is a thermos of water rather than running water, a pit toilet, oil lamps, and a wood stove should you need any heat. A difference this year was there is a fire circle outside, which I lit the one night. It really does allow you to be away from it all.

Meals at the Hermitage are usually in silence, but two things made that not happen as much this time. The first is that the one night a reporter came because he was doing an article on the confluence of three prayer centers all connected together in this same area, Gilchrist, St. Gregory's Abbey, an Episcopilian Benedictine monastery, and the Hermitage. It seemed like the polite thing to do was talk to him to help him write his story. And then there were two festivals at the Hermitage, a Blackberry Jam day where people come and pick wild blackberries and then make jam, and then the Feast of the Transfiguration, a day of worship and retreat. I did not participate in these events, I was too busy with my own form of work there.

What did I do at the Hermitage, people will ask me. I prayed, I was silent, I journaled, I read, I reflected, I walked and ran the trails, I visited with other guests, I met with David Wenger for two spiritual direction sessions, I rode my bike. The Hermitage has morning prayer every morning, with communion on Wednesday. Personally I also read the morning and evening prayers from the Anabaptist prayer book, Take Our Moments and Our Days. The book I read was Anabaptist Baptism, the classic written by Rollin Armour. I can't believe I've waited this long to learn this about what makes Anabaptists Anabaptist, baptism. I also began reading Joan Chittister's Wisdome Distilled from the Daily, based on the rule of Benedict. At Lowry's bookstore in Three Rivers I found the final three Ursula LeGuin books for the Earthsea Trilogy (which eventually became four books!) for only $6 total. I love that place. And finally on Sunday I went to St. Gregory's Abbey for their worship and communion service. It appears to be Anglo-Catholic in orientation, with much ceremony, which makes sense since it is Benedictine. But the Abbot preached a rowsing sermon with a very accepting attitude towards the Spirit bringing change to our world. It was quite the juxtaposition.

For me the Hermitage is a place to get away from words long enough to listen for God's still small voice in the quiet. I came away again with a better sense of God's call for me and with a reminder of God's love and generosity. I so appreciate their ministry there and want to find ways to connect with them more between sabbaticals. But as long as I have children coming home from school at 2:30 it will not be so easy. Part of my Hermitage practice the last two times has been to ride my bike there. It is part of making my time there apart from my busy life here. It is about 40 miles to get there and it takes about 3 1/2 hours with a couple of rests on the way. So I came back this past Sunday and then left immediately with Isaiah for a one-night campout at Indiana Dunes and again we had a nice day at the beach. It was colder than the time with Jacob, but there were waves which made for some good body surfing. Unfortunately we forgot to bring the boogie boards.

Now this final week I am doing some final cleaning around the house. I also hope to have a couple of final blogs where I reflect on some overall themes from my travels. I also agreed to talk at my family reunion on Saturday about the Kaufman ancestors.

Finally up the Eiffel Tower

2008-08-05T05:42:00.007+02:00

On our final day in Paris we finally went up the Eiffel Tower. We arrived first thing in the morning and discovered that the lines were already long. But fortunately, since no one was up in the tower yet, the lines moved quickly as people moved up into the three levels. We took one elevator to the second platform. I took the above photo of the upper part of the tower from there.

Then we took another elevator to the very top. The following several photos are from our vantage point at the top. Up there also Gustave Eiffel, the man who engineered the tower, had a small apartment where he hosted dignitaries. They have wax figures of Eiffel and his daughter hosting Thomas Edison, one of the more famous of his visitors.

This is a view of the Arc d'Triomphe in the middle. I like the way it shows the many white buildings which make up Paris, and the various curves of the streets. The Eiffel Tower stands along in Paris as its tallest building. You do not see huge skyscraper downtown buildings like you do in American cities, though there are a few clusters of tall buildings here and there. Paris is not beautiful for its tall office buildings, but for its art and diverse architecture.

This photo is for nostalgia purposes only. In the middle is the Pantheon, a beautiful church building that was turned into a homage to great people of France after the revolution. In the crypt, or what we would call the basement, are buried people such as Victor Hugo, Marie Curie, and Voltaire. Interestingly, Rousseau is also buried there, even though he was Swiss, though French Swiss.

Our apartment was just to the right of the Pantheon, about 4 blocks away. This is also the location of the Sorbonne, the university in Paris. If I had been thinking about it properly, I would have taken a photo of the university, since it is there that the young Conrad Grebel, founder of the Anabaptists, studied until he quit in disgust with his teacher. Click on Conrad's name to read my earlier blog of his exploits here. This area where our apartment is found is called the Latin Quarter since earlier higher education was always carried out in the Latin language. In fact Conrad would write to his Swiss brother-in-law/former teacher Vadian in Latin rather than German.

After our exploits at the Eiffel Tower in the morning we tried to take it easier in the afternoon; we knew we were going to be travelling for a long time on Saturday, from Paris to Goshen. Jacob, Isaiah, and I went to the park across the street from our apartment, called Jardin d'Luxembourg. It was a beautiful park with many amusements for kids, although you had to pay for every single one of them, even to use the playground. Since I was coming down to my last Euros and did not want to withdraw more money just so they could play on the swings, we ended up renting sailboats for the huge fountain. This was terrific fun. When I saw how fast the boats would travel I assumed that they had some kind of motor, but in fact they really were powered simply by the wind. The kids had sticks to push the boats in the direction they wanted. While we were there a film crew was working on a scene of a couple kissing on a bench at the fountain's side. I didn't recognize the couple, probably French actors. Although interesting it was a little annoying since they tried to keep shewing away anyone who got close to get their boats.

Finally, we decided to eat at a restaurant for our last evening. We had mostly been making our own food and eating the wonderful croissants, bread, and cheese of Paris. We of course had to try escargot, snails. I thought they might be one of the huge creatures I had seen at times in Europe, but they were medium-sized snails much like the ones in the US, though a little bigger than the typical snail. Jacob and I were the ones willing to order them, but then ironically everyone tried one and liked them, except for Jacob. They tasted good, though not like chicken. Nor were they chewing like clams or oysters.

That is how we spent our last day in Paris. It was both more exciting and more relaxing. A wonderful time was had by all.

Science of Paris

2008-07-29T21:35:00.008+02:00

The two museums we went to on our third day were the Science and Industry Institute and the Orsay Museum, an art museum with works from about 1848 to 1914. I also managed to get to the Notre Dame cathedral. The rest of the family was too tired to join me.

We went to the Cite des Sciences et de l'Industrie partly because any time we visit a city we like to see the science institute. I guess that's just the sort of people we are. The French aren't necessarily known as scientists as much as artists. But they of course also have many great scientific achievements.

One of the attractions to the science institute was a special exhibit called "Sex: What's the big deal?" It is an exhibit especially for children to learn about sexuality at an age-appropriate level. Some parents are jealous about sex education, wanting to make sure they are the only ones who teach their children about sex. I, on the other hand, am happy to get all the help I can get. It is hard to teach about sexuality. Jacob, Noah, and I went to the sexuality exhibit while Jill and Isaiah saw other interesesting things. The exhibit was well done, I thought.

In the afternoon while the others rested I enjoyed going to Notre Dame, the famous cathedral. For all its astounding beauty, I noticed all the gargoyles on the upper outer walls. I guess these ugly creatures are there to scare away evil spirits. If so, the architects of Notre Dame were especially worried about evil spirits. The gargoyles almost dominate the sculpture in places.

What impressed me again about this cathedral was that, like the Worms Cathedral, it had a chapel dedicated to Joseph which included a sculpture of Joseph with the child Jesus. And again like the Worms Cathedral, it had an emphasis on the resurrection of Jesus. There is a large wall around the choir in the front of the cathedral. And all the sculptures on the south side act out scenes from Easter, including the resurrection itself and then various resurrection appearances. On the north side is the birth and Palm Sunday. This is an emphasis on the resurrection that I have never encountered in architecture or art. Of course there is in the center of the choir, really the focal point of the cathedral, the Pieta sculpture, Mary holding the dead body of Jesus. So that the cross and suffering is still the focus, which I think is good as well. The cross and resurrection need to be held together.

The family went to the Musee d'Orsay together in the evening, since it is opened late on Thursday evening. It is filled with beautiful paintings and a few sculptures. If you like Impressionism then this is the place for you. It is filled with paintings by Monet and Van Gogh. It also has a lot of Manet and Degas. My favorite was the Van Gogh room. It included "Starry Night," but I was especially happy to see "Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles," which the Electric Brew has used as the basis of its bathroom in Goshen.

Orsay was a place of great beauty. It was once a train station like only the French would design, with such grandeur and beauty. But it eventually became too small for modern trains and so became an art museum. Compared to the Louvre, the themes were much less religious. And so the turn towards the modern age, and away from Christianity. But there were also a number of religious paintings as well.

After Orsay we crossed the Seine River and went to the Tuileries Garden and found some great playground equipment and also some cotton candy like we haven't seen before.

Art of Paris

2008-07-29T19:57:00.014+02:00

On our second full day in Paris we visited two museums, the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages and the Louvre. We purchased a two-day museum pass to enable us to visit multiple museums in one day. But we discovered that two is about the family limit, though I could easily go to three, I think.

Our day began with the Musee National du Moyen Age at Cluny. There we discovered some beautiful artwork, and of course lots of armor and medieval weapons. With Jacob and Isaiah's interest in the Middle Ages, we knew we would need to go here, plus it was within easy walking distance of our apartment.

A surprise find was the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, a beautiful series of tapestries, one for each sense, and then finally a sixth sense, that of love. They are housed together in a room and they are the kind of thing where you can just sit and look at them for a long time. Each tapestry includes a lion, a lady, and a unicorn. There is a way in which the sixth tapestry represents the lady transcending the five senses and saying that there is something more to life than what you can see, hear, touch, taste, or smell. Harry Potter fans may be interested in knowing that the Lady and the Unicorn tapestry can be seen in the Gryffindor common room in the movies.

We rested a little while back in the apartment before going to the famous Louvre Museum. The thing to say about this museum of fine art is that it is astonishingly huge. I think it was once a palace of the kings of France, and for that matter probably much of the artwork belonged to them as well. But after the revolution it was nationalized and shared with the public. It goes on and on, and it includes a wide array of sculptures as well as paintings. The pieces go to about 1850.

We wanted to make sure that we saw the great masterpieces. We did not bring a camera because I think there are usually plenty of examples of the artwork accessible on the web. I don't see any reason to photograph it again, with me in front of it. But if you follow the Louvre's the Masterpieces of the Louvre Trail, you will see some of what we saw. We did not see all of these and of course we saw many more. We did see the Louvre's famous ladies, the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Winged Victory of Samathrace. Because we went on Wednesday evening, when the museum is open late, we didn't have problems with long lines, and this in mid-July. We didn't even have to wait to see the Mona Lisa. There was a crowd, but within a few minutes we were at the front. The thing to say about the Mona Lisa is that it is small, and they don't let you get that close. Apparently it has been attacked by acid and one time was knifed. That explains why they search you before you enter the museum. Still it was great to see.

I perhaps enjoyed the most the The Wedding Feast at Cana, number three in the masterpieces trail. It shows the moment when the water is turned to wine and there is something about the way Jesus is portrayed, knowing that he is now revealed and there is no turning back from this path. It is a moment of enlightenment and recognition for Jesus. There is a resoluteness and serenity to it, but also a sense of crossing a threshold. This is it.

There are many, many religious paintings at the Louvre, especially since it focuses on earlier art. What surprised me is how often seeing these paintings led me and the boys to religious discussions. They wanted to know what these images portrayed, and it led to many serious discussions about Bible stories and religious issues. I hadn't expected that from a museum in Paris. I was also surprised at what they didn't know and realized that I need to work harder on helping them to know the Bible and its stories.

Monumental Paris

2008-07-29T18:53:00.008+02:00

We stayed in Paris for five nights, or what comes to 4 full days. Our first experience in Paris was not so good. We arrived by train from Mainz, Germany. I was disappointed that the boys never got to ride a French high-speed train. However, I discovered that the German trains went a lot faster in France than in Germany. So we still went really fast, but it was not like I remember my first train ride in France, where you seemed to fly across the countryside. But the disappointment was that upon our arrival at the Gare de L'Est in Paris, we found people not all that friendly and, as was expected, not all that helpful in any language other than French. When we couldn't find a taxi willing to haul 5 people, we finally decided to try the subway, though we had been warned repeatedly about pickpockets, especially when you carry your luggage around and so are obviously tourists. We never had any trouble with pickpockets and we bought a 5-day pass to the subway system. It was very expensive compared to what we were used to in Switzerland, where children under 18 are generally free and transportation passes gave access to museums. At least in Paris children under 18 were generally free in museums.

We came to our apartment on Boulevard St. Michel in the Latin Quarter, named that because the university is there, and at an earlier time education was in Latin. We took a small lift to the fifth floor and then had to walk the final set of steps up to a kind of loft, with slanted ceilings. It was a cozy and fun place that we found through Vacation in Paris, a New Jersey-based organization. One of the great things is we paid in US dollars long before the dollar plummeted to the Euro even more, so it was a reliable price. The apartment was great, with internet access, free telephone even to the US, and a clothes and dish washer. But best of all we could see the Eiffel Tower and Hotel des Invalides from our window, and the Jardin du Luxembourg, a big park, was just across the street.

On our first night out we found a crepe place, Le Fondeil, which offered us a tasty but inexpensive meal. And we also met some friendly Parisians. The staff there was very friendly and made great crepes. They were not the first friendly Parisians we met. When Jill couldn't figure out how to get through one of the barriers in the subway, someone showed her and welcomed her to Paris.

I may say more about this later, but Paris is much more like the US than Switzerland. It is a place where you need to be on your guard, not sure you can trust people. Switzerland is a culture of trust, where you assume people can be trusted. France and the US are not. For example, during my entire month in Basel, Switzerland, I was never asked to show a ticket on the trams. They just assumed that if you were on the tram it was because you had paid. Now when I went on longer train rides sometimes a conductor asked for a ticket and sometimes not. But in Paris they had elaborate barriers, like in Atlanta or other large American cities, to make sure you had a ticket in order to get through. Of course some people would cut through anyway. To have open trams is a much more convenient way to travel than to have barriers.

Perhaps the big difference is between large cities and smaller communities. Switzerland has no city over a million people, with even Zurich having less than a million in its total urban area. The big Swiss cities have about 150,000 in the city, or a little larger than South Bend, and Zurich has about 300,000.

In any case, for our first full day in Paris we decided to go to the must-see Parisian monument, the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately the lines were exceedingly long for each of the four routes, so after taking a few pictures that you can see here, we went to the Arc d'Triomphe. This is on the famous and beautiful Champs Elysees, which was in the news recently because the Tour de France always ends there. Unfortunately we missed the end of the Tour de France by one week.

The Arc d'Triomphe is in the middle of a huge traffic circle, or roundabout, where 12 streets come together. That's right, twelve. Fortunately there is a pedestrian tunnel under the roundabout so that you can safely get into the middle. The tomb of the unknown soldier is in the middle of the arch, and we saw the changing of the guard. They have two guards with modern weaponry and two with more traditional and showy weapons, also two men and two women. I was interested in how there were also two flags billowing under the arch, a French flag and the European Union flag. I wonder now whether that is always the case or whether it is happening now because France currently holds the European Union presidency. They also illuminated the Eiffel Tower in blue with a circle of stars on it. I know that is only happening now because of the EU presidency.

In this way France is also like the US, it seems to me. In both places there is great national pride. Displays of patriotism are quite common. This Arc d'Triomphe is commemorating the triumphs of Napoleon's armies, as they subdued much of Europe for France. In that sense what Germany did in World War II was just following the lead of France 150 years earlier. Of course the major difference is that France introduced religious freedom and democracy wherever it conquered whereas the Germans brought tyranny and extermination of Jews and other peoples considered undesirable. Mennonites in Switzerland first gained religious freedom in the days of the Helvetic Republic established through Napoleon.

Paris is a wealthy city with amazing architecture and sculptures and other artwork. To me it is important to remember that much of this beauty came from the concentration of wealth in the hands of the tyrannical kings of France with their absolute power. And then came the revolution with its great promise, only to have Napoleon become emperor and make France even wealthier through his conquering of much of Europe. I saw the painting "Napoleon crossing the Alps," (The more realistic one by Delaroche, not the romanticized one by David.) and it meant something different to me because I had been in the Alps and I thought of those conquered by his armies.

In many ways the US is in the position that France was 200 years ago, the world's superpower. Of course there are many differences, with the US not trying to conquer the whole world, just those places that block our plans.

I asked Mennonite missionary in Paris, Neal Blough about the way that France and America seem to have a love-hate relationship. He said he thought it was because both places think they are the light of the world, and both are wrong. I think he was referring to the Enlightenment which occured mostly in France and had a huge influence on the American revolutionaries. Both places also had a revolution in the late 1700s based on "liberty and justice for all" in America, and "liberty, equality, and fraternity" in France. Both countries see it as our duty to share the light of liberty with all the world, with force if we have to!

Ibersheim

2008-07-22T14:40:00.007+02:00

So on Sunday we rode through the German countryside until we came to Worms, pronounced verms. This is the place where the new reformer Martin Luther was called to defend his ideas about the church and the faith. He was condemned at this Diet of Worms, but he was able to find several rulers who were willing to defy the Holy Roman Emperor and defend him. According to tradition he said, "Here I stand, I can do no other." So at Worms we visited the Martin Luther monument that included several forerunners of the Reformation such as John Hus and Peter Waldo, two of the rulers who defended Luther, and several other statues.

Worms is still the home of an impressive cathedral, which is where Luther appeared. To me it appears to still be Roman Catholic. Northern Germany is mostly Protestant and Bavaria in southern Germany is solidly Roman Catholic. As I mentioned several rulers defended Luther against Emperor Charles V. In the Peace of Augsburg (1555) they enunciated the principle cuius regio, eius religio, "whose region, his religion." The ruled would follow the religion of the local prince or ruler. And so in this area of Germany it was a patchwork of Catholic and Lutheran rulers, not monolithic one or the other like in other regions. Not until after the Thirty Years War, a century later (1648), which paved the way for Mennonites to come to this region, did Calvinists become included in this pact between Catholics and Lutherans. And of course Anabaptists never were officially included, though they might be grudgingly tolerated here or there. Not until after the Napoleonic wars of the early 1800s were Mennonites and Amish granted freedom of religion along with all people. But of course Napoleon made an exception when it came to conscientious objection to war. That was just too dangerous.

Two things impressed me about the Worms Cathedral. The first is that the Joseph chapel included Joseph holding the baby Jesus, something I have not seen often. Usually it is Mary holding Jesus. The second is that there was a large sculpture depicting the resurrection of Jesus. Again, most churches focus on the cross, not the resurrection. While both are important, I think the resurrection needs more emphasis, as long as it is in the right way.

Worms also had dragons all over the place. There were these more modern ones that Jacob is beside, but it is clear that dragons were a symbol of the city long before, in various old fountains and other places. We also found our first Subway in Europe at Worms. Here I mean Subway the restaurant, the boys favorite restaurant. So we ate there.

Worms is where we returned to the Rhine River after our day's absence. We biked about 10 km up to Ibersheim, where we stayed at a beautiful bed and breakfast on Menno-Simons-Strasse. As you might guess, they turned out to be a Mennonite family. The farmhouse was in the middle of the village. But the Ellenbergers explained to me that that is how it is done in that area. The farmers have their farms in town and then their fields are spread out in the area around the town. So they own and work fields here and there outside of town.

The home was large and gorgeous. The Mennonites there have been prosperous. The hospitality was very warm. When Noah came down for breakfast in the morning, Isaiah welcomed him with the words "Welcome to breakfast paradise." There was bread, cheese, meat, eggs, yoghurt, fruit, and good things to drink. It was beautifully arranged.

The night before Traude, the wife, took us to the local Mennonite church, pictured above. The local Protestants, known as Evangelicals in German, also worship there, with each congregation taking turns, a Mennonite service one Sunday and then Evangelical the next.

Of interest in this church was that on each of two walls were memorials to the soldiers who died in the two world wars. The sign for World War I used lofty language of dying for the Fatherland and quoted the verse, "No one has greater love than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." The sign first listed the Mennonites who died and then the Evangelicals who died. The sign for World War II was plainer. It simply acknowledged who died in the war and didn't interpret what their deaths meant. Again it began with the Mennonites and ended with the Evangelicals. I of course asked Traude about the memorials and she said that there is sometimes discussion about whether they are appropriate, because of Mennonite peace convictions.

The Ellenbergers said we were the first American Mennonites to stay there. I hope we are not the last. It is a great place to stay. They do not appear to speak English. All of our conversation was in German, although Werner said a few things in English. Their daughter lived in the US for a little while and they stayed in Lancaster County. Much like our experience at Weierhof, they hosted us graciously and freely, saying that they wanted to return the hospitality that they had experienced in America.

On Monday we left early because our train for Paris left at about 12:30 and we had 40 km to go. We were a little nervous but made it in good time.

Biking in Germany

2008-07-22T13:20:00.008+02:00

I tried to upload a great video by Jacob of biking through a field near Weierhof from his perspective. But at the moment I can't get it to work.

But in any case I wanted to say a few things about biking in Germany. We rented two tandems from die Radgeber in Mainz, Germany. It's a play on words. Ratgeber is an advice giver, but with the change of one letter it is a wheel giver, or bike giver. They are great folks.

I also had my folding bike. You can get a view of this strange bike where Noah is popping a wheelie, something I would have condemned if I had seen it happening. But it gives you a good view of this bike where the handlebars and seat come down and then the body folds in half, making a much smaller thing to carry around.

The second photo is of the lovely scenery near Weierhof. It actually does look a lot like a hilly Kansas. There were many wheat fields in the area. My sense is that the vineyards predominate closer to the river. We biked for about four days along the river and one day, Sunday, from Weierhof to Worms, in the countryside. Along a river you don't have great variations in altitude, but in the countryside we had some big climbs before it mostly started going downhill.

Rheinhessen, this smaller area within the Palatinate, has excellent guides for biking and well-marked trails. They take you on public roads, dedicated bike paths, and farm roads, or roads where only local farm traffic is allowed. At each intersection there are well-marked signs telling you which direction to go to reach your destination.

This system works fairly well, but we still got lost a couple of times a day. It only takes one poorly-marked intersection to get lost. You look around for awhile, ask a passerby if you see someone, and then try a direction hoping to see the bike signs again.

The third photo is of my tandem bicycle that we rented. I sit in the back with a regular seat and can steer the whole thing from there. The second person sits in the front in a recumbent position. Unlike most tandems, they can choose whether or not to pedal. Jacob and Isaiah loved to sit in the front where you had a clear view of the scenery. Since I was sitting higher I also could see clearly. It was also easy to talk to each other, with our heads close together. My only complaint was that the adjustable handlebar was too adjustable, and would switch from one position to another when I didn't want it to. People would look at us and smile. It was a bike they hadn't seen before, but it is made by Hase Bikes in Germany.

On our shortest day we biked about 25-30 km and the longest was about 45 km. That is a range of about 15 to 25 miles. We had fun times and of course challenging times. I am glad we had tandems for the younger two. But it did get long at times for all of us. But the nicest thing was at the end when Jacob told me that the next time we go on a bike ride, he would like his own bike. The next time...

Weierhof, a German Mennonite center

2008-07-22T12:02:00.005+02:00

24 hours after we left our apartment in Paris, we arrived safely back home in Indiana. Of course it was a day of waiting about as much as we traveled. But perhaps more details on this past Saturday after I tell about our last week in Europe.

A week before, on Saturday July 13, we were still biking through the Rheinland-Pfalz (Rhineland-Palatinate in English) region of Germany. Our first two nights were focused on staying in castles along the Rhine River, and the final two days we focused on two Mennonite communities. So on Saturday night we stayed at the home of Ernst Neff in Weierhof. If I was more of a journalist and less of a pastor I would have some great photos of this small community that is almost completely Mennonite. But I was more focused on visiting with people and so the one picture is the back of Ernst's barn and home.

I have written more extensively about Swiss Anabaptists migrating to Alsace in search of greater tolerance for their religious faith. This is because Alsace played such an important role for the Amish division. Jacob Ammann settled in Alsace for awhile and this became the geographic center of the Amish. But the Palatinate also played a role in the Amish division, what I would call a mediator role as they tried to get the Alsatians and Swiss to agree. Of course all these Mennonites were of Swiss origin and so had a common tradition and understanding. But now they were taking that in different directions.

The Palatinate became a new immigration location for the Swiss after the 30 Years War depopulated the area. The local lords were willing to invite even Anabaptists to come and farm in their communities.

Weierhof's significance is more recent than all that, though. One of the most important Mennonite leaders of the 20th century, Christian Neff, was pastor of Weierhof. Why was he important? He is best known for two things. The first is that he was the originator of Mennonite World Conference. Under his leadership the first Mennonite World Conference was held in Basel, Switzerland, where France, Germany, and Switzerland meet, in 1925. The second is that he was one of the originators of the Mennonitisches Lexicon, a Mennonite encyclopedia and the inspiration for the English-language Mennonite Encyclopedia that came some years later. In fact you can read about Christian Neff in the online child of the Mennonite Encyclopedia (grandchild of the Mennonitisches Lexicon?) the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.

I asked our host Ernst about his grandfather Christian, saying that he must have been an interesting man. When Ernst replied, "People tell me he was interesting," his daughter Christina explained that if you are a 12-year-old boy, having a grandfather who spends most of his time writing in his study is not all that interesting.

We had a wonderful time with Ernst and Christina. Ernst was a retired farmer and long-time widower. He spoke good English and told great stories. They were wonderful hosts. Our simple meal of bread, meat, and cheese lasted from about 7 to 10. At one point they offered us Mennonite organic wine, Schoenhals was the label and Dornfelder was the variety. That led to two stories.

First I told a story. When I was gathering information about Rhineland-Palatinate for our travels I contacted the local tourism center and said I was interested in Mennonite history. So the tourism center sent me information about the Daetwyl winery, since the Detweilers are Mennonites. I read the English-language brochure and was surprised to read there that their Swiss ancestors immigrated to Germany because they were attracted to the wine-growing possibilities there. I had always thought that it was persecution that led Mennonites to the region, not wine. Christina commented that perhaps mentioning persecution was not very good marketing, and I commented that perhaps both intolerance in Switzerland and economic opportunity in Germany led to the migrations.

Then they told a story about Christian Neff. Neff was one of the first people in the area who had a car. But he employed a driver to chauffer him around. He used a stopwatch to time how long he drove him and he would encourage him to drive faster if things were going too slowly. One afternoon he was hosting C. P. Krehbiel or some other American Mennonite leader. Neff was showing him all the varities of vineyards in the region and Krehbiel commented that how much nicer it would be if all that area had been planted in wheat. According to the story, Neff said, the tour ends now and promptly brought Krehbiel back home.

But I was most intrigued with the stories that Ernst told about his own interesting life. The Weierhof sponsored a school for many years, but in the 1930s as the Nazis were coming into power the school became a public school. And eventually this former Mennonite school became one of the elite Nazi schools for educating future leaders of the party. Apparently Ernst attended this school because he lived across the road from it, not because he had party potential. But that meant that after the war the school was closed down and the community sent away while Americans occupied the school and community. When they returned a few months later, they discovered that all their war memorabilia were gone. Weierhof was then occupied by the French and then again the American military had a base there until the 1990s when the end of the Cold War brought the end of many American military bases. Ernst remembers a time when huge missiles were hauled on trucks into the base. He thought they might be nuclear warheads.

Ernst himself never faced the military draft because he was about 14 when the war ended. At that point, because they were so desperate for warriors, the Germany army was drafting 15-year-olds for the military.

The school was allowed to be re-opened, again by the Mennonites, and it was considered a very good school. It still operates today, though its church connection is not as strong, it is still influenced by the many Mennonites that continue to give leadership to it.

Weierhof today continues to be associated with the military and Mennonites. Whenever I would talk to local Germans about visiting Weierhof they would wonder if I was connected with the military. Clearly most Americans they meet are. But then I would say no, I am a Mennonite, and that would make sense to them too. Weierhof is where you find Mennonites, after all.

Weierhof is also the home of the German Mennonite Archives, which were started after World War II when the Danzig area Mennonite congregations disappeared and they needed to find a place to keep all their records. Gary Waltner is a South Dakotan who came to Weierhof many years before through MCC's PAX and married a local girl and stayed. He is the one who found us a place to stay and also helped us to bike from the Kircheim-bolanden train station to Weierhof.

When we arrived on Saturday we got there just in time for a community tea, and the women very kindly extended tea time a few minutes so that we could have some cake and coffee or tea. On Sunday we attended the Weierhof congregation. Unfortunately their regular pastor Andrea Lange was not there. It was an older congregation, at least that Sunday, where the announcements focused on deaths. Ernst introduced us and we were not the only North Americans visiting that Sunday. We met some wonderful people there.

I again noticed all the connections across the ocean. But I am also concerned that those connections are becoming thinner. Mostly historians are staying connected, but not church leaders. And there does not seem to be as many young people crossing the ocean for longer than a couple of weeks or months. For example Ernst's daughter Christina attended Bethel College and married an American. That kind of thing seems to be rarer.

But even with that concern, I was again impressed with the sense of connection we had with one another. We belong to a common family and follow a common lord with in many ways a common understanding, or at least common enough.

Paris with a bang

2008-07-18T22:27:00.006+02:00

I'm sorry I haven't been blogging well in Paris. I guess you could say the days are just filled. There is a lot to see and my legs are very tired, as is the rest of me by the end of each day.

I have a few more things to write about our days in Germany and then what we saw in Paris. But I wanted to write to let you know that we are coming home tomorrow. It will be good to be home. It will be strange for me as well; it has been 2 months since I have been in the USA.

Here are a few photos from our first day in Paris. The first is the view of the Eiffel Tower and Hotel des Invalides from the window of our little loft apartment in Paris. We missed the 4th of July fireworks but the national day in France is July 14th, Bastille Day. So at 10:30 pm this fireworks show started that we could see from our window. What a grand way to start our time.

And now it is coming to an end. My sabbatical is still another 4 weeks or so long, so I will be filling in more details from the trip when I arrive back home in Indiana.

Bacharach and Burg Stahleck

2008-07-15T20:38:00.007+02:00

This was our most pleasant day of biking along the river. We did have rain off and on for maybe half of the days of biking, but it was never so heavy that we really needed to put on our rain coats. We biked north a little bit to catch a ferry across the Rhine. There are no bridges across the Rhine between Koblenz and Mainz, a distance of about 95 kilometers, or 57 miles.

Then we came to the town of St. Goar, famous for its large Rheinfalls castle. We found a pleasant street cafe to eat at. Then we headed to Bacharach. We arrived early and stayed overnight in a castle again, the one in the first photo. This is Burg Stahleck and it is a youth hostel. It is in great condition. The outside looks very much like a castle but the inside is just like any modern youth hostel.

A word of warning though. If you are biking along the Rhine and then staying overnight in castles, it is helpful to know that castles are usually built upon bluffs many meters above the Rhine. We had a huge hill to walk up to get to the castle.

I continue to search for ice cream flavors that I cannot find in America. Here in Bacharach, which is named after the Roman god Bacchus, the god of revelry and wine, they had a Riesling flavored ice cream and another called Waldmeister. Riesling is one of the wines that is made along the Rhine, and waldmeister is an herb called Woodruff in English, which doesn't really help me. Both tasted good.

It was nice to be able to relax a bit more on this second day after a long day before. We had a pleasant time, except for my difficulty in getting money. But fortunately the youth hostel took our debit card.

The Rhine River

2008-07-15T20:09:00.007+02:00

After four nights in the Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, we are now in Paris where we have an internet connection again. Before I tell you about Paris I will tell you abour our four days in Germany. In some ways it is not surprising that we had no internet connection in Germany. We found the area where we were, at least, to be more of a rural area without all the connections you might find in other places. In that sense it reminded me of Indiana. We panicked at one point because Castle Liebenstein where we stayed one night did not accept credit or debit cards. So we gave them all our cash and then found it very difficult, actually impossible, to find a restaurant that did accept our cards. The worse point was when we bought some things at a drugstore, including snacks, only to discover that they did not accept our particular credit card. They did accept one that looked a lot like it but was actually different. We were wondering if we could eat and sleep. But fortunately the next castle where we stayed, Burg Stahleck, did accept our card.

We rode our bikes for five days, picking them up in Mainz on Thursday and then taking the train to Koblenz, from where we rode to Schloss Liebenstein. Unfortunately we got lost. I assumed that as long as we had a river on our right, we were on the right track. Unfortunately there is another river in that area, the Lahn River, and we ended up going down it. It was getting late by the time we figured this out and fortunately we could again take a train to get to our destination. Schloss Liebenstein is the castle on the right of the first picture, and it part of the "enemy brothers" with Schloss Sterrenburg on the left.

Jacob and Isaiah loved being in the castle. Jacob called the gift shop paradise. He was so excited that he couldn't stay out of there.

While the first photo is of the castle from the Rhine, the second is of the Rhine from the castle. We had a beautiful view of the river and fortunately were able to take a taxi up to the bluff overlooking the river.

While these first couple of days in Germany were focused on the beauty of the Rhine and experiencing its many castles, we also have an Amish Mennonite reason to be here as well. The Rhine River was the passageway for Amish and Mennonites out of Switzerland and into other parts of the world, whether it was first of all Alsace, France, not so far away, or a little farther down the river into the Palatinate, Germany, or down to the end of the river at Rotterdam, Holland, where they could depend on their siblings in the faith, the Dutch Mennonites, to help them settle in Holland, which a few did, or to find a way to America, which is what most did. So the ancestors of most Mennonites of Swiss background passed through here at some point.

Strasbourg

2008-07-09T23:35:00.005+02:00

From a remote farm near Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines we drove about an hour to Strasbourg, what some call the capital of Europe, because the European Parliament meets here. We are still in the Alsace. The first photo is from Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines and the second is from Strasbourg. So while one is a village and the other is a metropolis, both have a similar half-timbered Alsatian building style.

Strasbourg is an interesting place for Amish and Mennonites both historically and today. In history this is one of the cities that was fairly tolerant of Anabaptists. In the early days of the Reformation, the reformers in Strasbourg were very open to Anabaptist ideas. In fact Strasbourg tolerated both Catholics and Reformed, so maybe Anabaptists too? Michael Sattler came here to discuss believers baptism with Capito and Bucer. Melchior Hofmann also came here to preach his apocalyptic ideas that Strasbourg was the New Jerusalem. Capito was saddened when Catholics executed Sattler. But eventually Strasbourg imprisoned Hofmann. The only Anabaptists ever executed in Strasbourg were those who committed some other wrong, like the one who was a bigamist with a "holy sister" as a new wife. It was said that what other cities would execute an Anabaptist for, in Strasbourg they would beat you with rods.

Later Pilgram Marpeck came to Strasbourg and worked as a city engineer. John Calvin was in Strasbourg for a little while and met his wife there. She had been an Anabaptist.

Strasbourg was a location where Anabaptists could meet from many places. Dutch and Swiss would meet to discuss Christ's incarnation and discipline. At Strasbourg the Anabaptists were able to agree to certain issues of church order.

This became significant for the Amish as a source of the Ordnung, or church order. They draw up guidelines for membership and they could look back to the conferences at Strasbourg to say that Anabaptists had always gathered to discern together their church order.

The towers and bridge in the photo are significant in two ways. The first is that these were prison towers and so Melchior Hofmann may have been imprisoned in one of them. The second is that it was near the long bridge here, perhaps in an inn, where the first of these Strasbourg conferences was held.

For Mennonites the significance of these conferences is to see in them some tradition for general conferences like Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference, Mennonite Church USA assemblies, and Mennonite World Conference assemblies. And in fact the other significance to Strasbourg is that the headquarters of Mennonite World Conference is here. Our family briefly met executive secretary Larry Miller, his wife Eleanor, and his secretary. Larry grew up in Goshen but has lived in France for over 30 years. They were very gracious in hosting us.

Attempts at reconciliation

2008-07-09T07:42:00.000+02:00

On Tuesday we left Switzerland. It is the first time I am out of that country for 5 ½ weeks and it does feel strange. We are far away from the Swiss trains, from any trains for that matter. My plan had been to never rent a car during our time in Europe, to stick with railroads and bicycles. I prefer both of those modes of transportation to cars anyway, so it was no sacrifice. It also seemed like an appropriate way to honor my Amish heritage as I also explored that heritage in Europe. But ironically enough, as we decided to visit the location where the Amish once flourished, and where Jacob Ammann led his followers, we needed to rent a car. The owner of the Ferme-Auberge, or farmhouse inn, said that the bus just didn’t get that close. And we are indeed in a very remote location, near Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines.

We climbed through the Jura Mountains to get here, going by Glaserberg in search of some early Kaufman farms. We were able to find an old Rich farm, and a town that had Kaufmans in it, but unfortunately we missed a number of farms as well. In any case the Jura Mountians were again beautiful and I was happy to be in them. At some point we crossed the Swiss-French border.

After passing many small towns with closed restaurants we finally found a cozy restaurant that was open. We struggled in this new country with the French language. We know very little French and the French are as bad as British and Americans, perhaps worse, when it comes to learning other languages. All three of these nations expect others to learn their language, so why should they have to learn anyone else's? But the waitress was very patient and kind and with what German, French, and English we knew we managed to order a good meal.

Very quickly we moved from mountains to a wide plain. I was surprised just how flat this section of the Alsace is. Included on this plain was a small town called Ohnenheim. It was in the mill of Ohnenheim pictured above that in 1660 Anabaptist gathered to sign the Dordrecht Confession. And some 3 decades later, in 1694, another important meeting was called, somewhat related to the first. Because part of the Dordrecht confession that was accepted included the idea of shunning those excommunicated.

Palatine Mennonites were trying to effect a reconciliation between the Swiss and the Alsatian Anabaptists, or more properly the Amish and the Reist factions of the Anabaptists. Some of the Amish were still in the Berner Oberland in Switzerland. The Palatinate in Germany had been another location, along with the Alsace in today's France, that had tolerated Swiss Anabaptists. So all these folks were connected with Switzerland, but now they were in different locations.

The Palatines found themselves somewhat caught in the middle. They were accustomed to thinking of themselves as siblings in the faith and so the idea that the Alsatians had excommunicated the Swiss was very troubling. There was no idea of national autonomy. All believers were connected with one another and needed to be reconciled with each other.

So in 1694 Palatine Mennnonites called for reconciliation at this mill in Ohnenheim, Alsace. Reist admitted he was negligent in church discipline and in teaching that the true-hearted were saved, the Palatines rejected the shunning of the excommunicated, saying it goes too far. However Ammann would not drop shunning. For him that was unthinkable.

In fact some years later Ammann and his followers did ask for forgiveness for their wrongs. He admitted that he was too hasty in excommunicating Reist and his followers. He called for reconcliation. However he also continued to believe that shunning was essential and so would not reconcile unless they admitted that shunning was necessary. So again there was no reconciliation. According to some manuscripts my ancestor Isaac Kaufmann was one of the signers of this letter asking for forgiveness.

Here the the Palatines and Swiss were united in greeting Ammann's plea for forgiveness with silence. They did nothing. Jacob Gut of the Palatinate wrote that he thought silence was the best response to Ammann.

So there is an interesting, in my opinion, use of silence on both sides of this disagreement. Recall that the schism first started when Reist in practice silenced Ammann by ignoring him. He didn't come to a general conference because he was too busy farming. And then decades later again Ammann's attempts at reconciliation are greeted with silence, or what we might even call shunning.

I am a Mennonite and so in that sense I am more sympathetic with those who rejected shunning. But on this I sympathize with Ammann. The Swiss were saying they don't believe in shunning and yet in practice were shunning Ammann. I prefer Ammann's shunning to theirs. For Ammann the shunning is open and it has the goal of reconciliation. The Reist practice of shunning is veiled. Because it is done in what we today would call a passive-aggressive way, there is no way for the silenced one to achieve reconciliation. Because the other party does not openly admit that they are silencing the person, there is really no hope of reconciliation.

We are just outside Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, or what was also known as Markirch in German. This is the town where Ammann moved after he left Switzerland. This is a small town that is in the next mountain range, the Vosges. It is nestled in a valley in the mountains and it again, like Erlenbach im Simmental where Ammann was born, gives one the sense of being protected and secluded from the wider world. Amman was there for decades, my wandering ancestor Isaac Kaufmann was there for a little while.

I also have a photo of one of the many castles we saw in this region of Alsace. This is a reminder of Alsace's location as the border between France and the Holy Roman Empire, or what became Germany. It changed hands many times and there are so many castles, one supposes, because people had a great need to protect themselves from the many wars that raged across this land.

This is also a reminder that the Amish were able to live in this area because the local lords permitted it. I have not yet verified whether this was the castle of the lords of Rappolstein, but they are the ones who tolerated the Anabaptists.

Jacob Kaufmann farm

2008-07-08T07:24:00.010+02:00

Tonight is our last night in Switzerland. I again will have an internet connection in an off and on sort of way. Sorry I have blogged so many entries all at once. But that is the way it will probably be for the rest of the trip. And while I have a few more Amish and Mennonite sites to visit, the blog will probably be more travelogue at this point.

The morning began with a lot of rain in Grindelwald, but then we went again to Thun. I wanted to hike out to the farm that once belonged to Jacob Kaufmann, the brother of my ancestor Isaac, and it may very well have been the farm where he grew up as well. It is in Dornhalte, in Heimberg. This is a small and out of the way place, though by taking the train between Thun and Konolfingen to Heimberg, I only had to walk about 20 minutes to reach it.

To get there I headed north on the bike path between the highway and the railroad tracks. When I saw the Dornhalde sign I turned right. Then I almost immediately made a left onto a Wanderweg, which is to say a farm road that prohibits other vehicles from using it. The street name was Rothachenweg, or something like that. And then I saw the main farm house.

There are two farms there now, and the one is owned by a Shenk family, the name of my uncle. They are both dairy farms, and the one also has an orchard. The building are tucked away in a small valley and there really is a beautiful view of some nearby mountains.

This was again a strongly emotional experience for me, like when I sat in the prison in Thun and imagined Isaac Kaufmann there. I have focused a lot on places where Isaac was incarcerated, but this was now a place where he was productive and worked the land. This is where he contributed to his own welfare and the welfare of his community. It was a beautiful place to me. It felt good to imagine what he did there but then to also see that today there are farmers there who are also taking care of the land and contributing to their own welfare and the welfare of the community.

I found it interesting that the Reformed Church of Switzerland, once a bitter enemy of Mennonites, but now working at reconciliation in a number of positive ways, has a poster about loving enemies with an image of George Bush. Is he the enemy to be loved or the person being questioned? The translation is something like this: "Do you really have to love your enemies?" Then the subtitle is "What touches the world, touches us." It is for the Reformed church magazine. The Swiss Reformed have done a lot of work on acknowledging the dark episode of Anabaptist persecution in their past. Just in the last couple of years great strides have been made in the relationship. All the Mennonite churches I visited were working with the Reformed church in their area. It was heartening to see.

We ended our day in Basel. This was a last minute change to the itinerary. It partly was a way for me to see Basel again. I really love this city and I will miss it. We ate in a sidewalk café and then took the ferry across the Rhine River. These ferries have no engines. They use a cable and the current of the river to pull them across. The Rhine River will keep reappearing in the upcoming blogs. The Rhine finds its source in Switzerland but then journeys through the Alsace in France and then Germany, and finally to the Netherlands. It is the river that has defined European Mennonite identity for centuries.

James Bond and the Schilthorn

2008-07-08T07:13:00.007+02:00

Because of a mix up with our apartment in Murren, we had to leave a day earlier than planned. So we spent an uneventful night in Grindelwald. But before we went there we took a cable car to the top of the Schilthorn. We were very lucky when we were on the Jungfraujoch. We were able to see all the way to the Black Forest in Germany and into France. As we climbed the Schilthorn it started to rain and the clouds came in so thick that we couldn’t see a thing.

So we went into the movie room where they showed excerpts of the James Bond Movie “In her majesty’s service.” Why? Well, at the top of the Schilthorn is a restaurant called the Piz Gloria. As it was being constructed the James Bond producer came by and asked to use it for the movie before it opened. So this restaurant served as a remarkable lair and hideout for the movie’s bad guy. They showed the remarkable skiing scenes in the movie.

After this we went into the restaurant which revolves so that as you sit there for an hour you have a 360 degree panoramic view of the mountains surrounding you. At first we couldn’t see a thing but as we began to get our food the clouds started to disperse and finally we saw clear views of the mountains, and even Lake Thun which we had crossed in a boat on our way to the Alps. If you look carefully you too can see Lake Thun in the second photo. What a magnificent way to dine. And in Switzerland it takes so long to dine that we had no problem circling the panorama almost twice.

In Switzerland eating out is expensive. One time I ate at Burger King to see if it was any different from the US. I ordered a whopper, small fries, and small drink. It cost $13.25. It wasn’t very different from the US except the high price, that they gave me mayonnaise to eat with my french fries, and that one of the drinks was Rivella, a Swiss pop made from whey, a byproduct of cheese production. Anyway it costs maybe $20 for a low priced meal at a dining in restaurant. But one nice thing about Switzerland is that the restaurants in these fancy places like the Schilthorn and Jungfraujoch are not any more expensive than the restaurants out in the middle of nowhere. They don’t gouge you.

As I said, we then went to Grindelwald, which is a beautiful place. But we were very tired from our days of hiking and going to the tops of mountains. So mostly we rested and played games. Grindelwald is yet another location associated with my ancestor Isaac Kaufmann, who clearly led a chaotic life as an Anabaptist teacher, moving from one place to another to keep ahead of the authorities. An alp in Grindelwald is one place where he managed to farm for awhile, according to Sam Wenger. This would have been a nice place to stay. My last two photos are of Grindelwald.

Jungfraujoch

2008-07-07T22:35:00.009+02:00

This blog begins with an early morning view from our apartment window in Murren, but most of the blog is about our adventure to the top of the Jungfraujoch, about 11,000 feet above sea level. We took the train, which for the last hour or so is almost completely through tunnels in the mountains. I assume they did this to preserve the beauty of the mountains.

The three highest peaks in this region are the Eiger, the Monch, and the Jungfrau, translated into English as the Ogre, the Monk, and the Virgin. The monk is between the other two, protecting the Virgin from the Ogre. We went to a tourist wonderland between the Jungfrau and the Monch.

There were of course the up close and incredible views of the glaciers. Then there were the snow disks; we went sledding, and then the boys went skiing as well. Unfortunately we missed the husky rides. Finally there was the ice palace carved out of the glacier. It would have been best to have had ice skates for that.

I hiked across the glacier to the Monchjochhutte, the highest mountain hut in Switzerland. It was a contrast to the touristy happenings at Jungfraujoch. Here German rather than English was the main language. The clientele included those of us who had hiked the 45 minutes across the glacier, and mountaineers who had come by far more difficult means.

In this region English appears to be the first language. So many more people speak English that it is best to start with it rather than German. I am amazed at how international English is and how fortunate some of us are to have it as our native language.

Muerren days

2008-07-07T22:05:00.006+02:00

We spent three nights in Murren for pure enjoyment. Murren is in a beautiful location. We first took a train into Lauterbrunnen, and then from there took a cable car up the mountainside to where we got another train to Murren. The mountiains look like they are just outside our window.

On the first day we hike in the area above Murren and found the terrific playground that you see. That was also a good place for lunch. Then we hikee some more, sometimes walking through cow pastures, sometimes with the cows accomanying us. Fortunately I used to hang around cows in my youth, or else they would have been a little too intimidating for us. One time a mother cow bellowed at her youngster to get close, and so we weren't sure what to do while she bellowed, though we at least stayed on the other side of the fence until she had calmed down.

About every hour to half an hour or so we would come across a small farm with a restaurant attached. We could order some ice cream or get something to drink. It is a very civilized way to hike. And then soon enough we would be in a wild section again.

We found a magnificent stream that led into a tremendous waterfall. We enjoyed the beauty of God's creation. The amount of water melting from the glaciers and creating streams into these valleys is unbelievable.

The Amish and Mennonite division

2008-07-07T07:32:00.000+02:00

Here is a photo of where we stayed during our time in the Emmental. It is Unter Habegg and is a fairly traditional farm. We stayed in the Stockli, or what the Amish call a Grossdoddy house. That is, once the youngest son takes over the operations of the farm, then his parents move into a small home next to the main farmhouse. From there they help in their retirement. So the Blaser grandparents live on the ground floor and we stayed in what Europeans call the first floor, or the American second floor. It was a cozy place to stay with beautiful woodwork, especially on the ceilings.

The other building is the main farmhouse. Some accuse the Swiss of loving their cows too much, and perhaps part of it is that they live with them. This huge building is both the house and the barn. Since I do not have a wide angle lens, I could only fit the front half of the building into the photo, the human half. Humans live in the front of the house and the back is a barn where the cows stay. That is where the milking is done. Herr Blaser's milk becomes organic Gruyere cheese.

That may not sound like the introduction to the division between Amish and Mennonites but it is. It was in a farmhouse like this, called Fridersmatt, perhaps 15 kilometers from here, where the division between Amish and Mennonites took place.

In previous blogs I have given some background to the division. It was another time of more intense persecution, with the Bernese government confiscating property and exiling Anabaptists. Some would stubbornly return. It was also a time of evangelization. There were new converts to Anabaptism, such as Jacob Ammann's family and my ancestor Isaac Kaufmann's family. Many of these new converts were found in the Bernese Oberland, near Thun, whereas the oldtimers were here in the Emmental, around Langnau. Perhaps part of the new popularity of Anabaptism was from the Pietist movement that emphasized a personal piety and not just going to church for the sake of going to church.

Apparently Hans Reist, an elder among the oldtime Anabaptists, at some point appoints Jacob Ammann an elder. Eventually Ammann moves to what is today France, in Alsace, a German-speaking region, to the town of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines in French, Markirch in German. He manages to successfully sell his property in Switzerland, no small undertaking since the government assumes that all Anabaptist property belongs to it, and buy a farm in Markirch.

In Alsace Ammann is among Anabaptists that some 30 years before had adopted the Dutch Dordrecht confession of faith with its strong emphasis on shunning those excommunicated (2 articles on the subject), its inclusion of footwashing, and its greater emphasis on the authority of individual leaders. Ammann becomes concerned about the way the Anabaptist church seems to be becoming more and more like its neighbors. This might be expected in a place like Alsace where the faith is tolerated. But he also sees problems in Switzerland, where in the face of persecution the church is willing to compromise in order to stay.

We don't know a lot about Ammann, we know even less about his eventual opponent Hans Reist. Some years before he lost his property to the government and was exiled. While in exile he was part of a group that argued that one could graciously accept the aid of the Dutch Anabaptists while at the same time not acknowledging them as siblings in the faith. But Reist returned to Switzerland. He was willing to compromise in order to stay. We have official documents that show elder Hans Reist promising to attend communion at the Reformed church, in effect pretending to be Reformed.

Because of his concerns for the spiritual welfare of the church, Ammann calls the church to more strict discipline. This means observing communion twice a year instead of once. Communion is a time when everyone must examine themselves as to whether they are worthy to commune and whether there are any conflicts that would prevent them.

He also calls the church to a regular practice of footwashing with communion, something that was not part of the Swiss tradition but is found in Dordrecht.

He also believes it is not enough to simply excommunicate sinners, so that they cannot take communion but otherwise are not treated differently. They must be shunned, one should not eat ordinary meals with them either. This is the defining issue of the Amish-Mennonite division, the one that endures.

Ammann also thought leaders should have more authority to make discipline decisions. He became frustrated with the way the other Anabaptist leaders insisted on consulting with their congregations before making decisions. He thought leaders have the spiritual authority to make these decisions. Here again Dordrecht has a higher view of the leaders role than the traditional congregationally based leadership among the Swiss.

Ammann also had a specific case in mind, where a known liar was not excommunicated. He thought this proved his case that discipline was not taken seriously.

A final interesting issue, especially in the context of renewed persecution and Pietism, was the salvation of the true-hearted. The true-hearted, or half-Anabaptists, were neighbors of Anabaptists who were sympathetic to their beliefs and practices but did not become Anabaptist. However, they took many risks to protect Anabaptists from their own government. Reist said that perhaps the true-hearted were saved. Ammann saw this as just another example of how the church was becoming lax and was becoming unwilling to tell the truth.

As Ammann travelled in Switzerland, apparently on a commission from the Alsace Anabaptists, to see where the Swiss Anabaptists stood on these issues, he thought he was finding some sympathy for his concerns. For example Peter Gyger and Niklaus Moser, the owner of Fridersmatt, seemed to agree with him.

However when Ammann spoke to Reist he did not find a sympathetic listener. When Ammann asked about shunning, Reist replied, quoting Jesus, that what enters the mouth does not make one unclean. In other words eating meals with excommunicated people does not make one unclean.

When other leaders saw Reist take such a strong stand against Ammann, they followed. Ammann became frustrated when he called for a second meeting with Reist and he did not attend. So he called for a general meeting to take place at Fridersmatt near Bowil in the Emmental. He gave two weeks notice so that Reist could be there.

I am not sure how many attended but I think it was a crowd. These large Swiss farmhouses would have room for a large group particularly in the barn area . Reist and his closest leaders did not attend. They sent word that they were too busy with farming and so could not make it.

According to the sources, Ammann became enraged. On the spot he excommunicated Reist and those with him. And so the division occurred.

Hinter Hutten, another Anabaptist hiding place

2008-07-06T06:46:00.003+02:00

In the afternoon we took the bus from Barau Dorf, close to where we are staying, to Fankhaus Schulhaus, about a 20 minute walk from Hinter Huetten. Hinter Huetten is where there is a barn that has a hidden alcove within it. The boys are standing next to it. This is a place where Anabaptists could hide when the local bailiff was pursuing them.

The current family of the farm, the Fankhauser family, is descended from the builder of the barn and is currently Reformed. But they discovered that some of their ancestors became Anabaptist and that is why they made this hiding place. This place was unknown to the outside world until about 1979, when the owner made public what had been passed on in his family for generations.

The current family has done a fantastic job of creating historical displays in German, French, and English on Anabaptist history. It really was the best I have seen along with Schleitheim. They have also set up a whole series of enterprises, like farmers do in this area as they wait for hikers to pass through their farms. I think I have explained before how you can hike along a trail and then pass through a farm property. Some of these farms open a small restaurant or at least snack bar for those passing through.

So the Fankhausers charge a small admission fee to the historical display in their farmhouse, and then also have a snack area, and finally a souvenirs areas. In each place they have a small basket where you can drop in your money. So it is on the honor system, again a touch that reminds me a lot of Lancaster County Amish.

The displays included the narration of the story of the current farmer's ancestors who were Anabaptist. I appreciated the way this family decided to find the truth about their background. It encouraged me to stay on the trail of Isaac Kaufmann and to continue to find out what I can about him. In the case of the Fankhausers the family still has the farm presumably because some of the children did not become Anabaptist and so were able to inherit the farm. I don't think any of the old Kaufmann farms have Kaufmanns on them anymore. Not that some Kaufmanns didn't return to the Reformed faith.

Middle Ages in Bern

2008-07-06T00:08:00.006+02:00

My two younger boys are wild about the Middle Ages, and the Berner Historisches Museum has a Middle Ages park during its exhibition of Charles the Bold. They have three different areas where you can learn about how things were done in the Middle Ages. Of course one of the areas has to do with the military, but the others are clothing and building.

Here you see Jill and the boys using a Middle Ages crane. The power was supplied by people walking in a wheel like a hamster, and they would then lift heavy objects for constructing the great cathedrals of the time. It was quite amazing but to be in the wheel made me dizzy. Not something I would want to do all day. They also demonstrated building arches.

In the other you see us unsuccessfully using a battering ram. We had to give it another try. They also had a catapult that sent soft balls flying. Again I was amazed by the ingenuity and just what was possible before petroleum and electricity became king.

In the third area on clothes we got to wear armor, something the boys liked doing. I also learned something new and interesting. Men and women used to all wear robes, which all of us know from Bible pictures. According to the textile woman at the museum, men began wearing pants as a military innovation. They allowed men to wear armor and to battle more effectively. Eventually, as sometimes happens, this military innovation passed into daily life as well. This makes sense to me, and it would also explain why men wore pants and women did not, since women were not supposed to fight in military battles. So today we might see pants now as a sign of the military. But I suppose I'll stick with them because they are more effective and efficient for a whole number of activities besides battling.

Mennonites of Emmental

2008-07-04T23:19:00.004+02:00

Last Saturday we arrived at Langnau im Emmental, the location of the oldest continuing Mennonite church in the world, with its roots going back to 1527. The Langnau congregation is alive and well. I again contacted the President of the congregation and I again was treated with the utmost hospitality by him, as I was treated in Bern.

President Daniel Engel had been a MCC trainee in Ephrata, Pennsylvania and Steinbach, Manitoba. He spoke very good English that he learned from that time, and he said that their congregation hosts American visitors almost every Sunday. They have printed several of their congregational brochures in English for our sakes. Daniel picked us up at the farmhouse where we are staying and brought us to church.

The service was quite the event, it being the first time I have heard a Swiss Mennonite preacher. As I think I mentioned before, when I attended the Schaenzli Mennonite congregation in Basel the local Reformed pastor was preaching for a joint service. When I attended the Bern congregation last week, a Spanish Baptist preacher was the guest. So finally I heard a Swiss preach. However, he preached in Swiss German. The whole service was in Swiss German except for some High German hymns, and there were quite a few Swiss German hymns. I think it's great that they are doing so much in Swiss German, the language of the heart for the Swiss. But it was harder for me to understand than High German.

After the service was a carry-in meal, something they do every fifth Sunday. When we asked about it, it sounds like something they adapted fairly recently from American Mennonites. So again I am impressed with the interconnections between Mennonites across oceans from one another. MCC has made many connections possible. There is a sense of commonality and what in German can be called a siblinghood in Christ.

When Daniel learned that we planned to visit places in Langnau by bus and train, he thought that would be too difficult. So he took part of his day off on Monday and drove us to the Emmental Schaukaeserei, the place where they show you how they make Emmental cheese, what we in America call Swiss cheese. That was fascinating and tasty.

Then he drove us to Trachelswald Castle. This is the infamous castle where so many Anabaptists were imprisoned through the years. And in fact the castle remains open to the public, and the displays in it focus on the Anabaptists. I found that astonishing, but I think it is one of the affects of the Tauferjahr last year, the Anabaptist year, where Switzerland made some attempt to recognize its history of mistreatment of Anabaptists but also the survival of Anabaptism in Switzerland.

At Trachelswald I discovered that there is a Tauferpfad, or Anabaptisit path, that one can walk through the Emmental. I also bought some Tauferbrot, or Anabaptist bread, at the bakery. When I aske the baker about it she didn't know why it was called Tauferbrot. Daniel said that Tauferbrot was unheard of until the Tauferjahr, so he suspected bakers made it to connect with the commemorations.

In the photo you can see the beautiful Emmental land, this being the view from outside our window at a farmhouse. The second photo is one of our guys trying out the leg irons in one of the Trachelswald prison cells.

We came to Emmental expecting to find some ancestral lands in this area. But as I think I already mentioned, the Kaufmans were latecomers to Anabaptism, joining some 15o years after its founding. They also were more from the Oberland area, near Thun, and not so much here in the Emmental.

However, my wandering ancestor, the Anabaptist leader Isaac Kaufmann, did live for a while in Schangnau near here. Hanspeter Jecker suspects he lived there because it was ruled by Trachelswald but it was not connected to it. There was another county in between. So the rulers in Trachelswald had more trouble keeping track of what was happening in Schangnau. In any case some of the earliest official reports on Isaac are connected with Trachelswald. If I'm reading correctly, it appears that he and perhaps his wife Elsbeth were imprisoned here at one point.

Family Again

2008-07-03T22:31:00.005+02:00

I haven't blogged for a week because I haven't had internet access during that time. My life has been a whirlwind since then. Last Friday I picked up my family at the Zurich airport. It was so wonderful to see and touch them again. Actually we had been keeping in touch using Skype video so I had seen them about every other day on video. But now I could touch them.

At the Zurich airport they have a glass wall between those arriving and those waiting. So I saw them through the glass but they could not come out to greet me until they got their luggage. So it was like the "Boy in the Bubble" movie with John Travolta back in the 70s, who was separated from those he loved by plastic. Once they were through the glass I hugged them a lot. It is so nice to have them here.

After a night in the Backpackers Hotel in Zurich, we went on a hike to the Anabaptist Cave near Baeritswil. You can see my Tauferhohle, or Anabaptist Cave blog from before to learn more about this place. I thought it was such a lovely place for a family to visit when I was there that I thought I would take the family when they came, even though they would be suffering from jet lag still. I have no mercy.

So I bought some bratwurst and hot dogs and then we hiked all the way from Baeritswil. I had ridden my bike the first time, and I have to say that the hike is much prettier. It is about 3 hours round trip, assuming you stay for a little while. For us it was more like 4 hours because we not only grilled meat at the fire pits, with wood and newspaper already there for us to use, but then we stopped at a pool in the creek to wade.

So what is nice about the hike is that for the first half you go along a creek which is also surrounded by woods, so it is not just farmland in the sunlight. And then of course the cave is huge and magnificent, and what kid doesn't like a cave? So I would have to call this the number one family friendly Anabaptist site in Switzerland. And again we did it all with public transportation, taking a train from Zurich to Wetzikon, and then a bus to Baeritswil. It took about 45 minutes to be out in the country. You get off at the Baeritswill Oberdorf bus stop and then just follow the Tauferhohle Wanderweg signs, and the yellow markings as you go. It was a great way to spend the afternoon.

From Zurich we went to Langnau im Emmental, an historic Mennonite community. There we stayed in a cozy farm building. And there we didn't have an internet connection, and Langnau was not the kind of place to be full of internet cafes. And so that is why I have been out of communication for awhile. So I will try to fill you in over the next several days about what we did in Langnau.

The waters of Berne

2008-06-27T06:39:00.007+02:00

One of the things that I like about Bern is the way the Aare River surrounds it on three sides. Hundreds of years ago Bern built a moat on its west side so that the city was completely surrounded by water. But the moat is gone. The river is a beautiful and clean blue and rushes past the city quite fast, almost looking like rapids in places. The river begins in Lakes Brienz and Thun, flows through Bern, and then goes to the Rhine River.

The Bernese like their river and they swim in it. Unfortunately I did not have my swimsuit with me when I was there. I visited the river and the free swimming pool with a friend I met at Taize and the place was full of people enjoying the sun and the water. We finally had some heat and sun after a full month of cooler and wetter weather.

The first photo is of the Aare River. This general area was once a port, apparently when smaller boats were used. Today Basel on the Rhine River is the only port in Switzerland. One of the ways that Bern tried to deal with its Anabaptists in the late 1600s was to ship them down the Aare River all the way to Holland, where they would be exiled to America, and then would not be able to return. As I think I already mentioned, they would exile Anabaptists but then they would return anyway.

I have mentioned before my ancestors Isaac Kaufmann and Elsbeth Mergerdt. Isaac moved around a lot over his life time, as he tried to avoid authorities. He became part of one of these ship schemes. In 1699 there is a reference to him being sent to a ship in Amsterdam, which would then take him to the West Indies.

The problem the Bernese had with this is that the Dutch would not cooperate. As soon as these prisoners would reach Dutch soil, the Dutch let them go free. They did not agree with what the Bernese were doing, recognizing it as persecution.

And so it appears that in this case Isaac escaped to Cologne, Germany. And so an entry a year later mentions the authorities needing to pay 5 men to look for Isaac.

I had another interesting water experience in Bern. On Sunday, June 22 I attended the Bern Alttaufer Gemeinde, or Bern Mennonite Church. What a great day to attend! They had a baptism and communion service.

Daniel Neuenschwander, president of the congregation, hosted me for the morning. He picked me up and took me to the Wohlensee where the baptism took place. A highlight for me is that the officiant baptized his son, and asked the questions and gave the pronouncements in Spanish for him. So I could understand much better than the German questions. They are the ones in the second photo.

And then the father of the officiant (grandfather of the one being baptized) preached the sermon that morning, so that I first heard the sermon in Spanish, and then the son translated into German. So again I understood more of this sermon than any I have heard for a month. This family is apparently a missionary family from Spain, and so the officiant is now a professor at Bern University. Several other Swiss young people were baptised and it was nice to see all of them.

Daniel was an excellent host and I had good conversation with him. I was surprised how much I felt at home in this congregation in Europe. There is such a great cultural and geographical distance between this congregation and my own, but there also was so much that was similar. The baptismal pledges and formulas seemed very familiar, as was the communion practice, except for one small thing I find among Europeans, or maybe it is most other Christians. They eat the bread and drink the cup as soon as they get it. The American Mennonite congregations I have attended usually serve the bread to everyone and then eat it together, the same with the small individual cups of juice.

Berne, capital of Switzerland

2008-06-27T06:36:00.005+02:00

On Saturday evening I arrived in Berne, and I might as well say from the beginning that I have decided that it is the least favorite of the major Swiss cities. You might say that the relationship got off to a bad start. When I got off the train I followed some other people to some stairs and went up them. But I have since learned that I went the wrong way. The place where I came out had little information. The bus I needed to get to my hotel was off at some strange place. I walked around towards it but couldn't find it. I gave some money to a beggar who looked like a 20-something meth addict. She was the first of many addicts I would see during my visit. She was also only the second beggar I have encountered, the first was an old man in, of all places, the small French Swiss village of Tavannes in the Jura.

So I walked back towards the station trying to find my way. The strangest thing to me was that everywhere else you come out in a big train station filled with stores and friendly people. You just ask someone or go to the information booth. But here there was none of that. I was on my own. I wandered around for some 45 minutes before I finally found the train station that I would have come out of if I had gone the "right" way.

I went into a ticket office to ask how to find the bus. In Switzerland these offices always have you take a number rather than waiting in a line. But in this office there was no line and the number dispenser wasn't working for me. Even so, the next available agent insisted that I take a number before he would help me, even though I was clearly the only person there. And then he couldn't really help me so he sent me to another office. There I met a young man who was very sympathetic to my comments about how difficult it is to find anything in this city. Finally I got to the Marthahaus, which is a reasonably price pleasant place to stay, though it is not in the old town. But the theme of seeking and not finding continued throughout my stay in Bern. The one time it was when I just wanted an ice cream cone but couldn't find any.

Perhaps another problem I had with Bern was its strong motif of human domination of animals. There is a statue of Samson subduing a lion and Bern is name after the bear and symbolized by it. There are several statues that show a man in charge of a bear, and of course there are the bear pits, where bears are kept in not so pleasant conditions. A Bernese friend says she is embarassed by them, but they are now working on making a nice spot for the bears.

Bern came across to me as a dominating city. As I read the history, and notice that Bern is the largest canton in Switzerland, there is almost an imperialistic sense of conquest, gobbling up more rural areas to put under their rule. And of course part of their ruling of rural areas was trying to root out Anabaptists, something the cities wanted to do but the rural areas themselves didn't seem too keen on.

Having said all that, Bern is a beautiful city, but in a bigger is better, aren't you impressed with us kind of way. Don't worry, I will have nice things to say about Bern. I met some wonderful people, really the friendliest people I have met. But that is for another blog.

Thun and its prisons

2008-06-27T05:54:00.006+02:00

Thun is a nice city on Lake Thun, with an old castle on top of a hill that has a unique presence in the city. The castle was at one point a grain bin and is now a museum. And up until the early 20th century, the four towers continued to be used as prison cells. I saw at least eight potential prison cells at the present time. Only one of them, of course, is actually set up like a prison cell, the one I have photographed. The others now have other museum displays not related to their original use. From what I can tell, these were still prison cells even after part of the castle was a museum!

There is also a large knights room in the top middle section of the castle. It was used for meetings of the knights but then eventually became an interrogation or torture room. Torture was the standard method of interrogation in the 1500s.

When I first discovered these prison cells I sat in one of them for a long time. This is the prison where my ancestor, Isaac Kaufmann, was imprisoned for his faith. I still have some translating to do, but it may also be where my ancestor Elsbeth Mergerdt, his wife, was imprisoned, and she may have given birth to a daughter here.

This was certainly the most emotional experience that I have had here so far. And it's a little difficult to know how to write about it. When you look out the windows of these towers you are way up in the air. You are not going to try to escape. I considered what it might feel like to have your freedom taken away like that. You have other people telling you where you will sit and eat and what you will do. It must be awful. I considered also my anger at those people who imprisoned them. I guess sitting there in the prison cell made it all feel closer and more real to me than it ever has before, and my sense of the feelings that Isaac and Elsbeth may have experienced was more real.

And I considered the choices that Isaac and Elsbeth made. There was first of all their choice to be baptized as adults, against the law of the land. And then there was the congregation's choice of Isaac as a leader, and his decision to accept that charge and exercise it. It made his life difficult. Rather than the rather sedentary life of most Swiss, who would stay in their home village, he moved around a lot, as I will mention as I visit these other places. Because he moved around so much it appears to me that he was genuinely trying to stay in Switzerland for many years. But eventually he and Elsbeth moved to Alsace and then Montbeliard in France.

I thought about the choices he made, and how he could have given up. He could have decided to recant his faith. But he decided to stubbornly remain with his convictions and to allow his life to follow its course according to where they lead. I thought about the choices of the authorities, who thought that the only way to deal with these heretics was through imprisonment, confiscation of property, and exile.

All of their choices have made all the difference in the world in who I am today. Isaac and Elsbeth's decision was one of a series that have formed me into an American Mennonite pastor. I am grateful for the decisions they made, though I am not necessarily proud of them or think that I am in the best possible situation. But it is good. And what they did was good. Perhaps I can find ways to be a similar witness to a new world that God is making, that is so different from the current world that the authorities don't understand it.

Oberhofen, home to Ulrich Ammann

2008-06-26T21:49:00.002+02:00

Here are two scenes from Oberhoften, a beautiful location on Lake Thun. The first is the Oberhofen church, where Jacob Ammann's younger brother Ulrich was baptized. Ulrich was some 15 years younger than Jacob. Their parents moved to Oberhofen at some point between them. Jacob made his living as a tailor in Oberhofen.

We know a little about the Ammann brothers' personalities from the Letters of the Amish Division that have been preserved. The portrait we get of Jacob from these is that he was rather rash and had a temper. Several times people describe him getting angry. However, from the letters that Ulrich wrote by himself he comes across as a gentle person. They are a study in contrasts. Ulrich supported his brother through the Amish division, but his tone was always more conciliatory.

We also doubt that Jacob Ammann was literate. He signed many contracts among his followers and it was usually i.A., sometimes with the note that he couldn't write. Robert Baecher points out that that doesn't mean he couldn't have read. But we also read in the Letters of the Amish Division that Jacob would have letters read to him out loud. All that suggests that he was illiterate, though we don't know.

Ulrich never reached the stature and respect that his brother Jacob had among his followers, but in many ways his views in the Amish Division letters ended up as the Amish ones.

The Oberhoften Castle is now a museum and a beautiful place to visit. I rode my bike there and the bike ride along Lake Thun is great. Then I took a ship from Oberhofen to Thun, and as we approached Thun we heard people clapping and singing. I thought it was a game but in fact some people were being baptised!

Steffisberg, home of the ancestors

2008-06-26T21:19:00.008+02:00

So last Friday night I finally got to Steffisberg, which is where the Kaufmanns originate, or at least the Anabaptist ones. It turns out that their grandfather immigrated from Shopfe near Basel. I got to Steffisberg and I might as well admit that I was disappointed. Steffisberg was no grand location. I experienced it mostly as a place that people try to drive through as quickly as possible.

I have become accustomed to central Basel, but also its surroundings. There just aren't many cars around. When I ride bike the 20 km into town, I hardly have any stop signs because the roads are not full of cars. It's nice. But Steffisberg was more like America in the way it was just full of fast cars. Steffisberg itself is fairly flat, it's just that it is surrounded by beautiful mountains.

In some ways maybe it is a good thing that I don't think Steffisberg is the most beautiful place on earth. I don't find myself pining for the old country.

The church in the photo is the Steffisberg Reformed Church and it is where my ancestors Isaac Kaufmann and Elsbeth Mergerdt had the majority of their children baptised. I am not sure, but I think it is also where Isaac was baptized.

I have been learning a lot about Isaac and Elsbeth. On February 18, 1676, they were married with two other couples in a triple wedding. From the names, Jacob Kaufmann and Anna Kropf, and then Hans Kropf and Elisabeth Buerki, one can imagine that Isaac was married together with his brother and that his brother's wife was married together with her brother.

Isaac was called a Tauferlehrer, or Anabaptist preacher. So the authorities paid a lot of attention to him and I keep finding more information about him. Ernst Mueller mentions him in his book "Geschichte der Bernischen Taufer" and Robert Baecher mentions him in his article "Le prince de Montbeliard acoueille les anabaptistes." Unfortunatelythere isn't much about him in English yet.

The second photo is the view from Homberg. This is a place where Isaac was at one point. This is not that far from Steffisberg, but it is a ways from the church. I can imagine that Isaac came here because it was more remote and made it less likely that he would be found out. In contrast to Steffisberg, this is a beautiful place. I could settle here. I had a nice time in a cozy Bed and Breakfast, Dreiligasse Zentrum.

I visited the church and its graveyard near Homberg. It was filled with names like Gerber, Graber, Oesch, Oswald, Tschantz (Shantz, Johns, and maybe Jantzi, which is another ancestor of mine). I'm not so sure that these folks have Mennonite connections as much as it is evidence that Mennonites come from Switzerland, and that this area had a concentration of Anabaptists.

And in fact this whole area was full of Anabaptists at one point, and the majority of them followed Jacob Ammann, becoming Amish. Because this area is known as the Berner Oberland, or uplands, these Anabaptists came to be known as the Obere Gemeinde, the upper congregation, while the Emmental Anabaptists became known as the Untere Gemeinde, or lower congregation.

My family joins me tomorrow. I have missed them alot. The last week has felt kind of lonely. There haven't been as many people around Bienenberg and I am getting impatient to see my family. In any case I can't wait.

My time at Bienenberg is coming to an end. I don't know how often I'll find an internet connection the next three weeks, but I'll try to keep in contact when I find one.

Erlenbach, birthplace of Jacob Ammann

2008-06-24T22:25:00.005+02:00

On Friday I visited Erlenbach im Simmental, the birthplace of Jacob Ammann, the founder of the Amish. The first photo is of the farm where he likely was born, though I am pretty sure the buildings are not that old. The second is of the view from his home. He was born in a small village called Thal that is up a little ways from Erlenbach. Tal in German is a valley, so that the Simmental is the Simme Valley, with the Simme being the river that flows at the bottom.

This is the most beautiful inhabited place I have ever seen. The mountains are majestic. The fields and chalets are picturesque. The farmers were out turning their hay, since we finally have had some dry sunny weather. It was cool and wet almost all of my first four weeks in Europe! Some of the fields are so steep that they turn them by hand. But in others they have equipment that I can't believe is able to stay upright on these mountains. Someone told me they are built especially not to tip over.

I also took the cable car to the top of the Stockhorn mountain. It was unbelievable to be so high so quickly. I was up where there we still patches of snow and could see all the way to Lake Thun. I also got my first good look at the Eiger, Monch, and Jungfrau peaks.

A little something about Jacob Ammann. Ammann is a common name in Switzerland. It was the title of the mayor of a village. In fact the same day I was in Erlenbach I read about Miss Switzerland who is competing in the Miss Universe contest. Her name? Amanda Ammann. I also remember Switzerland's gold medalist in ski jumping in the Winter Olympics some years ago. His name is Simon Ammann. Are they related? Not very likely.

Jacob and at least some members of his family converted to Anabaptism from the Reformed church. The late 1600s were an interesting time for Anabaptists. On the one hand the government was putting a lot of pressure on them again, confiscating their property and forcing them out of the country. On the other hand a lot of their friends and neighbors were interested in their faith and were converting to it. A lot of what we consider traditional Mennonite names did not become so until some 150 years after Anabaptism started. The Kaufmanns and the Blanks were some of the newcomers during this time, as were the Buetschis, what we call Beachy/Peachey. And so were the Ammanns. Jacob Ammann's father Michael probably became an Anabaptist, and his brother Ulrich did too, in fact he also was a leader along with Jacob. But I will write more about his tomorrow when I describe my visit to Oberhofen, to where the family moved from Erlenbach.

Perhaps part of the interest came from Pietism, a movement that focused on a personal spiritual relationship with God. These neighbors sensed that Anabaptists were living their faith, not just thinking and talking about it.

I followed Sam Wenger's directions to Ammann's birthplace in his Rural Switzerland book. It was maybe 3-4 km from Erlenbach and it was too steep to bike, so I walked my bike up. Actually the walk would have been better without the bike, a little shorter. However there is nothing like the bike ride down. The hike to the house is quite possible from the train station for someone in good shape.

After my visit to Erlenbach I took a bike ride down the Simmental to Lake Thun. It was beautiful.

David Joris and other Dutch Anabaptists

2008-06-23T22:29:00.016+02:00

Once again I am going to write something about David Joris, the leader of the Jorists who was an Anabaptist but never became a Mennonite. In fact Menno Simons condemned him in no uncertain terms. In the face of persectuion Joris spiritualized the faith to such an extent that he could hide out in Basel as a Dutch Reformed leader, pretending to be something he was not. He was apparently fabulously wealthy, with the mansion I already showed you before, several farm properties, including one in a remote location for meeting his followers, and then also the castle above. I assume he bought the castle because he could. I spoke to an employee of the restaurant that now operates in the castle, the Schloss Biningen, and she also claims that David Joris' ghost is here as well as his mansion where the Swiss Federal Railways office is now. Maybe he still travels between the two.

I am finally getting to the point where I can "show and tell" about the Amish. But before I do that I need to talk a little about Dutch Anabaptists because they played a surprising role in the division between the Amish and the Reist factions of the Swiss Brethren.

The Dutch Anabaptists have a somewhat deserved reputation, in my opinion, of having all kinds of strange groups among them. And so they are the ones who took over the city of Munster, and had what was generally considered a reign of terror, though I don't know much about it. Perhaps the main terror to the other Christians was that the Anabaptists were in charge, not them. But the Munsterities did expel all those who were not baptized. They believed that Munster was the New Jerusalem. They took up arms and eventually also polygamy.

It was the Munster debacle that led the Roman Catholic priest Menno Simons to become an Anabaptist. He wanted to guide them in a more Biblical and peaceful direction. Perhaps it is the existence of all these different groups and beliefs that led Menno to shunning. This practice is that when a member of the church remains in sin, they should not only be excommunicated from the church's communion, but also shunned. Christians should have nothing to do with them.

Another influence for shunning from Menno was his view of Jesus not having the flesh of Mary, but a special celestial flesh. From an orthodox perspective this is heretical, not identifying Jesus as fully human. And so also Menno's view of the church is that it ought to be celestial, without spot or wrinkle.

Of course shunning doesn't really solve factions as much as create new ones. So Dutch Anabaptists had several major splits in their history, but in 1632 the Flemish and Old Flemish factions came together with the Dordrecht Confession of Faith. Menno is long dead by now but his influence continues. The view of Christ is not clearly defined, allowing for some to keep Menno's view of the incarnation. Also there is an article on the ban and then another article on the shunning of the ban. So clearly it was an important issue.

By the mid-1600s something else was happening as well. The Dutch were no longer persecuted. They still had a few restrictions but in general they were richer and more liberal than their Reformed neighbors. This was the golden age of the Dutch Anabaptists, and it was during this time also that Thieleman J. van Braght, concerned about the worldliness setting in among the Dutch Anabaptists, wrote his Martyrs Mirror to remind them of their heritage as a persecuted people and the importance of keeping the faith.

At the same time the Swiss Anabaptists continued to be persecuted. The Swiss and the Dutch at times came together as in Strasbourg, but in general their contact had been limited. But the Dutch used their power and money to help their Swiss brothers and sisters. They put pressure on the Swiss governments to ease their persecution.

As I mentioned earlier, at the time of the late 1600s they were not executing Anabaptists. Rather they were confiscating their property and forcing them into exile. Of course some returned anyway.

The Dutch had only partial influence on the Swiss governments. They talked Zurich into allowing the Anabaptists to leave with the proceeds from the sale of their property. Then they talked the Zurichers into leaving Switzerland for Alsace. It was these ex-Zurichers and some of the Alsatians who had been there for years who signed a German edition of the Dordrecht Confession, calling it theirs as well.

And when the Bernese government wanted an explanation of the faith of the Swiss Anabaptists, they decided to provide Dordrecht as well. However the Swiss had remained orthodox on the incarnation of Jesus and had never practiced the shunning of the banned, nor footwashing, all things that were different about Dordrecht. Of course the Swiss really didn't do careful theology, so their view of the incarnation is hard to say.

A couple of other differences between Dordrecht and the Swiss outlook. Dordrecht had a more hierarchical view of authority, with bishops, etc. The Swiss had ministers appointed by their congregations and leaders were accustomed to consulting with their congregations on issues. Dordrecht said that if you go to a city and they mistreat you, then go to another city, quoting Matt. 10:14ff. The Swiss said, quoting Psalm 24, "The earth is the Lord's," ie, it doesn't belong to the lords of Bern and they can't tell us what to do with the land the Lord has given us. We're staying.

Well, so now you have the background that brings us to the point of the division within the Swiss Anabaptists, or Swiss Brethren as they are generally called, the division between Jacob Ammann and Hans Reist, or between the Amish and the Reistians.

I will finally mention that the second photo is also from Basel. It is of the Holeestrasse Mennonite congregation. This congregation was given permission to build a building in 1847, making it the oldest church building that was not a state church. This is a new building, but at the same location. Interestingly enough, this congregation was an Amish congregation, until they liberalized enough to become a Mennonite congregation. But more on that later.

Early Basler Anabaptists

2008-06-23T22:29:00.011+02:00

I wanted to show a few more photos and tell a few more Basel Anabaptist stories before I move into the Amish part of the blog. So far I have concentrated on the Mennonite and Amish common heritage in Anabaptism with its emphasis on a faith lived out in daily life within a community of reconciliation. This means a break with infant baptism which takes personal accountability out of the community and a break with the state church, which turns pesonal accountability into a matter of state enforcement.

As I said before, there were early Anabaptists not just in Zurich and Bern, but also in Schaffhausen and Basel, and for that matter in St. Gallen and other places. The first picture is of Weisse Gasse, a place of known Anabaptist activity already in 1529, four years after its beginnings in Zurich. Basel also followed Zurich in switching from Roman Catholicism to Reformed, with John Oekolampad being the leader as Ulrich Zwingli was the leader in Zurich.

Weisse Gasse is not out in the country but right in the middle of things in Basel, like the first Anabaptists in Zurich. It is next to Barfusserplatz, which means what it sounds like, the Barefooters Plaza. It is near the Franciscan church and monastery, and apparently since the Franciscans were barefooted their nickname in German became Barfusser. The Franciscan Church, or Barfusserkirche, is now a museum. The Franciscans don't have a place in Reformed Basel.

Like Zurich, Basel also persecuted its Anabaptists. And so the second photo is of the Spalentor. This was a place where Anabaptists and other criminals were imprisoned. It was a main gate into the city, and part of the old city wall. Basel decided to preserve this relic of its history.

Finally there is photo of the Basel Rathaus. This is the seat of city and cantonal government

in Basel. The building is beautiful. In 1595 Basel issued one of the most severe mandates against Anabaptists. They would confiscate their property and exile them from the country.

There is a village near me here in Bienenberg called Hersberg. It is of course where the Hershberger family comes from, and some of those local Hershbergers became Anabaptists.

Pont des Anabaptistes

2008-06-22T08:50:00.002+02:00

Last time I wrote about how nice it was to go into the Jura Mountains. Well, when I got home from that excursion I had a response from a Jura Mennonite pastor and we arranged to meet the very next day. So I had two Jura excursions two days in a row. This one was not so exhausting because the pastor, Michel Ummel, picked me up in his car and drove me to the places I wanted to see. So I took the train through Moultier again but this time got a small train to Tavannes. I still am kind of amazed at the public transportation system that takes you out to these remote places. This train had only two cars to it and in some ways was more like a tram.

Michel eventually picked me up and then we climbed high in his car. That would have been a very difficult climb by bike. I am not sure how it would have gone by foot. And unlike the other old Anabaptist worship spaces, the Pont des Anabaptistes, or Bridge of the Anabaptists, is right next to a road. There is no long climb on a trail to get there. You can drive right to it and then climb down a few feet of trails and steps if you actually want to go into the gorge.

Those with a sense about language may have noticed that Pont des Anabaptistes is French and not German, and so I refer you to yesterday’s post about Jura being French Switzerland instead of German. Like the German language Tauferhoehle in Zuerich, two of perhaps the only places with the name of our faith in it, this spot got its name from the local pastor who knew it as a place of Anabaptist worship. The bridge at the time was the main bridge that would carry not just people but also carts and wagons. We have a picture of the bridge only because on time a horse fell to its death from the bridge. The Anabaptists would meet in the gorge apparently near the bridge.

Here you can see the ruins of the bridge. And then again one more photo of me, proving that I was here. Michel Ummel, who along with being a pastor at Sonnenberg Mennonite Church is also the director of the Swiss Mennonite Conference archives housed at Sonnenberg, told me about their historical efforts with the bridge. They would like to see the bridge reconstructed. But the archaeologists said they should leave the ruins and build a replica a few feet away. (This interests me because I went to the Roman ruins of August Raurica and discovered that the amphitheater and temple mount had been rebuilt. This was strange to me because generally Americans let ruins remain ruins, and build a replica if we want one. But for some reason on this issue they are more inclined to leave the ruins.)

Then Michel took me to the Jeanguisboden meetinghouse of Sonnenberg (they have four meeting places, as I mentioned yesterday.) There he showed me a historical timeline on the wall that they had developed as part of the Tauferjahr, or Anabaptist Year last year when Switzerland commemorated its Anabaptist history. I was pleased that they had made copies of two of Balthasar Hubmaier’s books, where he makes an argument for believers rather than infant baptism, and then responds to Zwingli when he writes in favor of infant baptism. Hubmaier has sometimes been ignored or marginalized by Mennonites because he was not a pacifist, but he certainly was one of the most articulate defenders of the baptism upon confession of faith, rather than as a rite of birth.

Then Michel took me down to the archives. Now for some reason the electricity wasn’t working. But I happened to have the light that I use with my bike and so since the archives are in a basement without windows it was very dark. But I could use my flashlight to see things. There I saw some old and significant books. Two of them interested me the most. The first was the Biblical concordance of the Swiss Brethren. Apparently over time a book developed that was basically a thematic concordance of the Bible, with the themes being based on what was important to Mennonites. This was recently translated into English and for the first time I saw one of old German copies.

The other interesting manuscript is actually a photocopy. Apparently there is a handwritten copy of the Schleitheim Confession of Faith, so this is before publication, and the government of Bern possesses it. So the Mennonites have a photocopy in their archives. I was shocked that we have a version of this that is so early.

Michel also told me about some projects they are working on. They are hoping to open a Taufer museum in Switzerland. They are seeking someone with architectural knowledge to help them design it. They would need to raise funds to build this, and of course they are already raising funds for the restoration of the Pont des Anabaptistes.

I enjoyed visiting with Michel a lot. He and his wife attended Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in the years just before I was there. He told me about the joys and trials of being a pastor in Switzerland, and also about his time in mission work in Portugal. After Jeanguisboden, he had to go to a Mennonite historical gathering, and so he told me how to take my bike down to Tavannes. So once again I started biking down hill, and again had quite the ride down into the valley. The poor brakes on my bike.

Geisskirchli, Chapel of the Goats

2008-06-21T22:38:00.004+02:00

On Wednesday I finally got out to the Jura Mountains. As I got about half an hour out of Basel and started to see the mountains, I thought to myself, why haven't I been coming out here more often? It was simply beautiful.

After arriving at Moultier from Basel by train, I got on the bus to Souboz. He was just pulling out but waited for me. And for one of the first times in this little country buses, I didn't have to pay him. My Swiss Pass got me free passage.

One of the strange things about the Jura is that it is French. I had always assumed that Switzerland is trilingual, with many people knowing German, French, and Italian. But really people learn the language of their location. And then they study another language in school, though many are also studying English.

So when I am taking the train out of Basel, the announcer says "Naechste Halt" for "Next Stop." But as I approach Delemont, only half an hour out of Basel, the announcer starts saying, "Prochain Arret" for "Next Stop." This is a bit of a problem because I don't know much French and French speakers, like English speakers, don't like to learn other languages, assuming that most educated people should know their language.

All of that to say that I am now in French-speaking Switzerland and can communicate in only a basic way to the driver. He takes me to the last stop. I fill my water bottle from one of those famous Swiss springs, and he immediately comes out of the bus and dumps my water on the ground and takes me into the bathroom in the garage to get clean water. And so I learn not to trust the water in those springs.

From Souboz I bike down to Le Pichous, where the trailhead is for the Geisskirchli, or Chapel of the Goats. This is another Anabaptist worship place/cave. I could have walked but Hanspeter Jecker figured out that the next bus didn't leave until like 5 pm. So he devised a way for me to get out of their sooner which I'll explain later.

So I bike for awhile, miss the special trail to the cave, and then find it on the way back. The signs pointing to it down at the bottom of the mountain are gone at the moment. So I leave my bike and hike up. You can see the cave and it is another inspiring place. Again, we do not have ancient churches to point to as Mennonites but we do have ancient holy places that God created thousands of years before churches. I find these places holy and inspiring. I am grateful for them and for their beauty.

I kept hiking up, though I think I again missed the trail and followed a gully. I slipped and fell at one point. Finally I got to the top, at about 3000 feet, and what do I see but farms. And a farmhouse with a little hotel and restaurant.

But first I hiked over to the Burkhalter farm, which is still a Mennonite family. That is the second photo, and they are related to Sheldon Burkhalter if you know him. (I forget if I mentioned that he and his wife were at Bienenberg for a number of days when I was. So we would eat together.) Then I hiked through a cow pasture to a beautiful vista overlooking the Pichoux Gorge. Then I reward myself with ice cream and water at the farm. The farmer's wife is very familiar with Mennonites coming. She actually knows some German.

The Jura is the area where many Mennonites fled to from persecution in other parts of Switzerland. There were two aspects to life here. One is that it was simply remote and so it was more difficult to be caught. But the other is that it was ruled by the Prince-Bishop of Basel. I need to find out more about this, but as I understand it Protestant Switzerland tolerated a Roman Catholic Bishop who was also a prince. They probably had no choice but to tolerate him. But apparently eventually he came to rule the high spots over 100o meters or about 3000 feet. He was not inclined to persecute Anabaptists and so they settled here. There are perhaps 10 Mennonite churches here today. And perhaps 5 in other locations.

Back to this language issue. I was surprised to discover that these congregations are increasingly switching from German to French. Again I assumed in Switzerland you spoke both German and French. So these Mennonites from German areas have maintained their German for many years, but now like the Mennonites who after about 150 years in America started to speak English, now they are switching over to French, with all the issues and arguments that go along with that. Some did this already a generation ago, but others like the Sonnenberg congregation, are changing more slowly. And Sonnenberg now has German and French worship in separate locations. (They are one congregation that meets in four different places, something that Mennonites still do here, and what Mennonites, or at least Amish, used to do in America. Though I only know of one congregation meeting in two places.)

I better finish my story. I then hiked down a path that took me down the mountain at unbelievable speed. It was one switchback after another. I have no idea how someone figured out such a trail, but it wasn't bad.

And then for the exciting part. I rode my bike through Le Pichous Gorge, which was simply a gorgeous ride. A creek had cut this gorge through the mountain range, and there were sheer cliffs one either side. It was a thrilling and exhilirating ride. Then I hopped on the train in Glovelier and made my way back to Moultier and then Basel. I highly recommend this.

The cows of Switzerland

2008-06-19T23:26:00.003+02:00

On one of my first hikes at Bienenberg, I was walking through the woods when I heard what sounded to me like drums. I imagined Africans dancing in a circle with others beating the drums. But since I was in Switzerland, and the German speaking parts hardly have any Africans, I considered what Swiss might look like beating drums in the woods. But as I walked further and came to a pasture, I realized that the sound I heard were cow bells!

Some evenings when I have my window open the cowbells are less rhythmic and more like a soft singsong. If I believed in fairies, then I would suspect that fairies were making tinkering their bells. It really has become a beautiful sound to me.

Because Switzerland is so mountainous there are not a lot of places where you can grow crops like we do so abundantly in Indiana. And so the Swiss have worked with cows in their pastures for all these centuries. In the first picture you can barely see the cows, and so you realize how high up they are, but also I am pretty high that day. That picture is in the Jura Moutains and I was just hiking down from some Mennonite farms above 3000 feet.

The other photo is of the local herd. I am grateful to them for providing me with at least my ice cream. They may also provide some of the milk and cheese, I am not sure.

At first I was concerned about missing out on Chief ice cream this summer. I don't know what I was thinking. There is plenty of good ice cream in Switzerland. And so many flavors. I have had grape, lots of caramel, someting called Stracciata, and even rhubarb. That wasn't my favorite but when you have the option of eating rhubarb you have to take it.

The cheeses of course have been great and every morning I have been drinking hot chocolate. I must confess that I have gone with ice cream as my indulgence rather than chocolate. Here at Bienenberg they combine the ice cream with cream and other delectables for excellent taste experiences.

The Swiss also have a national drink called Rivella. I have been drinking it. It is made from whey, a cheesemaking byproduct. It's not that it is the best tasting drink. It is too fizzy for me, as is all soft drinks. It's just that this is my chance to drink it so I might as well.

So I am sure that I am eating entirely too much dairy right now. But I am grateful to the cows of Switzerland, and to the Swiss for their ingenuity in adapting agriculture to their environment and then giving the world such great cheeses and chocolates.

More Bienenberg Buzz

2008-06-18T22:36:00.002+02:00

I have been writing so much history lately that there hasn't been much news. This past weekend I stayed at Bienenberg rather than travel around. The reason is that interesting people came to Bienenberg. Alan Kreider, a professor at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary and former missionary in England, spoke on the end of Christendom, that time when church and state were united in Europe. He commended to us the early church's model of lengthy catechesis as a way to make our congregations distinctive from the culture around us. We met in the building above.

The participants were from Switzerland, Germany, and France. Alan would speak in English, someone would then translate into German, while someone else was translating into French on ear pieces. One time they reversed French and German, but so many of the people spoke German that usually the French needed to special headphones.

Whenever Alan wasn't speaking, someone would speak in German or French and then the other person would translate into the other language. It really wasn't that bad, except that I don't know German well enough to know what was going on. I could understand the directions about snacks and the Biblical passages, the important things.

I saw some people I knew, including the Mennonite pastor in Ingolstadt who came to the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center trainings for several years, at least one of them with me. I also met some people, like the former leaders of Christliche Dienst in Germany. They knew several former Forest Hills youth that I had worked with, including one who is getting married in Germany in a few weeks. And then I met her fiance who was one of the attendees! It was wild to make these connections.

I must admit that I often used English in this setting, because my German is so basic and the people at this gathering mostly knew English very well. It is essentially a modern Latin. I also enjoyed meeting Neal Blough, long-time Mennonite missionary in Paris.

Finally I met a woman who spoke great British English but turned out to be originally from East Germany. She knew some Russian, like one of our waiters here. She basically wants to become Amish. So we had a good conversation since I am trying to understand the Amish. I had noticed her head scarf but it really didn't connect at first. She wrote to Family Life asking if it is possible for someone from the outside to join but she received no reply. I told her I had heard of it but it was rare. I gave her some ideas for people to contact. I must say that in talking to her she gave answers that suggested she really could be Amish, as much as I know, at least. When I asked her about her children not be educated beyond the 8th grade she spoke about how education pulls you away from the community and so basic education is enough.

The fountain at the top of the blog is the first station in a peace path coming to reality here at Bienenberg. They see this as a way of telling the gospel with art. This sculpture is creation and was donated by the PAX boys, American volunteers who gave several years of service here. The speaker mentioned that many of them stayed with the Mennonite faith because of the influence of the PAX boys. They are taking each spot one at a time, looking for ideas and donations. Do you have any?

Felix Manz, first to be baptized in blood

2008-06-14T16:48:00.004+02:00

Felix Manz, as I've mentioned before, was a kind of co-founder with Conrad Grebel of Anabaptism. Like him he was an educated young man in Zurich. They broke with Zwingli on separation of church and state, and infant baptism and so were imprisoned in a tower and put on bread and water. But they escaped. Manz was in and out of prison as he would travel around baptizing people upon their confession of faith. He appeared in several disputations arguing against Zwingli's views. Eventually the Zurich council decided to increase the penalty, and so finally in January 1527 he was drowned in the Limmat River, near the current Rathaus bridge.

Above is a picture of the location of the commemorative plaque that Zurich put beside the river in 2004. It says: "Here in the middle of the Limmat from a fishing platform Felix Manz and five other Anabaptists were drowned in Reformation times between 1527 and 1532. The last Anabaptist who was executed in Zurich was Hans Landis in 1614."

The second photo is an illustration of the Felix Mantz drowning found in the book written by Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli's successor after Zwingli went off and fought in a battle and got himself killed. Thomann copied and illustrated Bullinger's book with these beautiful illustrations.

I just read a review of a 1999 book called Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe by Brad Gregory. Gregory covers the about 5000 martyrdoms that took place in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. For Mennonites with our strong martyrdom tradition it is important to note that this covers Protestant and Catholic martyrs also, Anabaptists were not the only martyrs of the time. Catholics killed both Protestants and Anabaptists and Protestants executed both Catholics and Anabaptists. Of course in both cases Anabaptists don't come out well.

I am interested in the question of whether Anabaptist created any martyrs. Many Mennonites are unfamiliar with the Muenster episode, when Dutch Anabaptists took over the city of Muenster and made a mess of things.

In any case, when you learn that 40 - 50 percent of the martyrs during this time were Anabaptist, and when you consider that we are roughly .001 % of Christians today, you can see why for us this has figured as an essential part of our story. To be a Mennonite is to inherit the story of martyrdom. It is both gruesome and heroic, a testimony to inhumanity and a testimony of faith.

Conrad Grebel, founder of the Anabaptists

2008-06-14T16:11:00.006+02:00

Conrad Grebel was born into a fairly wealthy, leading Zurich family. The first photo is of his house in Zurich. It is a large and beautiful home. It is currently a small theater called Theater am Neumarkt. There is a plaque on it that says: "1508 - 1514 and 1520 - 1525 in this house lived Conrad Grebel, who together with Felix Manz founded Anabaptism."

Conrad was well-educated. His father used his political connections to gain what we would call scholarships today. Conrad first went to Vienna to study, through a scholarship through the Holy Roman Emperor, who ruled what would roughly be Germany today. There he was a student of Joachim von Watt, or Vadian. Through the years Conrad wrote many letters to Vadian, who eventually married Conrad's sister, and many of these letters were preserved.

After Vienna Conrad transferred to Paris, now under the auspices of the King of France. He was a studen of Glarean, another Swiss in a foreign setting. But there Conrad had much conflict with Glarean and eventually abandoned his studies. Glarean apparently thought Conrad was spoiled, and in my mind not without reason. He moved out of his lodgings with Glarean because they were too cold. But Glarean also played favorites and was hard to get along with.

In Paris Conrad got into other kinds of trouble as well. He was part of a group of Swiss students that became involved in a brawl that killed two Frenchmen. Apparently the French were attempting to rob the Swiss, so it was considered self defense. Conrad also admitted that he frequented prostitutes. He also suffered from an illness already at this time, something we hear about again and again, but not with enough details to know what it was.

So Conrad came home. But then his father got another scholarship for him, this time from the Pope to study in Rome. Now at this time the Pope was not just spiritual leader of the Catholic Church, but also political leader of the Papal states, much of northern Italy. So in other words Conrad's father managed to get money from each of the major countries that surrounded Switzerland at that time. This is part of the reason that Conrad's father was eventually executed, not for religious reasons but for treason.

But Conrad didn't have the heart to go to Rome and so stayed in Switzerland. He was a bright student, knew Latin as well as Greek. He wrote poetry that was published in Vadian's books.

It was only as he joined a study group with pastor Ulrich Zwingli, Felix Manz, and others that he began to have a spiritual awakening. He became more serious about life and about God. With Zwingli he believed that the church should be reformed according to the Bible. But as he read the Bible he didn't agree with all of Zwingli's ideas.

His greatest problem with Zwingli became infant baptism. He believed that baptism should follow a declaration of faith. That was the Biblical pattern.

The second photo is an illustration of the baptism disputation in Zurich. This comes from a handwritten copy of Heinrich Bullinger's Reformation History. The book was handwritten for political reasons, to not upset the Catholic cantons of Switzerland. The Swiss after all had battled each other over religion. The copyist painted these beautiful pictures. While the artist did not necessarily actually attend the events, he was drawing the rooms and places as they appeared at the time. In this picture the lords of the council are on the left, the clergy on the right, and the Anabaptist party are the ones standing at the front of the picture.

This is the disputation that the Anabaptists lost, where the council decided to maintain infant baptism, and to force parents to have their children baptized. As I already mentioned, the group soon thereafter decided to baptize each other as adult believers.

Basler Taufer, David Joris, and living with persecution

2008-06-13T22:18:00.005+02:00

Before I came to Switzerland I thought that most Swiss Anabaptists were found in Zurich, where it all began, and Bern. These are the two primary sources of Swiss Amish and Mennonites in America today. But as I found out last week Anabaptists were also plentiful in Schaffhausen, which is where the Schleitheim Confession was written. I have also learned that they were active early in Neuchatel, which is where the 1/3 less fat cream cheese originated, I suppose. And finally I've learned that there was a lot of Anabaptist activity in Basel as well.

Today I mention one of the most colorful of Anabaptists, David Joris. He is the only early Anabaptist that I know of where we have a portrait of him, and his portrait hangs in the presitigious Basel Art Museum. The house below the portrait belonged to him when he lived in Basel.

Joris was a companion of Menno Simons in Holland, though often in conflict with him. Menno stuck closely to the Bible whereas Joris was more of a spiritualist. That emphasis on inner spirituality more than the outward appearances eventually led him to flee to Basel where he pretended to be a Reformed refugee. He lived under an assumed name and became extremely wealthy. This house is one of several that he owned, along with farms and even a castle, which I may eventually visit. All this time he remained in secret correspondence with his followers the Davidjorists.

After he died his real identity was discovered. So he was dug up from his grave at the church and his bones were burned as a heretic. People would pejoratively say that Basel only burned its heretics after they were dead. The current Basel folklore is that Joris' ghost haunts his home because of the way his remains were treated.

Joris is an extreme example, but the same day that I saw his home I read an article in the Mennonite Quarterly Review (Mark Furner, "Lay Casuistry and Anabaptist Survival in Bern" October 2001) about how Anabaptists managed to survive in spite of government opposition. We talk about Mennonites becoming die Stille im Lande, or the Quiet in the Land. But this article painfully exposes the machinery that helped create this situation.

Anabaptists were killed by Swiss governments from 1525 to around 1614, though the majority of those deaths were in those early years. But even after they had abandoned execution, persecution continued. Some of the methods included imprisonment, sometimes on starvation diets. The Zurich government eventually succeeded in expelling all its Anabaptists, and so Bern tried to do the same, but never succeeded.

What Bern tried to do was confiscate Anabaptist land and then force them into exile. But Anabaptists would then start giving their land away to their children, or they would make complicated arrangements with neighbors and friends. And while the government would tell them they are exiled, they would simply return again.

So what do you do if being an Anabaptist means that your property and your children will be taken from you, and you will be forced to leave your home country? Anabaptist had four strategies. The first was to simply avoid the authorities. And so there are the Anabaptist caves. They would also avoid going to the Reformed Church.

Secondly they would compromise on non-essentials, and defining non-essentials became difficult as the authorities put more pressure on them. Surprisingly many Anabaptists allowed their children to be baptized, and then they would just call it a meaningless ceremony. To not have your children baptized made you a suspected Anabaptist and created all kinds of trouble.

Thirdly, avoid being identified as an Anabaptist. And so if you were called before the church courts, because the Swiss Reformed Church had a kind of morals court that would make sure that everyone in the parish was behaving in a properly Christian way. And so if an Anabaptist would be forced to appear, they would avoid answering questions and even perhaps outright lie, to avoid being identified officially as an Anabaptist.

Finally some Anabaptists went so far as to say oaths or recantations of their faith. One way to do this was to show up for the oath ceremony and mumble. But as authorities became suspicious they would individually be forced to speak. And so they might say it while inside they tell themselves that they don't really mean it.

For obvious reason in our telling of history we focus more on the heroes who were willing to die for their faith. They are of course to be admired. But other people tried to find a way to be faithful in an impossible situation. David Joris became a facade in order to be both Anabaptist and successful. Others after him, though not as extreme, found ways to hide their identity.

I'm not sure what to do with this story. I won't say go thou and do likewise. But at the same time I sympathize with their predicament. What would I do if I was going to lose my family and my home and my country? What compromises would I make? Or rather, what compromises do I make? When the pledge of allegiance is said, I don't say it, but I do stand up and face the flag like everyone else. Am I just pretending to participate in the national oath while only myself and perhaps one other person in the place knows that I am not?

Tauferhohle, or the Anabaptist Cave

2008-06-12T20:25:00.004+02:00

Hopefully you can indulge the many photos in this particular entry. On Sunday I visited the Tauferhoehle, or Anabaptist Cave, near Baeritswil. It was a deeply emotional, spiritual, and enjoyable experience.

In Schaffhausen I met some Mormons. They overheard me talking to a local woman and then because the one was American, he started talking to me. The other one was Swiss German, and when I told him that I was a Taufer, he recognized the name because he knew about the Tauferhohle. But just because that was the name of the cave, he did not know much about Anabaptists. I needed to give him the regular explanations.

And so while Mennonites think of Tauferhohle as a worship space for our spiritual ancestors, the Swiss think of it as a beautiful and fun place to hike. Since I was there on Sunday afternoon the place was full of people. There are several fire circles with grills and wood, so people would hike up to the cave and then picnic. It was nice to know that it was a place that was giving so many people such joy, especially children who loved the cave. But of course many of them did not know where the name came from or what its significance might be. However some signs were put up recently that do an excellent job in both German and English of explaining the place.

For my part I spent a lot of time in quiet, when I could. I also sang 606, which is the thing to do in such places. I felt a little awkward doing it by myself, especially since a family was within listening distance.

I have visited a number of beautiful cathedrals, or muensters they are called in German, during my stay here. Some of them have been not so beautiful, such as the Grossmuenster of Zurich which is still very plain after the manner of Zwingli. It even has places made for statues but no statues there. Zwingli preached against all such decorations and they were taken out of the church.

But the Fraumuenster, or women's cathedral of Zurich is just the opposite. It is gorgeous. It has a whole series of stained glass windows designed by Marc Chagall. They go from the life of Jesus, to the prophets, Jacob's ladder, King David and New Jerusalem, and the giving of the law. Each one is in its own color. I sat there for a long time meditating on the meaning and beauty of the pictures.

But I have to say that the beauty of this Tauferhohle is beyond anything else that I experienced. I thought about the irony of the Anabaptists needing to meet here because it was so isolated and so safe for gatherings. But at the same time finding such a beautiful and peaceful place to meet. There is a water fall that goes over the front, so there is the soft noise of water the whole time you are there. And if the preacher is standing at the front, you would have the beauty of God's creation to meditate on as you look past him or her. It is a holy and beautiful place.

A note on finding the place. Sam Wenger gives excellent directions in his second volume of A Tour of Ten Important Anabaptist and Reformed Sites in Rural Switzerland. They are very detailed. But you could also use Markus Rediger and Erwin Roethlisberger's Walk in the Footsteps of the Anabaptists. The main thing is to go to Baretswil and then follow the yellow "wanderweg" signs to Tauferhohle.

I took the train from Zurich to Wetzikon, and then the bus from Wetzikon to the Oberdorf stop in Baretswil. It was under 40 minutes to be at the Overdort stop. From there the Wanderweg sign says it is 1 1/2 hours by foot. I took my bike up the roads about 2 km and then went by foot another 1 km, I would estimate. It is a climb. And then I returned all the way to Wetzikon by bike. There is a nice bike path part of the way, though it was all down hill for me coming from Baretswil. So you could easily take public transportation and walk the rest of the way for about at total of 4-5 hours.

I met some hikers when I got off the bus. I biked up and then saw them on my return. They had given me some guidance. When I spoke to them I told them I was a Taufer, and they said they thought I might be. They could tell I was a foreigner, and thought I might be there to visit an origination point. They were well informed, asking about the Amish as another kind of Taufer.

This was a worthwhile and satisfying visit. My last photo is of the beautiful scenery you see when you come out of the woods.

The first Anabaptist baptisms

2008-06-10T19:54:00.005+02:00

These two photos are the locations of the first baptisms among Anabaptists. The nondescript street is Neustadtgasse, where Felix Mantz lived. We don't know where he lived exactly, but it was on this street near the Grossmuenster, or cathedral. Mantz was the illegitimate son of the canon of the cathedral.

Mantz gathered at his home with Conrad Grebel, George Blaurock and others to decide what to do after the Zurich council had declared that everyone must have their children baptized. They decided to start baptizing each other based on their confession of faith. So this happened on January 21, 1525.

The Hutterite Chronicle tells the story: "After prayer, George Blaurock stood up and asked Conrad Grebel in the name of God to baptize him with true Christian baptism on his faith and recognition of the truth. With this request he knelt down and Conrad baptized him. Then the others turned to George in their turn, asking him to baptize them, which he did."

The second picture is of a house in Zollikon, once a farming village outside of Zurich, now a suburb. I travelled there by boat, though it is also accessible by train.

The Anabaptists were evangelistic from the start. The very next day Johannes Broetli baptized someone in Zollikon at this Rudi Thomann home. A wave of baptisms swept the area. There is a plaque on the house, though it can no longer be read because the owner has allowed that bush to grow over it. Perhaps there is some frustration with tourists snapping photos? I don't know.

Anyway, from Sam Wenger's Swiss Anabaptist tour book I know that it says, in English translation: "The concept of the believers' church was first realized in Zollikon by Anabaptists. In this house on January 25, 1525, one of their earliest meetings was held.

I want to mention that my source for the beginnings of Anabaptism in Zurich, Zollikon, Hallau, Waldshut, etc., is the recent essay by C. Arnold Snyder called "Swiss Anabaptism: The beginnings, 1523-1525" found in A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521-1700, edited by John D. Roth and James M. Stayer, 2007. The book itself is a great resource for getting up to date on the state of Anabaptist studies.

First there was Zwingli

2008-06-10T19:28:00.005+02:00

Here in Zurich I was where I could witness for myself the places where Anabaptism had its origins. Anabaptism is the common background of both Amish and Mennonites, as well as the Hutterites, a communitarian group. In my introductory blog I wrote about a "Where in the world is Carmen San Diego" show that incorrectly identified the Amish as the origins of the Mennonites, when in fact it is the reverse, the Amish come from Mennonites. But I wondered exactly who the Mennonites come from. Increasingly I am convinced as I read and ponder, that Mennonites come under the Zwinglian Reformed. I mention Zwingli because eventually John Calvin became the leading voice of the Reformed church. But first there was Zwingli.

Zwingli was the main pastor of the Grossmuenster, or cathedral, of Zurich. Based on the humanism of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who for many of these years was a teacher in nearby Basel Switzerland, Zwingli was with Luther preaching for the reform of the church. Humanism was a rediscovery of classic literature, especially Greek. This meant educated people were able to read the New Testament in its original language.

Zwingli formed a sodality, or study group of ancient literature. The group included the promising young student Conrad Grebel and Felix Mantz. This was to inform his teaching of the Scriptures. But Bible study groups were also set up for studying the Bible in the new German versions of the Bible.

Eventually Zwingli broke with the Roman Catholic Church, believing that following the Bible was more important than following church hierarchy. He believed in faith alone and Scripture alone. But if the pope and the bishops were no longer the final authorities on matters of faith, than who was? Zwingli turned to the city council of Zurich.

This is what eventually led to the break between Zwingli and Grebel and Mantz, considered the founders of Anabaptism. It was another member of the group, Simon Stumpf, who told Zwingli, "You have no authority to place the decision in Milords' hands, for the decision is already made: the Spirit of God decides."

Of course other differences that flowed with this one was the idea of believers' baptism, that someone expresses faith before they are baptized, something a baby cannot do, and the idea of Christians not participating in war and other forms of governmental authority. That is all outside the perfection of Christ.

I have here a picture of Zwingli found in a prominent place in Zurich, he is after all a major figure in Zurich history, perhaps the most famous. The statue has him with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other, symbolizing his bringing together of church and state. And actually Zwingli died at a relatively young age in battle.

I show all the paraphernalia around his statue from the night of partying before. It was an odd scene to see drunken revelry. The beer manufacturer at that spot had obviously paid several young women to dance provocatively at that spot, I assume to keep men buying beer there. I wondered what Zwingli would think about the goings-on around him and whether anyone there knew who he was or what he stood for.

The second photo is an illustration of the Zurich disputation on baptism, which the Anabaptists lost. It was after this disputation that refusing to have your child baptized, or being re-baptized, were considered offenses for banishment. The illustration comes from the Zurich Chronicle of the time.

Of Snails and other wonders of God's creation

2008-06-09T21:37:00.003+02:00

This photo of a snail is when I was biking on the trail between Neunkirch and Schaffhausen. It's a beautiful path and I saw something on the trail but went speeding by. But I thought it warranted further investigation and so turned around and saw the largest snail I have ever seen. I have also seen some big slugs. I took the photo with my sunglasses to give you some sense of the size of the thing. And it was trucking along pretty quickly. I suppose this is mostly for my boys.

I also visited the Rheinfalls, the largest falls in Europe. This gave me the opportunity to eat lunch in a castle as well, the Schloss Laufen. And then I was off to Zurich.

But in Schaffhausen I was again helped by the legendary Swiss hospitality. A couple asked me about my bike and then helped me get my bike and luggage in the train. They then helped me get oriented in Zurich.

Zurich was a very different place from Schaffhausen. I went from a very country area to the most urban. Zurich is the largest and richest city in Switzerland. Because of the European soccer championships, the place was full of people, and especially young people. It was a wild, decadent, and loud place to spend the night. At one point I thought, oh to be 20 years old and single again. But then I remembered that when I was 20 and single, I wouldn't have liked the drunken and sexually charged festivities either. So what did it matter?

Hallau

2008-06-09T19:02:00.006+02:00

After a wonderful night's sleep in the barn pictured above, I was fed a fabulous filling breakfast. This is the barn of farmer Werner Gysel. They are connected with the Geissels in America, and in fact an American Mennonite had given his wife a Geissel family cookbook. In turns out that along with Bern, Basel, and Zurich, Anabaptists were also active here in Schaffhausen. The Gysels are not Mennonite, but perhaps some ancestors were.

Frau Gysel was extremely generous, feeding two filling meals. The scenery from here is fantastic. You are on top of the mountain. You can learn about them at www.farmer.ch. I had planned to sleep in the straw, and they have a small building for that. But as I smelled the straw I thought my nose might not be functioning properly by morning so I slept in the barn, which at this end is filled with bathrooms, meeting rooms and 2 dormitory style rooms. Since I was the only person there it wasn't a problem.

I then made my way across the mountain for awhile on my bicycle, and it was of course a wonderful trip down. I wanted to stop in the nearby town of Hallau because of a little-known incident there related to Anabaptist history. From April to November of 1525, the church and community there became Anabaptist. So I took the photo of the Hallau church interior, partly because its plainness seemed so Mennonite to me. But of course a plain style is also part of the Swiss Reformed emphasis of Ulrich Zwingli, the man from whom early Anabaptist parted ways. However there were two stained glass windows at the Hallau church, and one was of a knight! So that wasn't particularly Mennonite.

The people in the countryside are extremely accomodating and trusting and friendly. I arrived at the Hallau church only to find it locked. But some people were around and so he opened it for me. He drove away and told me to be sure to shut the door when I left.

The story of Hallau goes like this. After the first baptisms in Zurich in January 1525, the leaders spread out quickly. A few days later they went to Zollikon and then a few more days and Conrad Grebel was in Schaffhausen and Johannes Broetli and Wilhelm Reublin were in Hallau. At this point things were in flux and there were different ideas about what this movement might be. They did not assume that the state would be against them, though that was their experience in Zurich. So Broetli and Reublin preached in Hallau and many people were baptized.

Connected with this was the idea of the tithe no longer going to support the faraway administrators but for the support of the local community. They also wanted to decide who their pastors would be. There was a lot of peasant agitation against their lords and eventually the Peasants' War broke out.

What role did Anabaptists play in that? Certainly they shared in the frustrations of peasants. It is also clear that some of the early Anabaptists were pacifists, and others were not. When the capital city of Schaffhausen sent troops against Broetli and Reublin in Hallau, the villagers protected them with weapons.

A similar thing happened just across the border in Waldshut, Germany. Essentially the whole city became Anabaptist under the influence of the preaching of their pastor, Balthasar Hubmaier. Hubmaier was avowedly not a pacifist and the most educated of the early Anabaptists. He is one of the best Anabaptist theologians, especially in his writings about believers baptism and the separation of church and state. However for him that separation did not mean not participating in government functions, only that the state should not compel people to believe.

But in any case these experiments in whole cities being "Anabaptist" did not last long. Anabaptists never did garner state support. And two years later an ex-Benedictine monk, Michael Sattler, marked Anabaptism with some of his monastic ways. He was the writer of the Schleitheim confession, which I mentioned as the place I visited on Friday, and was also an area very sympathetic to Anabaptism. Schleitheim called for a strict separation between the state and the church. There was to be no mixing and Christians could not serve in state functions because that would require the use of the sword, something outside the perfection of Christ. You can read the Schleitheim Confession, which isn't very long, here http://www.mcusa-archives.org/library/resolutions/schleithiem/index.html

Not that Schleitheim is the first pacifist statement among Anabaptists. Conrad Grebel and his associates had also criticized the revolutionary Thomas Munzter for his advocacy of violence. But it is also clear that there was not originally consensus on this issue, and that at least for the Swiss, Schleitheim was inluential in eventually building that consensus.

After visiting Hallau I started biking towards Schaffhausen to catch a train to Zurich for the night. However I got a flat tire. And again I was aided by a complete stranger. I explained to someone that all I needed was air pressure, but he insisted on driving me and my tire to the nearest bike shop. Then he brought me to his home for a short visit and some chocolate with warm milk. His name was Iso and he was born in Greece, raised in Macedonia, and now lived in Hallau. He was a very busy man who worked hard, and being rewarded by gaining property in Switzerland, no small feat. As Andy had told me my first day in Switzerland, owning real estate is only for the rich. Everyone else must rent from them.

Schleitheim

2008-06-08T22:34:00.004+02:00

I had a fantastic and grueling weekend, going first to the canton of Schaffhausen to visit some of the country locations where Anabaptist seed first grew and then also to Zurich, the great city where the Anabaptist seed germinated. In Schaffhausen I visited Schleitheim and the Tauferstein. The countryside around Schaffhausen is just beautiful. Take the picturesque scenes of Lancaster County and double them, and you get some idea. It was simply gorgeous. Schaffhausen, though it is the capital of a Swiss canton, is a small city of only about 40,000 people.

Schleitheim is a short bus ride from Schaffhausen. Schleitheim has a small city museum, and one room is dedicated to the Schleitheim Confession, the confession written early in the Anabaptist movement, 1527, as a way to unite these disparate adult baptizers. The display is very well done, with panels explaining Mennonite beliefs very well in both German and English. And I was surprised to see brightly painted pictures of important Anabaptist events, such as the Zurich disputation on infant baptism and the drowning of Felix Manz. These are all depicted in the Zurich Chronicle, from the perspective of the Reformed Church of course. The volunteer curator was a great man to talk to.

A couple of things for those who might visit. The bus really does take you almost exactly where you need to go. You get off at the Schleitheim Gemeindehaus stop. Samuel Wenger has a series of 4 books on touring important Reformed and Anabaptist locations in Switzerland. Masthof Press out of Morgantown, PA, published them. They are very helpful. They include maps that take you right to the places you want to see, basically. However Wenger assumes you have a car, which I have not had. So I will let people know how to find things by public transportation.

There are also a couple of issues, the first being that you need to call ahead to ask for the museum to be opened, otherwise it is open only on the first Sunday of the month. Herr Bechtold is glad to open it for you, but he only speaks German.

The museum has one of only four copies of the original Schleitheim printing, which is in the photo above. It so happens that the Mennonite Historical Library in Goshen also has one, as the curator told me. The exhibit is well done, thanks to Dr. Urs Leu, a professor in Zurich.

After my visit to the museum I thought I would visit the Tauferstein. The Tauferstein, or baptist stone, is a memorial stone remembering the Anabaptists who fled Switzerland via the Tauferstieg, or baptist path. In German Anabaptist/Mennonites are generally known simply as taufer, or baptist. The stone was put on this path about four years ago as an act of reconciliation from the Reformed for their ancestors persecution of ours.

I was enjoying my time riding my bike along a lovely path. A local woman suggested a way for me to get to Hemmental, near the Tauferstein. But as I biked along I noticed a shortcut on the map. So I took it. Bad idea. It had some grueling climbs. And then as I kept going I just kept climbing and climbing. I saw what was basically a mountain and thought to myself that there was no way I would have to go all the way up that thing to find the Tauferstein. Well, I was wrong.

I think part of my problem is that the map showed numbers like 900, which I took to mean 900 feet. But of course this is Europe and 900 is for meters, or more like 2700 feet. So now we are talking the altitude of some of Pennsylvania's Allegheny Mountains. And it was getting cold and I was now walking my bike, wishing that I was returning the way that I came so that I could leave my bike somewhere. I took a path that ended up being wrong and I felt completely lost on this mountain with no one around and no water. Then I see a famous Swiss spring.

Then I hear a tractor. As he passes me by I flag the farmer down and ask him if he knows where I could find the Tauferstein. Yes he does, but it's difficult to explain and my German isn't that good. He says, I can go with you. I cannot express the relief I felt when he said this, but all I could say was, but you don't have time. He replied that he had lots of time. So he walked with me for about 20 minutes until we found the stone, and then he snapped my photo above.

When I told him that he was like an angel to me, he replied that he was president of Schleitheim, and that when someone visited Schleitheim, he wanted to make sure that they had a good time. Then he gave me directions for a good way down the mountain, and of course when you are on a bicycle going down is a lot of fun. I am so grateful to Herr Stamm for taking the time to make my visit a success. And I met person after person in Schaffhausen who took care of me.

It was getting pretty late by then and I still had a ways to go to the barn where I would be sleeping. So once back in Schaffhausen I hopped on the train to near the place. Since the address was Berghaus, or mountain house, you can imagine that once again I had a steep climb, but it was doable. I made it up the hill just as the sun was setting and the kind farmer's wife made me a hearty supper of potatoes, bacon, eggs, and salad. I ate everything and slept very well and very long. Did I mention that I was exhausted?

It was a satisfying day by the end, though there were moments when I wondered if it was a good idea to be in a foreign country with only a bike. But I again had the opportunity to experience the extraordinary kindness of strangers, a kind of reversal of angels unaware.

Bienenberg

2008-06-08T22:20:00.004+02:00

I had a wonderful first week at Bienenberg, which means Bee Mountain in German. I have attached both a photo of where I am staying and the view from my room and the restaurant where I eat here. This was once a resort and is now a retreat center owned by the Mennonites of France, Switzerland, and Germany. Since Basel is located where these three countries meet it is a great location. In general the staff is trilingual, as far as I can tell. Or at least they speak great English along with German. From my window I can see the Black Forest of Germany. I didn't realize that this area was as moutainous, or at least as hilly, as it is.

I had a surprise my first week here in that a group of Swiss Mennonite senior citizens were here on retreat all week long. There are also two German Mennonite volunteers, two brothers from the Palatinate. All of them are very friendly, in that way that older people are so good at being.

A man who once taught at Bienenberg (it is both a training center and retreat center) came up to me and introduced himself. He was very patient with me, like some others have been. And in the gentle way that an older gentleman can do this, he corrected my German. In Switzerland, he told me, we don't use "Sie" with each other, it is "du." Which is to say, they aren't formal with each other, but informal. For those who know Spanish Sie is like Usted and du is of course like tu. I also met a former pastor of the Langnau Mennonite Church, who speaks great English, and the former administrator of a children's home in France. She of course knew the Meyer family. A number of the folks here were in the US as Mennonite Central Committee trainees.

The last night when both they and I were still here, they invited me to a slide show of Switzerland. A man who had died some years ago had taken some great shots of different locations in Switzerland. They were great. Now that I am back from my weekend away, I miss all the people around here. It is now just a few of us.

Finally Basel

2008-06-05T20:55:00.002+02:00

I guess you could understand the word "finally" in the title in two ways. The first is that I have finally arrived in Basel. But the other is that here I am, on Thursday, and I am finally getting around to writing about last weekend. Since coming to Switzerland I have been flooded with thoughts and feelings and I guess I am not sure where to start. Also I am going to be at Bienenberg for about a month, and so I figure I can take my time in explaining what is going on.

So let me begin with my weekend. As I said, Irene's relative met me at the Basel Bahnhof (train station). He helped me with my luggage as we went onto two different trams to his home. Basel is an extremely pedestrian friendly city, and he does not own a car, though he is part of a car coop so that he can use one when he needs one to go out into the country.

Andy is married with one small daughter. She is such a cutie, under a year old. She smiles all the time. They were a very friendly and welcoming family. For my meal there, we had curry. He noted that curry is not particularly Swiss, but he made it with fruit, which is. It was delicious.

Andy lived in the US for several years and speaks great English. It was fun to talk to him about some of the differences and what we appreciate in both countries. On one of their doors they have affixed two photographs of the prairie. For him the prairie is so beautiful because you can see for miles; he is accustomed to being hemmed in by the mountains. I found this hard to believe and we realized that you can more easily appreciate what you do not have in ample supply.

On the other hand he did not miss American plumbing. He said that American water faucets are too close to the bottom of the sink. There's no room for your hands. And certainly a visitor to Switzerland is immediately impressed with all the smart technology. The plumbing really is impressive. Some toilets have two buttons depending on how much water is needed. All the showers vary both the pressure and the temperature in a very easy to use way.

The windows also astound me. You turn the handle one way and they open as vents at the top, the other way and the swing wide open. And get this, they don't use screens. I was just waiting to be invaded by a horde of insects. But really it was no problem. It's nice for the view but I'm guessing that they get away with it only because their summertime temperatures are not nearly as high as in Indiana. So far it has been in the 60s and 70s Fahrenheit.

And finally the electrical lights are also amazing. They use motion sensors so that as you go from room to room the lights turn on. Eventually they go off.

I went with the family to the Schaenzli Mennonite Church in Muttenz. They were having a joint service with the local Reformed Church and the Reformed preacher spoke. He was more formal, wearing a robe and special things around his neck. He spoke about reaching out across boundaries.

The church is alive and well and very active. It is a young church with many young families. Apparently Swiss Mennonites have experienced some decline some years ago, but at least recently it appears they are alive and well and reaching out. It has been exciting to see how strong Christian faith is in Europe since I more easily hear about how weak it is becoming. From Taize and my experience here, it is clear to me that there is still many strong Christians in Europe.

My photo is of the church "parking lot." It is mostly bikes. And you see this kind of thing everywhere. Even at the Rathause, which would be like the Indiana State Legislature, you see men in business suits riding bikes and then parking them in the long line of bicycles in front of the building. What's not to love about a country like this?

Geneva

2008-06-03T19:39:00.004+02:00

Saturday was a long, hard day of travel. I rode on one bus, three trains, and two trams before I arrived at my destination in Basel. That means I carried my luggage seven times. I had a small bruise where one of my bags bumped against my arm. I was travelling for about 12 hours, though that includes a long stay in Geneva. I spent about 4-5 hours there because this is probably the only time I will see this beautiful lakeside city. Swiss train stations have lockers for luggage, but my luggage was too big. The guy at the luggage office complained to me bitterly about taking my luggage, but since I don't understand much French it wasn't much of a problem.

After having a typical Genevois meal of Filets de perche, perch filets, I strolled through the old city. I saw the home where John Calvin once lived and the Cathedrale St-Pierre where he preached. It was called the Protestant church of Europe.

During Reformation times, Geneva was a great city of tolerance and Protestant Reformation. As I looked at the various monuments, such as this one of Calvin, John Knox, and two other important Protestants figures, I found myself wondering why Anabaptists were not included in this tolerance. The monument goes through a whole series of proclamations of toleration for various religious views and we can be thankful that this toleration has spread so widely, though still not widely enough as many people are still persecuted for their beliefs.

As I returned to the train station, I caught a glimpse of Geneva's famous Jet d'Eau, or water spray. It is a nice touch. The region is full of beauty and I could not believe how far and wide Lake Geneva goes. We saw it from the train for a long time, and it was just the first of a couple of lakes.

A relative of my temporary German teacher Irene welcomed me for the night. But I will say more about that when I describe my first Sunday at church.

Cluny the once great, now mostly a ruin

2008-06-02T23:05:00.003+02:00

One day at Taize I went to Cluny, what was once the head of a great Benedictine order of monsasteries. This is just a small village but at one point it had the largest church in all of Christendom. After the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution, most of it was destroyed. The one picture shows the ruins of the great columns that were in the church. And the big tower in the other picture is the only remaining of three great towers that once stood there. The church in Europe became very powerful and used much of that power to gain even more power and money. In that sense I can understand the revolution. But I can't help but think that the French themselves wish that the church was still there. What a tourist attraction they would have!

Tokens of community

2008-06-02T22:28:00.001+02:00

I have left Taize now, but I wanted to say a little something about community life there. We form a bit of a community in the "adult" section of Taize, everyone over 30. We have small group meetings in the afternoon that are of course based on language. My group changed each time, with a couple of Americans, British, Dutch, Swedes, and an English-speaking German who I guess preferred to speak to people outside of Germany since there were plenty of German speakers there.

I started to hang out with some of these folks, especially two British women who were there a couple of days. The one day I went out biking they gave me a lift to the local village which enabled me to buy some sunglasses and get out a little further on the Green Way, Voie Verte, a magnificent bicycle path that passes through Taize and kilometers of French countryside.

I also met two Swiss among all the Germans, and got to know the one a little bit. Thursday was a bit of a change since these acquaintances left, leaving me again without people to quickly join in dining. So it is an interesting and changing community at Taize. I miss it a lot. It is a camp atmosphere, only this is for adults. And I realized that this community would never gather again.

At the same time I realized that on my European sojourn I am not alone. I realized how one person after another has offered hospitality to me. In one sense this is a community, though hardly one, or at least a conglomeration of people who are making my trip possible. I have received several tokens of this community.

The woman who gave me a ride in Chicago gave me some of the wet wipes she sells, for when I need to clean up after a bike ride. Someone from Colorado gave me a small pocket cross as a token of blessing during my time of sabbatical. Finally one of the British women gave me her hair brush.

When they gave me a ride to the neighboring village I had also wanted to purchase a hairbrush, but since my hair is thick and I need a special kind, I couldn't find what I needed. They had teased me when they gave me a ride about the dangers of taking rides from strange women, after my experience in Chicago. I retorted with telling them that so far people were giving me gifts. So on the day they left one of them gave me her hairbrush, which was just the right kind. I was so surprised I don't know if I thanked her or not, I am sure I didn't thank her enough. All of these people are showing me great kindness and I appreciate these reminders of conversations that we had and especially these reminders of their grace and hospitality in making my time go a little better as I travel from one place to another.

Now that I am in Basel of course this story of hospitality continues. I stayed in the home of a local Mennonite family here and they again showed me extraordinary kindness.

Singing at Taize, Part 2

2008-06-02T22:12:00.002+02:00

I've added some photos now that I have reliable internet access with my computer. Attached to this post is the Taize Church of the Reconciliation.

My final evening in Taize was special for two reasons. During one of the services two of the German women noticed that I sing bass and Spanish. I explained that I am an American, but that Spanish is my second language. They invited me to join them that evening to continue to sing Taize songs after the Taize brothers left.

To understand their plan you need to understand a little bit more about Taize songs and worship. Taize songs are generally repetitive chants with no end. You keep singing them over and over again until the song leader decides to sing amen or just stop. You can see this as a lack of artistry if you like, but I think there is something else at work here. I think it is a way to keep the prayer going--since Taize songs are prayers--it is moving us towards praying without ceasing.

The worship services work in a similar way. They do not end! There is no benediction. At some point, the majority of the brothers get up and leave the room, leaving an instrumentalist and a vocalist to lead a couple of songs. And then those two leave as well, leaving the room with whoever happens to still be there. Every other night I was there the group would sing one or at most two songs. But without the brothers to sing the harmonies, the music would peter out.

Again I think the lack of a benediction is pointing to the idea of praying without ceasing. We take our prayers and songs into our hearts during the rest of the day. And the experience of worship at Taize really does make a big difference in your life the rest of the time too. The whole time does feel like a time of worship.

So anyway these two German women told me that during the summer and holidays the people at Taize keep singing for hours after the brothers leave. So they invited another German they knew who sang tenor and the four of us sat close to each other as the service was starting to wind down. Then when there was no song number announced on the LED board, one of the women called out a number in German and we would go to it. I noticed that a lot of the songs were German and finally started requesting some English ones too. We kept singing for perhaps 1 to 2 hours after a lot of people had left. Maybe 20 people stayed with us. We was a great experience of worship and singing. Perhaps a fourth of the songs were new to me and so that took some concentration and at times guessing the notes. But it went well. As Germans would say, das war toll!

The other special thing about this final night was that on Friday night they always bring out the icon of the cross and invite you to kneel at it, symbolically laying down your burdens at Jesus' feet. I certainly had burdens to lay down and so I went to the cross. About six people gather around it at a time and while everyone else keeps singing those at the cross are absolutely silent. It was such a holy silence. I felt myself suspended between heaven and earth. Perhaps that is a good way to describe Taize.

Das Doopsgezinde Domine

2008-05-31T06:08:00.003+02:00

I have been called many things in my life, but never a Doopsgezinde domine. Probably the second largest group after Germans here are Dutch. I am accustomed to people not knowing what a Mennonite is when I tell them I am a Mennonite pastor. But I have discovered that if I use the Dutch word for Mennonite, Doopsgezinde (in Dutch "baptism-minded") then they know what I mean, though they may not know much about Doopsgezinde.

I have enjoyed learning to know the Dutch here. Jill and I have good Dutch friends in California with whom we lived on my last sabbatical. There is a couple here where the wife is very friendly and the husband comes across as kind of gruff, though inside he is actually very soft. This is not the first time I have met a Dutch couple like that. She is the one who called me das Doopsgezinde domine, which would be Dutch for the Mennonite pastor.

Many of the people in the adult sector of Taize are either at least a decade older than me, that is over 50, or a decade younger. Taize puts you in the adult section when you turn 30. I was pleased that for my supper clean up duty, I was put with younger people. I have had many good conversations. They ask very honest questions and are very open. One young man talked to me about how love of enemies led him into the Dutch army reserves as an engineer, where he can work at rebuilding. I am thankful for such conversations.

The picture shows the town of Taize on its hill. I am just about to climb the hill on my bike. I will have a few more things to say about Taize I am sure, but today I leave for Basel. This has been a week full of grace and peace.

International and interdenominational

2008-05-29T06:23:00.004+02:00

A central aspect of community life at Taize is that all Christians are welcome to worship here. I guess many Christians would say that about their worship, but at Taize they make several overtures to include Christians of various traditions and nationalities. The most obvious thing they do is that their worship is in many languages. We sing in Latin about as much as any language, which is seen as a kind of neutral European language. But the most predominant vernacular languages are French, English, and German.

It appears that Taize has worked more specifically with the Orthodox in recent years and so we have also sung in Russian a few times. I think another time we sang in Polish, which is also east, though it is Catholic. Earlier I mentioned Brother Roger, the founder of Taize, being Catholic and Reformed. I think that would describe the brothers also, meaning that some are Catholic and some are Protestant.

And so this is the most international interdenominational gathering I have ever attended. It is also not dominated by Americans, which since I spend most of my time in the USA is also a change.

The times in between worship are also opportunities to build community. Of course language is a major barrier, though it is amazing what you can communicate by knowing a word or three and some hand gestures. I had a great conversation in Spanish with some Spaniards who are Carmelite sisters in the Dominican Republic. I of course told them we had a student at our church who grew up in the Dominican.

I also had a sustained conversation with a German woman who did not speak much English. As I mentioned German is the most common language here, though half of them speak great English. She was very patient with me and I appreciated that she took the time to talk to me. We learned a little about each other and our churches and nations. This is one of the reasons learning German is important to me, it enables me to converse with people who are different from myself.

Coming from the USA, where the important language besides English is Spanish, it is strange how little Spanish is spoken here. So far I have met only a handful of Spanish speakers.

Our Bible study time also has this aspect of Pentecost language experience. We are taught by a German speaker probably because so many Germans are here. So first he teaches in German, then he translates his words into French for the small contingent of French speakers while a volunteer translates his words into English. Then while he is speaking again in German, one of the Spaniards translates from the English translation into Spanish for her Spanish companions. Talk about a holy confusion, but in fact it mostly works as long as you are willing to pay attention.

So this is a unique way of experiencing in a real way the presence of God amidst all peoples.

A pilgrimage of trust

2008-05-28T07:02:00.003+02:00

Taize describes itself as a pilgrimage of trust on the earth. It is a community of brothers who live in celibacy and simplicity and worship. They allow others to join them for a few days or weeks in this pilgrimage, and the young people flock here, although this week before the major holidays it is still subdued. Taize invites us all to be bearers of peace and trust.

Trust has become the theme of my week, perhaps it will become the theme of my sabbatical. I have arrived on a continent where I do not know anyone. And so I must trust in others. Sometimes it is easy to trust, such as the people at the information window at the Gare de Lyon. Other times I am not sure how much to trust, such as the gypsy at the Gare de Lyon who provided me much needed assistance but from whom I eventually needed to separate so that I could make some decisions and get some information on my own. There was also the woman who gave me a ride to O'Hare in Chicago. Ultimately I was late but I did make it here.

Finally here at Taize I am making some friends amidst all these strangers. We are assigned Bible study groups and since I was assigned an English speaking one I have met some English and Americans with whom I have had good conversations. I was explaining the American presidential political process to the Britons and they found it very complicated, which it is.

I was also assigned a work group and there I met a Swiss woman who lives in Bern. That eventually led to an attempt at conversation with some Germans who didn't know much English, something that hasn't happened much. German is the most common language spoken at Taize this week, but many Germans speak English very well.

It is good to have some people that you feel like you know a little bit and can trust.

In the worship I realize that the ultimate question of trust is with God. Do I trust in God's care for me and for God's world? How do I continue to trust in the face of disappointment? How do I find the capacity to trust again someone who was not trustworthy about something? Trust is perhaps a discipline, a discipline I hope to cultivate here. If I can find the capacity to fully trust God even when things are not going my way, then I am on the road to maturity.

Singing in Taize

2008-05-27T06:37:00.004+02:00

Finally I made it to Taize. I gave them my laptop to keep in a secure location. But they have clunky internet machines with awful keyboards that I can use for 2 euros for 30 minutes, or about $3. So I may send occasional dispatches from here.

There is something about travelling in a foreign country where I have only a rudimentary understanding of the language, that has heightened my sense of dependence on God. Getting onto the train was one of those experiences. I walked along the train until I spotted what looked like second class. I got on the first car, unloaded my luggage, and sat in the first available empty seat. A few minutes later a French woman began to explain something to me but she didn't know any English. Finally I asked, "Reserve?" And I realized we had assigned reserved seats. Fortunately my reserved seat was across the aisle and one row over, otherwise I would have needed to lug all my luggage in the narrow aisles to who knows how many cars away.

As I was reading a book in the train, which is what most people were doing--that or sleeping, I remembered that a week earlier when my brothers or parents would talk about what they would be doing in a week, I would say, "Sorry I can't be there, but next Sunday I will be on a train through the French countryside." So I decided I had better look out the window and enjoy. And the French countryside is beautiful. Undulating hills are green with many crops other than corn. And almost all the cows are white. Homes are old stonework. There are many straight lines, but they do not have the square quilt pattern of northern Indiana. Of course, corn and square fields are fine, but also vive la difference.

As I arrived at Taize I was nervous about what would happen here. What was it that I was looking for? How did I intend to experience God here in a way that I could not anywhere else?

The first worship answered my questions. It was a beautiful and uplifting experience. When we hosted Roman Catholic priest Brian Daley as our preacher, I tried to explain the worship to him in language that would make sense to him. So I told him, "Mennonites sing our liturgy." Liturgy is from the Greek word for "work of the people." Catholics are happy to recite creeds and litanies with the spoken word. But Mennonites complain that it seems like they don't really mean it when they have to read a litany. However if you set those same words to music, they will sing almost anything with meaning, although Rich occasionally will point out bad theology in a hymn we just sang.

At Taize also the liturgy is sung. There were also Scripture readings and a few prayers spoken by the brothers. But it was mostly sung in two or four-part harmonies. As you sing the repetitive phrases it is as if time is standing still, that you are taking part in the unending praise of eternity. I stayed for 1 1/2 hours, but didn't realize how late it was. It was good.

To Taize

2008-05-26T09:04:00.003+02:00

I have my train ticket to Taize and so leave for there this morning. I doubt that I will have internet access there, so you may not hear from me for awhile.

Taize is a community of religious people, founded by Brother Roger, who was Swiss Reformed. But according to Rich Meyer, he also was accepted into the Roman Catholic fold without having to renounce his Swiss Reformed identity. So he was both Roman Catholic and Protestant. He did not convert, but accepted the authority of the pope. It is the only such case that I have heard of.

Taize is mostly meant for young people, but they allow a few older folks like me to be around as well. Worship is central to their life. So this is a week of spiritual retreat for me. You can learn about Taize at http://www.taize.fr/en

Continued delays but at least in Paris

2008-05-25T22:30:00.004+02:00

So, since I was late in getting to Paris, that has now led to more delays. My flight to Paris arrived just in time to miss the last train to Macon that would take me to the bus to Taize. So after speaking to the ticket agent at Gare de Lyon I decided to spend the night in Paris.

I have since learned that I probably could have taken a taxi to Taize from Macon. I guess I'm not a fan of taxis and so I didn't even think about it.

As I arrived at Gare de Lyon a street beggar helped me for awhile. He got me some information and a phone card. When I realized I didn't have the phone number to call Taize, where I was supposed to spend the night, he gave me a hanky, apparently to cry. In some ways I did feel like crying.

But the ticket agent got me tickets to go to Taize tomorrow and I had a pleasant evening in Paris. The hotel is attached to the train station.

I am wondering about all the luggage I brought, and whether hauling my bike is going to be worthwhile. As I trudged through Chicago looking for the blue line, I thought of the many portages I managed with canoes and a heavy backpack in the boundary waters of northern Minnesota. This certainly is not worse than that. But it is a lot of work for the arms.

In general I have been stubborn about letting others carry my bags, but I think I will accept help now. And I was very happy to discover carts at the airport and train station. Again, in the past I have been too stubborn to use them, but now I think it's going to be an essential part of my travels.

The surprise of the day is that my flight was routed through London and so I spent a few hours in her majesty's United Kingdom. I wasn't sure what to do with the time, or what products I should buy there that are difficult to purchase elsewhere. If I had known I was going to be there I would have asked my British friends for advise.

The English Channel really didn't take that long to cross on an airplane. On the shuttle drive from Charles de Gaulle airport to Gare de Lyon I was impressed with how much Paris didn't seem that different from the USA, of course this was from the perspective of a freeway. Now that I'm in the city I have seen some of the differences. This is a very pedestrian friendly area. I ate at a small faster food place but I have to say that the food was terrific. The salmon tasted good. All the ingredients seemed fresh and carefully put togehter. I had an appetizer of a cheese with herbs mixed in. Bon appetit!

Delayed on first day of trip

2008-05-25T20:41:00.000+02:00

The first day of my trip to Europe was eventful for the simple reason that I was late for my flight. by 12 minutes. Apparently American Airlines will not allow you to check in if you arrive less than 40 minutes before an international flight.

Why I arrived late is an interesting story in itself. I came to Chicago by the South Shore Railroad with plans to walk 3 blocks over to the Metra Blue Line. When I got to the station that I had just visited in the Spring, it was under construction. I asked someone how you got to the Blue Line now. He started to answer me but he didn’t know what he was talking about, and finally admitted it when I questioned him further.

Then I saw a woman who looked like she was comfortable in the area. She also didn’t know the location of the Blue Line, but she did offer me a ride to O’Hare Airport. She was headed that way anyway. I was surprised by this extraordinary kindness and trust from a stranger in Chicago. I thought through the risks and thought it would be worth it. She had one errand to run and then we would be on our way. It was a surprising encounter, I a Mennonite pastor and she turned out to be someone who worked in the adult toy industry. Her specialty is leather corsets but she also is expanding into other areas that I will not mention. We actually had a good conversation. She had to drop off a leather corset at a gay convention.

Unfortunately in our travels to O’Hare we took a wrong turn a time or two. Once at the airport the skycap told us to go to Iberia rather than American Airlines. I’m not sure why, but since my original ticket was for Iberia it made sense to me. At Iberia they told me to go back to American. Unfortunately we had just passed American on the one-way street. So we had to go around the airport again. But we accidentally took the arrivals rather than departures lane and then we had to go outside the airport area again and turn around. Finally we got to the right place and the kiosk refused to issue me a ticket because I was 12 minutes late.

Then I waited in a long line at American where she told me I would probably need to pay a penalty. She also said that no more flights were available until the next day. Then she said that since Iberia originally had issued the ticket, I had to go back to them. I went back and discovered that their desk was closed until 1 pm the next day. I was in despair, not knowing what would happen to me. I prayed, acknowledging that my fate was in God’s hands.

Eventually I heard a ticket agent in the back and I called to her. She came forward and she remembered that I was the pastor from Indiana, since she had called me the day before about whether I was willing to switch to American Airlines from Iberia. She had seemed very nice and that impression was affirmed by this experience. She went to the back and worked on my situation. She found a flight for me through London to Paris, going from American to British Airways.

So now I lugged my oversized (my bicycle) and heavy luggage (too many books) another time to American at the other end of the lobby. There the ticket agent said that the Iberia agent had not properly changed the ticket. But she worked for some time and called several people and finally validated my ticket. As she worked on this, she went from being kind of angry to confiding to me about how difficult it is to work at American Airlines right now. She doesn’t know if she will have a job in a few months. It sounds very difficult. She checked me in and did not charge me for the oversized or overweight luggage. I was very grateful.

So I will be arriving in Paris, God willing, Sunday afternoon rather than Sunday morning. Hopefully I can still get a train to Taize, or at least find a good place to spend the night if I cannot.

Introduction

2008-05-24T17:28:00.000+02:00

As a child I remember watching Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? One of the questions was something like "Which group did Mennonites come from?" The options included Quakers and Amish. The answer was the Amish, but the show had it wrong. Mennonites didn't come from the Amish, it is the other way around. The Amish broke from the Mennonites in 1693. Perhaps the producers assumed that liberals would break from conservatives, but in many cases conservatives decide they no longer want contact with the more liberal elements.

There is a lot of information and misinformation out there about Mennonites and Amish. I grew up in a Mennonite home and today am a Mennonite pastor. Three of my grandparents grew up in Old Order Amish homes, but all of them left the Amish for the Mennonites when they were baptized as young adults.

I have wondered about the Amish background in my family. What difference, if any, does it make in the way I express my Christian faith today as a Mennonite? Many Mennonites are aware that the Amish divided from us centuries ago. Much fewer realize that about a century ago there was a significant merger of Amish and Mennonites. These more liberal Amish started calling themselves Amish Mennonites, began to meet in meeting houses rather homes, and formed area conferences like the Mennonites. Eventually most of these Amish Mennonite conferences merged with Mennonite ones, and they dropped the word Amish from their name, so Clinton Frame Amish Mennonite Church became Clinton Frame Mennonite Church. The awareness of this Amish heritage disappeared along with the name. My mother was baptized at Clinton Frame, but had no idea it was once Amish.

In this blog I explore the ways Amish and Mennonites have connected and disconnected through the centuries. That is why I have called this blog Amish Mennonite, not because I claim to be Amish Mennonite. Some groups still use that name, but I am not a part of them. I am a Mennonite interested in the Amish.

On the one hand the Amish are the most conservative part of the family tree. But on the other you have Amish like the Stuckey Amish (now merged with the Central District Conference of the Mennonite Church USA) who were very lenient about discipline, especially not wanting conference to ever tell congregations what they should do. Or there is Oak Grove (Amish) Mennonite Church, where the preeminent Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder was raised. So I am curious about whether there is something that binds the Old Order with the progressives. What part of the Amish heritage might still be at work among these more progressive elements?

This mostly going to be a travelogue. I will include personal details but also history, geography, theology, and genealogy. I may eventually include an annotated bibliography, but at the moment I will say that the book to read on the Amish is A History of the Amish (Intercourse, Pennsylvania: Good Books, 2003 (revised)), by Steve Nolt, a history classmate of mine at Goshen College years ago.

Thanks for stopping by my blog and reading what I have to say. This is my first attempt at this so I hope technical issues are not a problem. Peace.