To be sure, those who are excommunicated rarely see shunning as an act of love. Wounded and frequently embittered by their experiences, they often dismiss Amish claims that the church cares for its prodigals. Books such as
True Stories of the X-Amish
and Web sites containing first-person accounts by former members sharply criticize shunning as unbiblical, vengeful acts by power-hungry elders.
15
Certainly some Amish leaders, just like leaders in other churches, do abuse their power. In other cases, even if there is no clear abuse of power, some bishops and ministers wield authority unwisely.
Yet even as the Amish acknowledge the imperfections of their disciplinary process, they are not about to abandon a tradition they believe is clearly taught in the Bible. “It should not alarm us that the world does not understand the value of scriptural discipline in the church,” wrote one church leader. “What should alarm us is when we ourselves begin to question and doubt the practice of shunning unfaithful brethren.”
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Coming Home
The concept of separating from sinners is not entirely foreign in non-Amish church life. Mainstream churches sometimes enforce separation by barring convicted sex offenders from church grounds. What outsiders find so offensive about shunning is that it applies to what the modern mind considers trivial violations of the
Ordnung
. One woman, who had married an outsider and left the Amish church, expressed exasperation as she recounted her parents’ interpretation of her exit. “No matter what I might have done, I had not turned my back on [God], as my parents would frequently suggest.”
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Occasionally ex-members do return, sometimes years later. Those who return with contrite hearts are welcomed back. They do not need to be rebaptized, but are reinstated into the church in the rite of restoration.
In 1992, one couple recounted their journey in an open letter to Amish young people. The husband had been a deacon in an Amish church in Delaware when they left. “It was very hard on my dear father and mother when we left the Amish
Gmay
,” Samuel J. Beachy recalled. “They came to visit us . . . and asked us to come back.”
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For two decades Sam and his wife, Lena, attended a different church that was active in evangelism and mission, and Sam even served as a congregational leader. But over time they were increasingly troubled by a gnawing sense of unease. Sam felt he could not teach the biblical injunction to honor one’s parents because he had disrespected his own parents’ wishes. On top of that, Sam and Lena became increasingly concerned that their new church was drifting closer to the world. At first, the absence of the Amish
Ordnung
had felt freeing, but the lack of guidelines soon troubled them as they saw how people in their new church accumulated possessions and raised their children.
About twenty years after leaving, they returned to the Amish church, and on bended knee were reinstated as members. “Do not think, dear friends, this was easy,” Sam emphasized. “NO! NO! This was very hard on our pride, to come back . . . and give up our nice cars . . . [and] our electricity and confess we had gone the wrong direction. It cost many a tear, but it brought exceedingly great joy and peace into our hearts and lives.” Sam had lost his ordination when he left the Amish, but after he returned, he was nominated for a ministry position, chosen by drawing lots, and ordained again.
Although Sam and Lena are not alone in returning to the church after years away, they are somewhat unusual. “I know it is a lot easier to go drifting with the tide of this world,” Sam admitted. Still, it was precisely that worldly tide that motivated the Beachys to choose the Amish way once again. They believed they had found, in the Amish church, a community of accountability—a community that would not let them do as they please but would strengthen their affection for the things that matter most.
Part III
The Amish Way in Everyday Life
CHAPTER SEVEN
Children
Our children are the only crop we can take along to heaven.
—AMISH FATHER
W
e were honored when Katie and Sammy invited us to their home for church. Many things that Sunday morning reminded us of how different Amish worship is from our own: extremely slow singing, no instrumental music, hard backless benches, two long prayers as we knelt on the floor, long sermons in a dialect we didn’t understand, and more than two hundred people packed into what seemed like space for about half that number. There was no Sunday school, no nursery, no children’s sermon, no praise band, no bulletin, and no announcement saying how pleased they were to have us as visitors.
Yet nothing astonished us as much as the children. For three straight hours, three- and four-year-olds sat quietly on benches and in the laps of their parents, seemingly quite content. Partway through the service, someone passed around a plate of crackers so that the children could have a small snack, and those who tired of their fathers’ laps would sometimes toddle over to their mothers or grandparents. Occasionally a child left for a bathroom break. The rest of the time, however, they sat quietly, occupying themselves with simple playthings—a small doll, a handkerchief, or tiny bits of fabric or paper.
Watching the children that day reminded us that the church service is an incubator of patience, a patience rarely seen in most young children. Amish boys and girls, who can be noisy and rambunctious at play, learn this discipline at an early age. Taught and caught from infancy, patience shapes the character and spiritual disposition of Amish people, becoming the social reality they take for granted.
A Sacred Calling
To have and raise children who grow up to respect God and join the Amish church is the preeminent goal of couples. Leaders discourage artificial birth control, although some couples in change-oriented groups occasionally do use contraceptives.
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Abortions are universally considered sin. If an unmarried woman becomes pregnant, she almost invariably weds the father if he is Amish. If he is not Amish, she may leave and marry him outside the church or remain in the community and raise the child as a single parent. But single parenthood is rare in Amish society.
Parents warmly welcome children into their homes as gifts from God. Those born with disabilities are dubbed “God’s special children sent from heaven” and showered with extra loving care. Parents may adjust their work to flex with the duties of child rearing. Mothers, for example, rarely hold outside jobs when they have young children, and fathers often select jobs that enable the family to work together. “We bought a deli business in a farmers’ market so the family can work together; it’s a family thing,” said Jesse.
One might expect that an Amish childhood would be chock-f of religious activities like vacation Bible school, religious camps, and Sunday school. Yet formal religious education is missing in an Amish child’s life.
2
Fathers and mothers—not church programs, schools, or youth pastors—shoulder the duty of passing on the faith to their children.
Parents take this task seriously. Tradition holds them accountable for the spiritual outcomes of their children, even though young adults have a choice to embrace or abandon their faith. The words of Menno Simons, an early Anabaptist leader, are instructive: “Watch over their souls as long as they are under your care, lest you lose also your own salvation on their account.”
3
“Every father,” says the author of “Rules of a Godly Life,” “must give an account for the souls of his household.”
4
Ministers frequently remind parents of their child-rearing duties with verses from a sixty-four-line poem, “Die Kinder Zucht” (The Upbringing of the Child). Those who fail in this task, the poet says, “face the danger of being a total stranger to heaven.”
When early discipline is lacking,
Times will come which bode no good.
Sinful nature must be tamed,
Else conflict taints the neighborhood.
What you teach them early on,
They’ll later bring to mind.
Habit has tremendous strength;
Both the good and the evil kind.
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Raising children who join the church increases one’s status in the Amish community. This respect diminishes if children forsake the Amish way, and parents may feel as though they have failed. Some parents fear for the salvation of such children, especially if a wayward son or daughter rejects Christianity entirely. In situations where adult children choose to join a different denomination, parental reactions vary. Some may mix regret with a sense of comfort that their children and grandchildren are at least attending a church.
In any case, parenting is considered a divine calling. One mother summarized its spiritual significance in a poem she penned after hearing a minister preach on the qualifications for ordained ministers. He reminded his listeners that motherhood was a sacred calling no less significant than church leadership itself.
Then the words of the visiting preacher
Struck my heart like a two-edged sword,
For he asked, “What’s the highest calling
Ever given to man by the Lord?”
He went on and said, “You mothers
At home with your children so small,
Yours is a very great calling,
Yours is a most sacred call.
I lowered my head in submission,
For the lot had fallen on me
To carry this most precious calling,
For I am a mother, you see.
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Living in a patriarchal society, this woman—and the minister she quotes—underscore the esteemed value of mothers in the spiritual realm.
Although mothers and fathers take the lead, they receive lots of help from other adults. Children’s spiritual beliefs, practices, and affections are molded as they watch adults around them and join in rituals of faith—sitting quietly through three-hour church services, singing, kneeling, and hearing spiritual wisdom from adults. Children learn by observing and mimicking the behavior of dozens of Amish people—older siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors—in the course of everyday living. Parents would heartily agree that it takes all the people in the proverbial village to help them raise their children well.
Singing Their Way Through Childhood
Songs, prayers, and nursery rhymes nurture children in the Amish way at an early age. “I myself was taught to sing early in my childhood,” says Sarah, who considers it her motherly duty to train her children to sing. “We as parents are responsible to openly teach our children about God, the Supreme Being, and drill into their minds fitting music for the soul.”
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Bedtime prayers and songs help form the spiritual character of children. The Lord’s Prayer is one of the first things many children memorize, usually in German and English, by the time they’re four or five years old. “The Lord’s Prayer was the first thing I learned at the age of five,” said Mary, a mother of seven. “My husband quotes it when he puts the children to bed, and they could quote it before they went to school.” Jesse told us that “Miede bin ich, geh sur ruh” is “a good bedtime rhyme that everybody knows.”
I’m tired and I’m going to bed. Close my eyes up tight.
Father, may those angels of yours watch over me tonight.
If I have done some wrong today, please, God, look upon
my sorrow;
Your grace in Christ’s blood, can prepare me for tomorrow.
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Sam Stoltzfus writes that, in his childhood, “There was always prayer, from infant age on. Our parents taught us to put our hands under the table and pray a silent table prayer six times a day, before and after each meal. Then there was the evening prayer that Dad would read for the whole family just before bedtime. . . . There was a secure feeling in our hearts when we would go up the stairs to our beds.” In a world of many perils, “we felt protected all night long.”
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These practices of song and prayer attune children to God and also bond family members across generations. Sarah describes her joy in hearing her young children sing: “How the words touched my heart as they flowed from the lips of our three-year-old, ‘Wo ist Jesus, mein Verlangen, mein geliebter Herr und Freund?’ Where is Jesus whom I long for, my beloved Lord and friend?” She then adds that “Grandma taught this hymn to our oldest son in his early years, and it keeps on being passed down to our babies, one by one as soon as they’re old enough to lisp the words.” Her family also sings the
Loblied
, the second hymn in every church service. “Although our oldest children couldn’t always carry a tune,” Sarah explains, “ it didn’t seem to bother them at all. They just said the words, supplying their own tune.”
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