Let’s Talk About Church — Mennonite-Style

Guest Post by Tammy

When Mom and Dad got married in 1960, he left his childhood church at Central to attend Lockport with Mom. Her entire family attended there, except for her sister Mary Lou, who left Lockport to attend Central Church with her new husband, Vern “Levi” Beck. There was a lot of back and forth between Central, Lockport, and West Clinton. Central was the parent church to the other two, and it had only been a few years that they were functioning as three fully independent organizations. The rest of the Mennonite Churches in Northwest Ohio were started later than these three, and I always thought of these three as the foundation of everything.

It was confusing to me when Dad would refer to West Clinton as the East Church. East and West are usually pretty straightforward for me, but only when I’m outdoors. As soon as I’m in any building, I lose my sense of direction, something that happens to me still to this day. Mom loses sense of direction all the time. I remember lots of times when Dad would ask her which way north was, and she would think for a while before answering. Whenever I’m in a new building and someone leads me to the correct room, when it’s time to leave I ask which direction is the way out. My instinct is to turn in the opposite direction. Even when I try to go against my instinct, I’m still turning in the opposite direction from how I entered the room. 

This habit, calling West Clinton the East Church, is because it’s east of Central, and Lockport is west of Central. For a long time, people called them the East Church and the West Church until they got their current names. I guess West Clinton is in the western part of Clinton Township, hence its name. Lockport is named after the historic village of Lockport, Ohio. It was a busy place for a while, because it was beside Bean Creek, and I think there was a grist mill and a saw mill there. 

Then Stryker and West Unity grew larger, and Lockport ceased to exist as a village. The cemetery is still there and is still used. It’s next to the Lockport Church, and most people assume that it’s associated with the church. But the cemetery is a secular entity. I think it’s administrated at the township level. Most of my relatives on Mom’s side are buried there. Most of Dad’s side is buried in the Pettisville Cemetery near the Pettisville School. 

I was in Mary Lou’s wedding, as a flower girl. The ring bearer was Levi’s nephew, Arlen “Dean” Beck, who was also in my Sunday school class. That Beck family liked their nicknames. My best friend a few years later was Linda “Pin” Beck, who also was in my Sunday school class, and who also was a nephew of Levi. And a cousin of Dean. I was sort of embarrassed to be in a wedding with Dean as my partner walking down the aisle. I was only about four years old, but somehow I knew it was a romantic thing, and I wasn’t sure about being paired up like that. Mom tells me that I behaved well as a flower girl, doing all the things that were expected of me.

Church was my entire social life, outside of relatives, for my first seven years. I only attended a few months of kindergarten, as it only occurred in the spring for kindergarteners in that school system. So I was two months short of seven years old when I finally went to school every day for an entire school year. For all of my childhood, church was superior to school. It was better morally, as we were following God. It was situated in a better place because it was closer to my house. It was better for my family because every time we went to church it was like a family reunion on Mom’s side of the family. School was an afterthought for me, even in high school. My first real boyfriend was in my youth group. I married my second real boyfriend. My best friend was in my youth group. My other best friends were also in my youth group, except for one or two. So my whole life was basically at church. School was like a job someone takes to get a paycheck. Church was the reason to live.

And church was better socially, as it was consistent throughout all my years. Kids would come and go from school, and I would have to change to a different building some years. But my Sunday school class had the same kids from preschool through my senior year, with very few exceptions. The girls were Linda, Pam, Lisa, and me, and the boys were Jeff B., Jeff W., Dean, and Todd. All of them were related to me in some way, other than perhaps Jeff B. They were some combination of second, third, and fourth cousins. Lisa’s dad was my dad’s first cousin. Todd’s mom was my mom’s first cousin. 

Sometime in the middle school years, Gene joined our class. He lived in Michigan, and his parents drove about an hour to Lockport for church for many years. They became central figures in many things there, teaching marriage classes, and being fully involved. They were more involved than a lot of the people who lived nearby and were related to everyone. But because they didn’t live in the local community, their family always seemed outside the circle in my young mind. 

Jeff W. was always a lot taller than the rest of us. He also shared my exact birthday. His mom and my mom were in the hospital together when we were born. I was born to a 21-year-old mother, and his mother already had several children and was probably nearly 40 years old. We had our first birthday party together, and we gave each other teddy bears. Jeff ended up living with his wife and children on the same farm where he was raised, in the same house. Years later, my brother Rick worked for Jeff when he needed help with his sandblasting business. 

It’s funny how I categorized things in my little mind. My dad had a friend in Kidron, Ohio, from their time serving together in PAX in Germany in the late 1950s. They chose to build houses for war refugees, rather than enlist in the military. We made lots of trips back and forth to spend time with Ernie and Jeannie Geiser and their kids. I loved their house because it had an elegant stairway to the upstairs of the house. Instead of a straight passageway, the bottom several steps extended out into a half-circle shape, leading into the living room. So you could sit on the half-circle steps, and visit with people in the living room. This was the height of wonder to me. 

On one of our trips back from visiting them, it was dark and we kids were sleeping in the back seat of the car. No seatbelts in those days. Dad built a wooden insert for the backseat of the car to cover where you put your feet, so the seat was twice as wide. It was like a bed, and we could all lie down and sleep on long trips. So I was in a sleepy state, but listening to my parents talk. Dad made a comment about Jeannie being a really wonderful wife, even if she wasn’t a Mennonite. My mind equated Mennonite with Christian, and while I knew there were other denominations, I also knew that only Mennonites go to heaven. I spent a long time thinking about how sad it is that Jeannie can’t go to heaven. 

On a later trip, we went to church with them, and in fact, they attended a large Mennonite Church in their area. It made Lockport look like a village chapel. I think I stopped worrying about Jeannie after that.

My great uncle Walter Stuckey was the pastor of my church throughout my childhood. He was my mom’s dad’s brother. Every year I received a birthday card from him with a stick of gum and a note about how I’m making my parents proud. I later realized that he sent these to every child in Lockport. 

I always liked how Walter would raise his hands over the congregation at the end of each service, and say, “Now may the Lord bless you and keep you, May he make his face shine upon you, and give you peace.” That’s how I remember it, although the verse he quoted may have been longer. It was always the same, and it was solemn and happy at the same time. I think this was the most religious ritual I ever had as a kid, and I loved it. I probably would have been very happy as a Catholic child. 

When I was about 13, Walter was ready to retire. It was a long and mysterious process, but we finally found a new pastor. I think there were a few fill-in or short-term pastors, but eventually, Keith Leinbach became my pastor for the rest of my childhood. He talked a lot more about personal salvation. He told a lot more personal stories. He was fun to listen to. He was very different from Walter. In retrospect as an adult, I see this as a huge time of change for Lockport. I’m sure there were adults that didn’t like it and others who thought it wasn’t enough change and wasn’t fast enough.

I attended baptismal preparation classes when I was 12 or 13. Walter was involved in teaching them, as he hadn’t totally retired. We were the first group to be water baptized where the girls were given a choice of whether to wear the head covering. In the 1800s, all the Mennonite women covered their heads all the time, like the Amish still do. In the early 1900s, all the Mennonite women covered their heads when praying. My Grandma Wyse kept a head covering in her kitchen drawer, and put it on quickly before Grandpa prayed before a meal. She took it off right after the prayer and put it back in the drawer. By the 1970s, Mennonite women only wore the head covering to church services, and there were discussions about whether it was required. 

So our little group in 1974 was given a choice. I chose to wear it. My dad talked with me about this decision, as he thought that if I started to wear it, then it would be harder to stop later when I no longer wanted to. He thought it would be better to never start. But all the women I admired wore one! So I did too. And then within a few years I stopped, as my dad predicted. By the 1980s, only the older Mennonite women were wearing one.

Mom couldn’t wear a veil at her wedding in 1960. She wore a head covering, with her fancy normal-looking wedding dress. She was fashionable and had short hair, but the veil was too much. The next wedding after that, the veil was allowed. Mom and Dad also couldn’t have wedding rings in their ceremony. They put them on each other privately between the ceremony and the reception. The next wedding ceremony after theirs had rings. Change was happening so fast in the 1960s.

So by the time I was in high school, I no longer wanted to be like all the other Mennonites. I was questioning everything. I was wearing dress pants to church for Sunday night services. That was living on the edge. I wanted to wear jeans but never pushed that hard against the unwritten rules. I also didn’t wear dress pants on Sunday mornings. I had friends who were conservative and only wore dresses to church. They were offended that I wore dress pants at all. I argued about it with the best of them. “God doesn’t care what I wear! I could wear jeans to church and he wouldn’t mind!” But then they argued back that we shouldn’t be a stumbling block to others, so I kept it to dress pants, not jeans. 

This is so weird to write this out. People wear shorts to that church now. They’ve had female pastors. They have female elders. Divorce and remarriage are allowed. I didn’t know a divorced person until I was in high school. They discuss whether LGBTQ people can have leadership positions, although that one remains a little verboten to this day. 

I know our society has changed since the 1960s throughout our country, but I think the rate and amount of change in the Mennonite church is far greater as compared with the change in our society. 

So when I was born, there was a picture of a lamb that was placed on a bulletin board near the preschool Sunday school classrooms. It had my name on it. All the new babies had a similar lamb. When we were old enough to go to preschool, the lamb was removed and given to our parents. Mine is in my baby book. Imagine having such a consistent attendance at a church, that you could do that. The baby was still there several years later, and the group of children going to the preschool Sunday school class was essentially the same kids that graduated from high school together over a decade later.

For a child, this is reassuring and safe. For a church leader, this is a disaster. The only way to grow a church in this situation is for the families to have lots of kids. (Unless the church has lots of community outreach, but the Mennonites were pretty distinctive. Others were always welcome, but it wasn’t easy to join up with Mennonites before 1975 or so.) 

The church growth era hit in the 1970s and 1980s, at the same time that family size was shrinking. There were lots of expectations that a church would continue to grow, or at least not shrink, My great grandma Roth was one of 15 children. She then had 7 children. Her daughter, who was my grandma, also had 7 children. My mom had 4 kids, and I had 3. Two of my adult children don’t have kids, and my son, Jesse, has two. Extrapolate that out for a century, and you can see that the church will no longer be growing. 

In fact, Lockport is dealing with this reality as we speak. We often had 300-400 in attendance when I was a child. I think it’s less than half of that now. You’ll always have some kids grow up and move away, and some marry into other religious systems, or decide that being Mennonite is not for them. 

I’m not lamenting that people are having fewer children, or that churches are shrinking, or that people move away. I’m just thinking about the impacts on our small communities when these social changes occur. The changes are neutral to me, but the social impacts are where my interest lies. Mennonites are not alone in this change. In the Western world, most religious institutions, and many community organizations like The Elks and The Masonic Lodge, have a similar process unfolding.

Every summer we had two weeks of Bible School. Some years it was in the morning, and some years in the evening, but it was always 4 hours of extreme fun! I think Bible school was my favorite thing in all of my childhood. We had snacks! We had crafts! We had recess! We had lots of extra kids there from the community! There were no grades or tests! There was the burdensome and strongly-worded suggestion that we memorize a few Bible verses each night in preparation to recite them to our teacher the next day. For which we would get a prize. Which I always did because I wanted the prize! But oh the burden of remembering that verse until I could unload it verbally and get my prize. Then I was free again!  Hurrah!

As an adult college student in nursing school, I loaded up my brain with all the facts for each exam, and the first thing I did upon leaving the exam room was buy a candy bar. It was awesome. And just now I’m realizing that it’s a holdover from Bible School.

We played lots of organized games at recess, rather than being free to run and roam as we were in regular school. I loved this! One of my favorite games was Red Rover. The kids split into two groups, and stand in lines opposite each other, holding hands. Then one group shouts (after conferring together to make a group decision, which the teachers did not dictate to us!), “Red Rover, Red Rover, let Tammy come over!” Yes! They called my name! So I would go running toward the other group and try to break through their hands. I had to run really fast because so many of them were bigger than me. 

One time I didn’t break through their hands. Instead, I flipped backward and fell onto my head on the sidewalk. I don’t remember this but I was told about it. My first memory of the event is lying on my grandma’s couch. I’m told that I hit my head hard enough that they thought I should rest instead of finishing Bible School that day. Grandma only lived a few miles away so someone took me there to rest. I have no memory of the time between running and lying on my grandma’s couch. I’m pretty sure it was a head injury that induced my memory loss. I was about six or seven years old, I think, based on which classroom and play area I remember from playing that game.

Youth group was awesome. We called it MYF, for Mennonite Youth Fellowship. It was as awesome as Bible School, but on Wednesdays all year long, and we were too cool to be THAT excited about it. There were Bible studies and praying and singing, but mostly it was hanging out with other high school kids and going away for weekends. Lots of campouts and bike trips and cookouts and games. 

MYF sponsors were married couples who committed to a few years of guiding us through all of this activity. It was the most involved volunteer position in the church. The MYF would vote on who they wanted to be their sponsors, then the current sponsors would go ask them. We knew it was risky. Lots of people declined to do it because of the time commitment. But those who said yes were our heroes. My Aunt Donna and her husband Art said yes, and they were my favorite people for a long time. Also Richard and Teresa Stebbins. Yes, they are just enough older than me to have done that. They were probably only in their early 20s.

Pinegrove was a little church that Lockport had started in the 1950s or so, in the Stryker area. They were pretty small, so they teamed up with us for MYF. It was awesome to have new people with us, at a time when we were realizing how interrelated we all were as we saw each other at family reunions. My first real boyfriend went to Pinegrove and I met him through MYF. It turns out that he is my third cousin. No one seemed to mind. It didn’t even matter to me when I realized it. My own parents are third cousins to one another, I reasoned, and everything turned out fine. I had an awesome biology teacher in tenth grade, Mr. Dilbone. He focused a lot on genetics, as it was the hot new science of that era. I knew that beyond first cousins, it was ok to procreate. Maybe even first cousins were not a problem …

Now this all seems so funny to me. My daughter Lydia realized early on how many relatives she had in Northwest Ohio, and one time she said she wanted to marry a person of another race because they would be the least likely to be her relative.

One MYF game we played was Walk A Mile. It’s an excuse to hold hands with the opposite gender. Nobody thought about how LGBTQ people felt about that idea. Boys and girls paired off holding hands, stood in a long line, and extra people left over were the runners. We started walking down the country roads after dark. The runners would go to a person and say something like, “5 back”, and then they got to hold the girl’s hand and the other guy had to go back 5 couples and do the same. Or the girls were runners – depending upon which gender had more people. It was fun making up the instructions for the handoff. I didn’t realize until talking about this as an adult with my husband, that people cheated! Never entered my mind. They of course chose their partner based on their preferences. I was so honest that it was literally unthinkable. 

Speaking of LGBTQ and Mennonites, Pam, from my Sunday school class, and I had quite an adventure. We were about 17 when we went to a Mennonite conference near Kitchener, Ontario. It was for both adults and youth, and we were part of a huge youth choir. We went to all sorts of meetings and workshops, and there was so much to do and see. Pam and I were interested in a workshop on sexuality. We were almost late, and got seats in the front row. As it started we realized that this was meant for the adults, not the youth, but we stayed anyway. Then we started to realize that the topic was not sexuality in general, but it was all about the homosexual question in the Mennonite Church. Then during the question-and-answer time, the man sitting beside Pam asked a question, the content of which made it clear that he was gay. This was the first gay person we had ever known! Afterward, we were so startled and excited and stunned and didn’t know how to feel about this! Pam whispered to me, “I was sitting by a gay man!”

The Mennonite Church continues to talk about this topic to this day. I think they decided that each church can decide for itself, but it has contributed to a lot of debate and a few church and conference splits over the years.

So on one MYF campout, Pin and I were sitting around a campfire with some boys a few years older than we were. One was her cousin, Lynn, and one was my boyfriend, Mark, and there were a few more. Mennonite boys were known for their pranks. But Pin and I were naively innocent. The guys started telling us which weeds and grass were edible. They were picking different ones and naming them. This went on for quite some time. Then one of them said you better roast it first to be sure it’s safe, and they held it over the fire like a marshmallow. Then they ate it. And we believed them the entire time.

On another MYF trip we were staying for a weekend at Brunk’s Cabin in Indiana. There was a lot of ice skating and sledding. On one trip down the hill, my sled spun out of control and I ended up hitting a big tree with the middle of my back. I laid there looking at the sky for a bit, as I couldn’t breathe. Pin’s cousin, Lynn, came to check on me and said, “Are you ok!?!?!” He looked really scared. By then I could breathe, and I simply said, “Yes”, and got up. I never let on how scary that was. Years later, my chiropractor saw scar tissue and a bone spur on that area of my back when he did x-rays. I think it was from that sledding accident.

I loved our annual MYF manhunts. I think it might be my favorite thing of all about MYF. We would choose a farm of about 80 acres, and trade years between which gender did the hiding. The others had a few hours to find them. The losers had to put on a banquet for the winners.

We also divided this activity by gender. I’m starting to think the whole purpose of MYF is to get the kids to marry someone, the opposite gender of course, within the church. And do it young so you have lots of kids. 

Anyway, one year the girls hid in a cornfield on my great grandma Roth’s farm, which was by then being farmed by one of her kids. It was only a few miles east of where I lived. It was in October but the corn wasn’t harvested yet. So we just laid down between the corn rows, all in one long row. We thought that even if the guys walked through the cornfield, it would be difficult to cover every row. And yes, they walked through the cornfield and were only a few rows over from us. We could see them. But they never found us, so they had to arrange and serve the food at our banquet in November.

Another year, we hid on the top of Pam’s dad’s barn. He had a double roof on it, where there was an area where both roofs sloped downward toward each other, and if you went to the bottom of that roof area all you could see was the roof around you and the night sky. So we all laid on the roof, cozy and clean in sleeping bags, while the boys searched the whole farm. We won again.

I think we found the boys both years that I searched for them, but I don’t remember the details. Hiding was so much more fun.

It was traditional to welcome the freshman class to MYF in September of each year. For a few weeks, we would do everything as scheduled, but then we would have an MYF initiation night. Some classes were worse than others, and the one older than us was pretty bad. I ate dog food covered in chocolate, had raw eggs poured over my hair, crawled through straw, and more. It took me forever to get all that out of my hair that night. This was the one thing I hated about MYF. It just seemed mean. 

The next year we were supposed to plan the initiation for the kids one year younger than us. I remember the meeting with the kids my age and the sponsors. We talked about how we didn’t want to do it. In the end, we had a harvest party in the abandoned house on my dad’s farm, and we didn’t do anything mean. Everyone else was surprised, and nobody did that sort of initiation for the rest of the time I was in MYF. My class stopped the hazing. 

Bible quiz was another option for us. I was in it for three years, but not for my senior year. In my junior year, I had joined a lot of extra activities and ended up with a case of shingles on my forehead and in my hair. The doctor had talked with me about how it can be related to stress, when the chickenpox virus is activated into shingles. I decided to cut back and Bible quiz was one thing I let go of. 

Quiz was a lot of memorizing. It made Bible school look like nothing. Over the three years I was in it, we studied the books of John, Amos, Mark, and James. We had it practically memorized. Once a month throughout the school year we would go to West Clinton’s sanctuary and be quizzed on our knowledge. I was pretty good at it. But I really liked the lack of pressure during my senior year.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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