Everyone spoke in hushed tones. Mom cried silently, dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex. What was going on?
Moments before, I sat in the back row, behind the Vinar family, copying the gibberish I saw in a hymnbook onto a blank piece of paper my older sister had given me. Now, everyone was huddled into groups, solemn, and praying. Something important was happening. Something big!
This is church.
At least when I first woke up to the fact of what church is. This was it. Our small, pine wood church house embodied by people of all stripes, shapes and sizes.
There was Amos, who loved smoked fish. He even ate the eyeballs—I always watched in awe. Amos wasn’t young. I always thought he was old. But in recent years, I’ve discovered he’s only now gotten old. I guess it was his balding head and short stature that made me feel he was probably old.
Amos’s wife, Rebekah, was one of the first Sunday School teachers I remember. She always carried a purse full of little treasures and, if we behaved well enough, she would let us play with some of them after class.
Soberness permeates my earliest memories of church.
Every Wednesday night we had prayer meeting. Often the men would gather downstairs for prayer, after a short devotional, while the ladies stayed upstairs. We sat around one large table made of a couple eight-foot folding tables side-by-side. The men closed their eyes and wore grievous looking expressions on their faces. I know because I would watch them pray. Dad often had sunglasses hanging from his pocket, the wire kind with large lenses. I would play with them, slip them on, and watch everyone as they earnestly lifted their requests to God.
The most exciting memory I have of those early years of church is getting stuck in the snow after a blizzard. My friend Jared and I were out tromping through the freshly fallen snow. It was another night—maybe Wednesday. Church was either going long and were out early playing, or it had just ended. I don’t remember. I only remember we mighty (little) men forging new trails in the three to four feet of snow.
But then I got stuck. After jerking and wrenching my leg a few times to no avail, Jared trudged his way back to the church building and grabbed a shovel. We spent the rest of the evening digging my leg out of the snow. My boots were packed with snow, our hands and faces frozen from the chill of the wind. It was a blast!
Every now and then we had a big meal after a Sunday morning service.
Those were the best! Everyone brought something to eat, and everything tasted scrumptious! Looking back, I feel bad for any ladies that didn’t know how to cook, because those meals were the times you proved yourself as woman to the world.
I forgot to mention another person I remember from those early years. She wore a veiling, not a bonnet-style covering. That stuck out because all the rest of the ladies in church wore the white, bonnet-style covering. But she wore a veiling. Black.
Something about all of that had to do with why Mom was crying that night, huddled in the middle of a small group of ladies. Dad was saying some things to people in the church that they didn’t like. You see, he was the pastor, but he was doing things people apparently didn’t appreciate.
That night, in the middle of the teary chaos, Dad had announced he was not going to be pastor anymore.
And while I didn’t know what was going on at the time, I’ve been told since then that half the church was glad to see him go, while the other half didn’t want him to leave. As it turned out, they all left, too, and asked Dad to be their pastor of a new church.
People called it a church split. I didn’t really know what that was. All I knew, was Jared and I no longer trekked across blizzard-stricken churchyard territory. We started going to church in town. And while many of the same things happened (solemn prayer meetings, delicious potluck meals) there were many other things that changed.
For instance, the ladies began wearing those black, flowing veils instead of the white, bonnet-style coverings. The men who led singing also started using guitars and other instruments. Dad, who used to always wear a black suit coat that made him look like a stiff frog, no longer wore suit coats. Instead he wore sweaters.
I remember something else from that time, as well. Dad used to fly away to different meetings and speaking engagements. I don’t remember exactly how often it was, but from my five-year-old perspective, it felt like it was almost every other week. I remember he had one speaking event planned for a couple weeks from the time of the solemn night at church. But he never went to it.
I found out later that the pastor of that church had called and told him not to come.
Yes, this was church. And people called our church something funny: Mennonite.
I didn’t really know what that meant. I knew we always had popcorn after Sunday evening services. That all of our ladies wore long dresses, and we men never wore shorts, unlike people who went to other churches in our community. But beyond that, I didn’t know what Mennonite meant.
About twice a year we got together with other Mennonite churches in the area. We’d have a singing service or special service for Good Friday or Labor Day. We often played softball afterwards, and we always ate really good food. Those times were highlights for me because I got to hang out with Jared and some of my other friends from our old church.
There were a few years, however, soon after we started going to our new church, that a couple churches didn’t want us coming to those events. Something about we were going down the slippery slope. I didn’t know anything about any slope. When I first heard the term, it was July, and I didn’t know what they meant by “slippery.”
But I do know a lot of new people began coming to our church. People that, for whatever reason, weren’t always allowed to come to our old church. I didn’t know why they weren’t allowed, I just knew Mennonite churches didn’t always allow people to come to their church. I suppose we were still Mennonite because we looked pretty much like we did before, but something was different because these people started to come.
If our church ever put on an event and invited all the other churches, some of them wouldn’t come because of the kind of people we allowed to come to our church.
This never made sense to me; but this what church was.
I was born into a church denomination with strong opinions, and I could do nothing about it. I didn’t really have anything I wanted to do about it—it’s all I knew. But it did seem a little weird. Especially, because Dad talked about it being weird.
You see, I guess Mennonite churches forced things on people that aren’t always in the Bible, and Dad was questioning some of that. He didn’t feel it was right. That’s why he left.
These memories are some of my earliest memories of church, and they’re just the beginning of a string of memories of church. I’ve been in church all my life.
Since those years as a four and five-year-old boy, I have spent time in all kinds of churches. Not just Mennonite churches. I have friends and family who attend other kinds of churches. I’ve been a part of a church plant in the inner-city of Los Angeles. I’ve served overseas (albeit with a Mennonite organization), interacting with believers of many different cultures and backgrounds.
Growing up, I couldn’t fathom anything but my Mennonite world. Today, however, I can barely fathom the Mennonite world.
There is a lot going on in the Mennonite church at large, today. I suppose there always has been. But now I am an adult, and I understand more clearly what is going on. For instance, I now know why Mennonite ladies wear dresses and put coverings on their heads. But there are other things I still don’t understand, such as why some people disassociate themselves with other people they don’t agree with—even when they used to attend the same church.
People today are leaving the Mennonite church in droves. Some of my close friends have left. All of this has forced me to reckon with why I’m still “Mennonite,” whatever that means. This has caused me to dig deep into my heart, into my belief system and evaluate what my compass for faith is.
Over the next five days, I’m going to share a series of blog posts with you looking at some of the things I am sorting through.
This very raw. I want to write eloquently, so you as my readers can follow along with ease. But some of the things I will write are very difficult for me to put into words.
I feel extremely vulnerable because much of what I will write about is current for me. Some of you won’t like what I have to say. You may never read my blog again. Others of you will really appreciate what I say, but I’m afraid you will miss the deeper message I’m trying to get at, the deeper questions I am asking. I feel vulnerable, because I think very few will actually understand what I’m saying, and I don’t like being misunderstood.
But over the last couple of years I have had too many private, one-on-one encounters with people who are wrestling through the same questions and concerns, I believe it behooves me to go public with some of what I’m sorting through.
There are changes happening around me that I can’t control. Relationships being damaged and broken and nothing I attempt to do bring healing or reconciliation. And all of this is happening within the Mennonite church.
Why? And what do we do about it? That’s what I’ll be looking at this week in my blog series called, What’s the Big Deal about Being Mennonite?
As always, and especially as we go through this series, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.
Like this? Gain access to even more in-depth articles reconciling human experiences with God and His Word when you become a member of Unfeigned Christianity on Patreon.
