A Brethren group I didn't know about

 I was baptized on Palm Sunday, 1950, in the Mt. Morris, Illinois Church of the Brethren and have been a Lutheran (in 3 synods but same congregation and building) since 1976 when we were confirmed. I've watched from the sidelines what has been happening in the different Brethren groups from the original small group in 1708.  Today I came across a new split--the Old German Baptist Brethren New Conference. There seems to be a disagreement about foreign missions.

"On the heels of the Protestant Reformation, in 1708 a handful of believers under Anabaptist and Pietistic influence, embarked upon a journey of faith seeking a deeper reformation of doctrine and practice. Seeking a life that followed the Scriptures more literally, eight souls were baptized by immersion in the Eder River in Schwarzenau, Germany. This was a radical departure from the state churches’ practice of infant baptism. With a genuine desire to live the New Testament, these brethren were led to practices such as the Love Feast including feet-washing, the agape meal, and the emblematic bread and cup, non-resistance, the refusal to take an oath, and the practice of the holy kiss.

The group grew in Germany and Holland and migrated to America in the 1700’s establishing congregations beginning near Germantown, Pennsylvania. From there the Brethren migrated to Virginia and the West growing to a fellowship of approximately 70,000 members. In 1881, a small portion of these members, calling themselves Old German Baptists, separated from the larger group in a quest for a more godly and simple life. From this body of believers, the New Conference emerged in 2009." https://www.ogbbc.org/about

My relatives, the Shumans, who live near or in Pendelton, Indiana are members of the Old German Baptist Brethren, and this article is about them, presented by cousin Lois at the Pendleton Museum.  I see nothing about New Conference.  So I don't know how the churches decided which group to go with.  

"Addressing about 30 attendees, Shuman said the Christian religion was first organized in Germany in 1708.

The ruler of Germany at the time was tolerant to new religions, but when a later, less tolerant ruler took over, the German Baptists moved on to the Netherlands.

In 1719, the first members brought their religion to the United States. Like the followers of many other religions at the time, they settled in Pennsylvania, where William Penn had promised religious freedom, she said.

Old German Baptists are neither Catholic nor Protestant. They are recognized as Anabaptist.

Anabaptists establish rules that are to be strictly followed by the members of their sect, she said. Old German Baptists believe the newer sects are too progressive in their thinking.

The first group reached Pendleton in 1791.

“There are still descendants of the first families in our congregation today,” Shuman said.

Because the religious groups were so spread out in the state, one minister may have an area of 30 square miles to cover.

“It doesn’t sound like much now, said Shuman, but imagine how bad the roads were in the 1800s.”

About half of the Old German Baptists still live in Indiana and Ohio.

After Shuman’s talk there were many questions from the attendees.

She said her religion does not prohibit use of new technologies like some faiths. She has electricity, a microwave and many other modern comforts.

Shuman used a laptop during her presentation.

“We accept modern technology as long as it doesn’t get in the way of Christian living.”

She did point out that they do not have TVs, radios or the internet. She said “a computer without the internet is just a fancy typewriter.”

She uses her “fancy typewriter for her job with IU. While Shuman does have a phone, it is not a smart phone.

“I am able to text on my phone, but it’s a lot of work,” Shuman said with a laugh.

Church members do not vote or participate in government.

They are conscientious objectors and do not file or defend themselves in a lawsuit.

Children are encouraged to finish high school but for the most part are steered away from college, she said. They feel that college will cause children to question their beliefs.

Church services are different from what others might accustomed to seeing.

Meetings start with singing. There are no musical instruments.

“The minister reads the verse and the congregation sings it,” Shuman said.

There could be as many as five ministers for each service.

Ministers are appointed for life.

Normally, men and women sit on different sides of the church, but this is not a strict rule.

Old German Baptists have been called Dunkards and Tunkers. These names were used because they believe in full immersion baptism.

A person can become a member as soon as they reach the age of accountability, usually late teens or early 20s.

Children are encouraged to marry within the congregation.

Shuman said they have a 50% to 70% retention rate in their church.

Most women make their own clothes. Shuman said the cape is for modesty.

“When I became a member, I thought the dress was going to be very hot, but I got used to it, Shuman said.

Men wear plain coats and button-up shirts. Members of the ministry have a beard without a mustache. It is encouraged but not required among the membership.

Shuman finished her presentation by stating, “Everyone is welcome to visit our church.”" https://www.pendletontimespost.com/2022/03/10/history-talk-explores-old-german-baptist-beliefs/

Reading and cycling

My office was cleaned out to the bare walls and moved to the laundry room to make way for our son’s hospital bed and supplies. At first the exercycle was in my husband’s office, but I pushed it into the laundry room so I could multi-task.  My washing machine, which I’ve written about before, is a little touchy and likes to dance around if not loaded evenly, so sometimes I just jump on the cycle during spin.

But it’s sort of boring, so I’m reading a new book I was sent for review: American Harvest, God, Country and Farming in the Heartland, by Marie Mutsuki Mockett, a Californian with a Japanese mother, and American father.  There’s been a 7,000 acre wheat farm in her family for over 100 years, although her grandfather had left the area as a child.

What caught my interest was not just the farmer angle, but the Christians who annually harvest the wheat using teams from the Pennsylvania Anabaptist country. I’m only in chapter 2, but so far, unless her liberal side takes over, I’m enjoying her vivid descriptions of the farms and her compassionate look at the harvesters she travels with to get material for this book.  I can go 3-4 miles a day with Marie.

http://www.mariemockett.com/books/american-harvest/

Here’s a review, but it sounds like the reviewer only finished the first 2 chapters, which is how far I am on my exercise plan. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-04-03/evangelicals-marie-mockett-american-harvest

Can Hutterites be born again?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddIxHNJ38mk

This is a fascinating film about a communal Christian colony called the Hutterites.  Their origins are in the Amish and Mennonite Anabaptist tradition and there are over 400 colonies in Canada and the U.S. This group live near the Canadian border, but some time back during a time of grief, one family went to a tent revival and were “saved,” and now worship differently than the Hutterites.  The emphasis is on Jesus, not love and commitment to the community of believers. They worship in English, not German.

The Flatwillow colony born again women sell their bread at a farmer’s market and use the time to evangelize. This is different from other Hutterites that only send men outside the colony. The “born agains” have Bible study, a practice not observed by Hutterites who read the Bible literally without questioning or interpreting. The “born agains” will not be able to intermarry with the Hutterites, and the two groups no longer do the same tasks on the 15,000 acre property.

I didn’t know when the film was made, but the eye wear looked like the early 1990s, and I found a WorldCat entry for 1992, filmed by BBC. So this all happened over 20 years ago.  They were making so many dress and life style changes I assume they eventually didn’t follow any Hutterite traditions, although when the film was made they continued them.  I did find an obituary for Eli Stahl from 2011, which follows a comment one of his relatives made in the film about an early death for those who leave the faith.

Religious Colleges should be allowed to follow their beliefs

even at sporting events. Goshen College, where my sister attended in the 1950s, is about 50 miles from Manchester, a Church of the Brethren college I attended. We shared a car (ca. 1951 Packard) to get back and forth to our parents' home in northern Illinois. Both colleges are picture post-card perfect, midwestern liberal arts schools. Goshen was recently in the news because a parent from a competing school athletic team complained that the Star Spangled Banner wasn't sung or played at athletic events at Goshen. I believe a compromise has been reached by using an instrumental version.

However, I was surprised to read in the paper that Goshen was still 55% Mennonite in student body. Mennonites along with the Quakers and Brethren are one of three historic peace denominations in the United States. In my family database I have many Mennonites and Brethren, and a few Quakers since they tended to hang out together in the 18th and 19th centuries. Are the rest of us really in danger of losing something if a few college students don't want to sing about an 1812 battle in a voice range that is almost impossible to reach and which celebrities regularly slaughter at base ball games?

Manchester's Brethren roots, on the other hand, are hard to find on the college web site. They are mentioned in the history section. Of the 10 or so MC web pages I searched with the "find" feature, Jesus' name appeared once. Environmentalism and religious pluralism are much bigger than Jesus at Manchester if pixels mean anything. At the About page the following values are listed: learning; faith; service; integrity; diversity; and community. It was hard to tell if there is any viable connection (other than funding support) from Church of the Brethren.

Anyway, I think little Goshen should stick to its guns--uh, um, its beliefs.

Dear President Obama

When I found out you had paid your parking tickets from 1989-1990 when you were a graduate student at Harvard in 2007, I decided it was time to pay my Ohio State University Libraries over-due book fines. Who knows, I might be tapped to be someone important in the future. So today I went to the Ackerman Road location (temporary home while the Main Library is being rebuilt /restored/ revitalized). After asking directions twice (I don't pay my bills on-line like you did--it's a generational thing), I finally found a nice lady who said she could help me pay my fine. I gave her my name, and there it was on her computer. $16.00 for 3 fines, one of which just happened last week. The other two I had no idea how old, but from before I retired, so I thought maybe the late 1990s.

I wrote her a check, she printed out the information, took it to a copy machine to copy the check, then gave me a copy of the bill. It's not that we weren't hi-tech in the old days nine years ago, but for some reason I was really surprised to see how much detail there was. I had no idea what had been overdue--maybe it's on my accessible record and I never noticed. When I saw the titles (1999 and 2000, so the fines were from 2000) I only remembered "Horse heaven," by Jane Smiley. I was the veterinary medicine librarian, you see, so I suppose I thought a novel about horse racing would be interesting. But it wasn't, and I think I only read about two chapters, until I forgot about it and it went over due. Truth be told, Mr. President, I really don't care much for fiction.

The second was one about which I have no memory at all but I'm assuming it was non-fiction, Anthony Arthur's "The Tailor-King," an account of the 16th-century takeover by Anabaptists of the city of Münster and its rapid descent into despotism and anarchy. Oh my! I can see why Martin Luther was so unhappy with the Anabaptists--the 16th century guys were certainly not the pacifist Mennonites and Brethren I grew up knowing! This guy ended up with 16 wives, one of whom he beheaded!!

"It says much about this strange young man's personality and character that he could so effectively turn his mentor's disaster into his own triumph. Of all the qualities that the preceding episode reveals about Jan van Leyden - ingenuity, imagination, timing - the one that stands out most is his intuitive mastery of what would later, in our own century, be called the technique of the big lie. Told with sincerity to a people anxious for reassurance, deriving from some source beyond and greater than its speaker, the big lie is so outrageously improbable that no one could possibly make it up. Therefore, it must be true." (p. 73)

Although some of this does have a familiar ring to it, doesn't it? The part about the big lie so outrageous and the people being so gullible.

But I was just thinking--I mean about the detail in my book fine information after all these years that even I had forgotten. You said you didn't remember you had fines, until the Boston Globe reporters began sniffing around asking questions. (This was back when they were tight with Hillary.) It was really smart of your advisers to get those tickets off the books before the Clintons even realized that you really were serious about becoming President of the United States. I don't know how a poor grad student in 1989 was able to even afford a car in Boston, but the ticket records would have had your DL number, the auto registration, whose house you were parked in front of, how many times it happened, and any other registered autos who were ticketed around the same time. Considering the hay the anti-Bush crowd tried to harvest over an old DUI, this could have gotten nastier than the certificate of live birth or the transcripts from Columbia and Harvard that have disappeared down the rabbit hole.

Anyway, just wanted to let you know I'm one of the many you've inspired to do the right thing. Also, I respect you for not pulling any strings to just make those parking tickets go away. Tim Geithner probably would have. Watch your back with that guy.

Evangelical Visitor, vol.1, no.1, 1887

Technically, I can't put this in my collection of premiere issues because it is scanned and on the internet in the collection of Messiah College for The Brethren in Christ Church (River Brethren). One of my great- great- somethings was a founder of this denomination [see correction below], so I thought I'd take a look. Reading through it, nothing seems any different than the German Baptist Brethren/Church of the Brethren of the 1880s. There was an annual conference, "love feast" (communion) with foot washing, modest clothing for both men and women. It was a mix of Mennonite, Brethren and Methodist, with emphasis on piety, just like the other Brethren. I'm not sure why these groups had to split up--it's usually the leadership--nor do I know why they didn't all vote to get back together in 2008 (300th anniversary) since the 6 or 7 groups are tiny by themselves. Together they probably don't reach 100,000 in membership in the U.S. Ah well, they didn't ask me, and I haven't been a member for over 35 years.

Having said that, I found this item by "C.S." from Louisville, Ohio sounding just like the "emergent church" controversy of today:

It has been, and is yet the aim of some professors of religion [i.e. people who profess to be religious] to get religion into such a position, that there is no cross connected with it. Men have been trying to dress up religion so that the offense of the cross should cease. . . they make daily compromise with the world.

Another fun item was reminiscences of the "old days" in various Ohio counties--like the 1850s--that people sent in. One obituary observed that the "brother" was not a believer, although he was married to one. The cost was $1.00 a year for 12 issues, and if you wanted to write something for the paper, you submitted it in ink and used only one side of the paper. The Elkhart, Indiana church had had a June Love Feast at the Brethren Meeting house, 16 mi. south of town with wonderful testimonies, Bible studies, exhortations, and a supper, with people returning home the next day rejoicing.

Based just on the numbering (vol. 121, no.1, Winter 2007), I'm guessing that the (new title) journal for BIC "In Part" is the granddaughter of Evangelical Visitor. She's handsome, fashionable, and topical, but not as spiritually satisfying.

Update: I checked my genealogy database and my notes say that my ancestor, John Wenger, split from the River Brethren in Montgomery Co. Ohio over issues of closed communion and meeting houses. His group (Pentecostal Brethren in Christ) were known as the Wengerites. All this is in Daniel Wenger's book on the Wengers. His son Christian Wenger was the father of my great-grandmother, Nancy. This may be more than you wanted to know about a tiny Ohio sect, but "The name Brethren in Christ became more common and about 1861 three groups in OH called themselves Brethren in Christ; the original River Brethren, the Wengerites and the Swankites. The River Brethren officially adopted the name Brethren in Christ in 1863 at the outbreak of the civil war in order for drafted conscientious objectors to obtain legal recognition as members of an established religious organization opposed to war. By 1924 the last of the Pentecostal Brethren in Christ had joined the Pilgrim Holiness Church (which merged with the Wesleyan Methodist Church to form the Wesleyan Church)."

How to tell a real peacemaker

Check out their beliefs. Statement on the War in Iraq by the Mennonites (Mennonite Church USA), at the Global Anabaptist Encyclopedia On-line. Also useful for doing some genealogy searches if you have Mennonites in your family tree.