An Amish Paradox
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These twenty-first-century Amish missionaries intentionally seek to be culturally sensitive change agents. According to one Old Order man, the Old Colony Mennonites realized that “we understand them better than some evangelistic church that would come in there and tear the whole structure down.” At the same time, it is interesting that members of a group routinely identified as “backward” by American mainstream society invoke the same terms of discourse to identify the Old Colony Mennonites as spiritually and educationally deficient. “They don’t know how to think for themselves,” commented one mission worker. Added another, “They have now identified how bad their education was. We want to get them to read and fully understand God’s word so that they can have salvation.” That at least a handful of Old Order Amish are participating in this endeavor is a striking testimony not only to the economic success of the Amish in North America but also to how the mission impulse and mind-set has grown in the main body of the church.9
Moving down the Anabaptist escalator, the stance of the Andy Weaver affiliation and the various Swartzentruber branches toward mission work is much more cautious, if not negative. Nothing restricts an individual from donating to a particular cause, but taking on an administrative or even a volunteer role for mission activities is less common for the Andy Weavers and almost unheard of for Swartzentrubers. One reason is the perceived danger of publicity that comes with supporting mission work. The Andy Weavers may support a fund-raiser for disabled individuals or the heart fund, but they are less likely to support overseas missions. Swartzentrubers may also support “free will” donations for local causes but will balk at supporting overseas missions. In some cases, these more conservative Amish groups do not consciously consider proselytizing in the first place, perhaps because of the lack of universalizing assumptions in their worldviews. One young Swartzentruber man said, “They wouldn’t even give it a thought.”
Competing Interpretations of the Great Commission
The various stances of Amish groups toward missions and outreach also reflect a much broader debate within the Anabaptist community over the interpretation of the Great Commission. Should “saving souls” and “church planting” be the top priority, or is God’s work best accomplished through relief and development efforts? Supporters of the latter view often cite a different Bible verse as justification for a more social gospel: “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in” (Matt. 25:35).
The Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) and Christian Aid Ministries (CAM) occupy opposing sides of this fault line in the Holmes County Settlement. Begun in 1920, MCC is the peace, relief, and development committee of various Mennonite groups and the Brethren in Christ Church in the United States and Canada. Because it has effectively joined massive fund-raising with an efficient administrative system, many aid organizations around the world see MCC as “cutting edge” in terms of administering fair trade and engaging in relief and development work. In Holmes and Wayne counties alone, MCC receives roughly a half million dollars a year in donations from two nonprofit thrift shops, MCC Connections in Kidron and Save and Serve in Millersburg. Approximately half of the volunteers in the latter shop are Amish. MCC also benefits from a relief sale in August that is supported by the Amish. In addition, MCC’s meat-canning committee, chaired in 2008 by an Old Order Amish man, is a finely honed operation. In conjunction with the scheduled arrival of a mobile canning truck, Amish church districts send volunteers for “work days” to can massive amounts of turkey for shipment to Burundi, North Korea, and other sites. MCC coordinators maintain a list of about fifty Old and New Order Amish bishops who are comfortable with receiving letters about MCC projects.
The Beachy Amish, however, have long viewed MCC as far too liberal on various social issues, including support for women in the ministry, a relatively activist stance with respect to peacemaking, and more tolerant views of homosexuality and abortion than the Beachy Amish hold. In the early 1980s, David N. Troyer founded Christian Aid Ministries as a conservative alternative to MCC. Out of its worldwide headquarters in Berlin, Ohio, and offices in Pennsylvania and other states, CAM has thus far distributed $1.3 billion worth of donated products around the world. In 2006 alone, it shipped more than 15 million pounds of food, medicine, clothing, and other aid to more than forty countries.10 CAM’s annual budget is nearly three times that of MCC, and its fund-raising has been so successful that Beachy church directors became concerned about declining donations to other Beachy Amish mission programs.
Old Order Amish volunteers mingle with Beachy Amish and Mennonites at Save and Serve, a thrift shop that supports the Mennonite Central Committee’s outreach projects. Photograph courtesy of David McConnell.
Although CAM receives strong backing from the Beachy Amish community, it also relies heavily on support from New and Old Order Amish. New Order Amish not only populate the ranks of donors and volunteers but also fill three staff positions at CAM headquarters and regularly fly to Indonesia, Pakistan, and other places to provide on-site assistance. “The New Order are very awake, they’re top of the line for us in terms of witness and work,” noted a CAM administrator. In contrast, Old Order participation comes mostly in the form of “silent support” through monetary donations; however, some Old Order individuals provide in-kind donations and volunteer in the CAM warehouses. Commenting on the growth of Old Order participation, a CAM employee noted that it “has really changed in the 25 years since I’ve been here, mostly due to ministers who are born-again.” As for the Andy Weaver Amish, a few may quietly send in a check. Swartzentruber participation is virtually nonexistent.
CAM appeals to the tastes of mission-oriented Amish in a variety of ways. To avoid looking wasteful to Amish contributors, CAM’s news-letter, its main fund-raising tool, sent to twenty-five thousand supporters, did not convert to an all-color version until 2007. The newsletter itself is packed with information; it appeals to Amish sensibilities by providing concrete examples of how donations are used for practical projects. “Our style is not ‘in your face’ proselytizing,” commented a CAM administrator.
At the same time, CAM’s sharp division of the world into the righteous and the heathen is clearly on display in its literature. A 2006 publication on flood relief to Romania, for example, begins: “It was an area of darkness, the people steeped in witchcraft and superstition. They did not know that a mighty God in heaven cared about them.”11 In 2006 CAM spent nearly $2 million to translate Bibles and Christian literature into local languages. In short, CAM’s outreach and relief programs are wrapped in a cloak of Christian theology that is far more explicit than MCC programs reveal.
Amish views of the tension between CAM and MCC are diverse. Some Amish are completely unaware of any competition or philosophical differences between the two organizations; they tend to focus more on the immediate need being met by a fund-raiser and less on the sponsors. Others are aware of the tension but don’t understand it. “I hear there’s some static between the Mennonites and Christian Aid,” commented an Old Order man, “but I don’t know why if both programs are helping people in need.” “We support both,” responded an Old Order businessman when asked whether he prefers to donate to CAM or MCC. “But if I had to guess, I would say most Amish choose to support one but not the other.” According to a New Order man with extensive knowledge of both groups, Amish support CAM more readily than MCC because they are not always comfortable with the “social agenda” underlying Mennonite programs. Other Amish resent CAM because they feel that the Beachy Amish are trying to raise money from the very Amish groups that they rejected. When CAM sent calendars to parochial schools in the settlement, for instance, a controversy erupted: “We as teachers were told by the school committee not to get involved in the CAM-MCC conflict,” related an Old Order Amish teacher.
Still other Amish, however, reject these bureaucratized mission programs altogether, believing that they run counter to the biblical injunction to
embody Christ in one’s everyday life. Such views are more common among conservative Amish, but even one New Order bishop confessed to serious misgivings about evangelical outreach. “The danger in mission work,” he said pointedly, “is the sin of pride.”
Some Amish religious leaders characterize their stance on mission work as “light that makes no noise,” a clever metaphor for a nonintrusive approach that focuses on setting an example and providing relief services without seeking to reconstruct the indigenous church. Such a modest formulation of mission work protects Amish from having to engage in questionable activities in the process of outreach. Upon closer scrutiny, however, we have seen that the Holmes County Amish take a variety of stances on how their “light” should be cast, from active involvement in spreading the gospel at home and abroad, to financial support for disaster relief and material aid, to outright rejection of mission work. The mid-century mission movement may have ultimately broken ranks with the Amish community, but its legacy remains in the form of a widespread, if low-key, debate over which mission organizations to support and how. As with other dimensions of Amish interaction with the outside world, specific responses to the Great Commission vary considerably by affiliation, by district, and by individual inclination.
The Changing Form of Rumspringa
Few Amish cultural practices have received as much public scrutiny as rumspringa (literally, “running around”), the liminal period in an Amish teenager’s life that begins at age sixteen and ends with a decision whether to be baptized in the church. Outsiders are especially fascinated with these adolescent years because they appear to be so inconsistent with notions of what the Amish believe. Unfortunately, much of the sensationalized media coverage of rumspringa has created the impression that all Amish youth go through a period of wild abandon. Lucy Walker’s 2002 documentary film The Devil’s Playground, in which Amish youth told their own stories as they partied and experimented with drugs, alcohol, and sex, contributed to this impression by focusing on some of the wildest youth in an Indiana settlement.12 In reality, enormous variation exists in the form and content of rumspringa across and within Amish settlements.13
The Holmes County Amish fully embody this diversity. This one settlement is home both to Amish who reject rumspringa altogether and to young people who attend large parties and participate in non-Amish entertainment and leisure activities on a regular basis. The Holmes County Settlement also includes a significant number of parents and youth who are deeply ambivalent about the prospect of experimentation with the outside world. A balanced examination of this rite of passage reveals much about the interaction between changes in the external environment and internal responses by Amish affiliations, church districts, and families.
The insistence on voluntary adult baptism creates a singular dilemma for Amish parents and church leaders: How can they best instill in their children the desire to remain in the Amish affiliation into which they were born? Is it more effective to enforce firm limits and clamp down on questionable behavior during the teenage years, and run the risk of making their sons and daughters rebellious? Or is it better to take a more permissive approach, turning one’s back temporarily on the attendant dangers of experimenting with the English world, in the hopes that the youths will “get it out of their system”? Kraybill leans toward the latter position in describing rumspringa as a “social immunization” by which a small dose of worldliness strengthens Amish young people for the temptations they will face in adulthood.14 Although the perception of choice (to join the church or not) is partly an illusion because youth have been thoroughly immersed in an Amish world since birth, Kraybill argues persuasively that the very fact of having a choice does make adults more likely to follow the Ordnung. Nevertheless, this “fact of choice” underlies a vigorous debate in Amish communities about the proper approach to the young folks.
In the Holmes County Settlement, several key changes in the external environment over the past several decades have had a dramatic effect on the contours of this debate. One is the ever-expanding size of the settlement itself. Richard Stevick, in Growing Up Amish: The Teenage Years, makes a crucial distinction between “adult-centered communities” and “peer-centered communities.” The former are generally small, isolated settlements where young people tend to be respectful of church standards even after they turn sixteen. “Wild” behavior for them may consist of playing the game UNO or listening to country music on the radio. In peer-centered communities such as Lancaster County, Elkhart and Lagrange counties, and Holmes County, thousands of youth live close to one another and to urban centers, allowing for participation in large parties (or “band hops”) and athletic leagues, as well as trips to professional sporting events, amusement parks, and more.15 Another crucial dimension of large settlements is that they afford more anonymity and more opportunities for youth to find a critical mass of like-minded peers.
Amish adolescents’ increasing access to cash constitutes another key challenge. One ripple effect of the economic transition from farming to wage labor is that most fourteen-year-old boys and girls now get paying jobs as soon as they finish eighth grade. Some families restrict the use of money earned in this way, but even so Amish youth have more cash in their pockets than ever before, and they have a smorgasbord of possibilities for spending it. The frequency of economic exchanges with non-Amish has also led to a more confident posture among youth toward the outside world. “The young people are losing their shyness,” noted one elderly Old Order man. “When I was growing up, thinking of talking to a non-Amish, I wouldn’t have had a clue where to start.” A New Order bishop confessed, “We’re seeing a lot of the young folks following the trends of everybody else. It really bothers me, and I think it comes from intermingling. They’re getting away from the farm, and that’s why you’re seeing more of that.”
Combating Drugs and Alcohol in the Amish Community
An even more alarming change over the past few decades has been the steadily increasing availability of drugs, alcohol, and pornography. “It used to be that the people who had a wild period in life would come back to the Amish church,” noted one New Order businessman. “But now the things they are getting into are addictive.” In 2006, for example, Paul Fehr, an Old Order youth who was about to join the church, was sentenced to three years in prison and fined five thousand dollars for selling marijuana and attempting to sell methamphetamines to undercover agents. In the Millersburg courtroom, where his family took up two rows of seats, Fehr apologized and confessed that his habit started small but grew into a monster. Although Fehr’s father asked Judge Thomas White to be lenient, Judge White was not moved. “This is a little more than running around,” he commented at the sentencing.16 Partly because hard drugs were making their way into Holmes County, a federal drug task force named Medway (after Medina and Wayne counties) was extended to Holmes County in 2003 to deal with the growing problem. In cooperation with local Amish leaders and local law enforcement, drug and alcohol awareness workshops have been held throughout the settlement.
In October of 2005, we attended one of these seminars, held at night in a small shop southeast of Mount Hope, along with roughly two hundred Amish parents and teenagers. After noting that some Amish had been among the sixteen arrested for drug trafficking in Holmes County between April and October of 2005, the invited guests—the sheriff, a medical doctor, and the head of Medway—described the medical effects of alcohol, marijuana, and the highly addictive crystal methamphetamine and offered tips on how to detect signs of alcohol or drug abuse. After their presentations, anonymous written questions were collected from the audience and answered by the speakers.17
It was the religious prelude to this program on the medical effects of alcohol and drugs, however, that especially caught our interest. Following a hymn and a silent, standing prayer, an Old Order Amish minister, who said he had slept only two hours because he was worried about speaking in English, delivered a talk that framed drug and alcohol abuse in the starkest of moral
terms. “We’re here for the prevention of this terrible sin,” he began. “I’ll say it again. A three-letter word: S-I-N. We all know that it is among us.” Citing 1 Corinthians 3:17, he reminded the audience that anyone who defiles the temple of God will be destroyed, because “we all go back to the sinful nature of Adam.” He then posed the question of the hour: How we can make sure that our young people choose the right path?
In answering this question, the minister made several interesting observations. First, he noted that 95 percent of the job must be accomplished at home, not by the church. The first step is for parents to exemplify what they want their children to be: “They have to see that we love this path.” Next, parents need to establish firm boundaries and exercise thorough oversight—“We need to know who their friends are and what they’re doing”—in order to “bridle” the body and its “raging hormones.” The minister then made a plug for sex education at home: “If we don’t do our duty and teach our kids what intimate love between man and woman is all about, they’ll find out about it in a way that’s dirty and lustful.” He ended with a plea to fathers. “If I’m a hard, unyielding captain and everything has to go my way, the children will jump ship,” he noted. “Be open to your teenagers so that they can come to you and not be ridiculed.” This minister’s outright rejection of the logic of rumspringa was one that we heard repeatedly from Amish parents and church leaders. “We discourage running around. It’s a heartbreak for us to see young people doing that,” confessed a Swartzentruber bishop. “It’s not like the parents give them permission to go do it,” commented an Old Order man.