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True Greatness

May 29, 2016 by jdschrock

true greatnessToday I watched this elderly couple slowly making their way into the supermarket, hand in hand. On the way in, she stopped by the flowers to have a closer look, he waited by her side patiently, still holding her hand. Once inside, I continued to watch them. He walked slowly, with a perpetual stoop, and pushed the shopping cart for her. She would put things in the cart and he would also gather items and place them in the cart. They talked with each other as they went throughout the store. Near the checkout, I walked over and started talking with them. They were very kind and friendly. Both of them are on their second marriage, but not in the same way that most people are in their second marriage. Each of them had a spouse who passed away a little over 16 years ago. He’d been married for 54 years, and she, for close to 50 years. They found each other and have been married for 14 years now and there’s no doubt that they care for one another. As I watched this couple, I thought about how much value American society places on “success”. Our success is mostly measured in how great we can be, how big our bank accounts are, our education, our athletic prowess, our looks, or a myriad other things that are of NO value in eternity. This election year there’s a focus on making “America Great Again”. Apparently, greatness has been lost.

True greatness has never been lost. Maybe it is in decline, but it’s always to be found. Perhaps we can’t see greatness because greatness is not what we think it is. Perhaps true greatness is measured in kindness, loyalty, faithfulness, caring, fidelity, love, affection, and humility.

Filed Under: Amish Values

Will an Amish Super PAC convince the Amish to Vote?

May 27, 2016 by jdschrock

Amish Super PAC - Plain Voters Project
Amish Super PAC – Plain Voters Project
Political activists are taking aim at getting a very counter-cultural group of people to the polls this November, the Amish community. $41,000 plus dollars is being bet on convincing the Amish, and others in the “plain communities”, to head to the polls to vote for the “conservative” presidential candidate.

A group of three conservative political operatives are driving the campaign, known as The Amish PAC – Plain Voters Project, in hopes of getting the Amish, who traditionally do not vote for political candidates, to do just that. Among the operatives of the PAC, is one former Amish man, Ben King, of Lancaster County, PA, who helped raise funds for Dr. Ben Carson’s campaign.

The campaign will target the key swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Since the Amish are generally averse to technology, the funds will not be used to buy space on digital media, but two more traditional mediums: newspapers and billboards. The campaign will target the two largest Amish settlements in the world, Lancaster County, PA and Holmes County, Ohio, each with populations between 60 to 70,000 Amish.

Just how important is the Amish vote?

According to the group’s website:

  • The pivotal swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania will decide who becomes the next President of the United States.
  • When Amish vote, they vote for individual rights, personal responsibility, less government, lower taxes, and to protect their right to bear arms.
  • The objective of Amish PAC’s Plain Voter Project is to drive up Amish voter registration and turnout.
  • Increasing Amish turnout by even 5% in 2016 could be the difference between a Republican president and Hillary Clinton.

Why the Amish don’t vote

The Amish generally don’t vote nor hold political office for a number of reasons. Amish believe in the separation of church and state and are non-resistant. They are hesitant to cast a vote for politicians who, as agents of the state, may use force and violence and go to war. Many affiliations of Amish do not prohibit voting, but also don’t encourage it. It is left up to the individual to decide if and when he or she will vote. Generally speaking, the Amish who do vote, will do so when there are local issues that affect the community.

The Amish Response

When I first saw the Super PACS’s website, it seemed a little odd to me. Voting is not very common among the Amish and I don’t personally think that either Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton would have much appeal to the Amish community. My first inclination was that this campaign is facing a pretty serious challenge in achieving its goals. I had an opportunity today to talk with a couple of Amish men in the Holmes County Ohio Amish settlement, one of whom had already heard about the Amish Super PAC. Both of them, members of the Old Order Amish affiliation, agreed with me. One of them, Ray Miller, a friend of mine from Brinkhaven, Ohio and publisher of The Vendor, a local tabloid format information and advertising publication, said:

I do not plan to vote and would discourage other Amish from doing so.

Regardless of the outcome, hundreds of thousands of residents and travelers to Amish Country Ohio and Pennsylvania are likely to see ads in the “Amish” newspapers and billboards encouraging the Amish to get out the vote.

If you are so inclined you can read about the PAC’s goals and agenda at their website, AMISHPAC.com. There’s even a poll you can take on the website entitled: Can we beat Hillary by turning out the Amish Vote in key swing states? Who would have thought it?

Filed Under: Amish Values

Doughty Run School Benefit Auction

July 13, 2014 by jdschrock

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend the Doughty Run School Auction for the first time. The auction is held annually on the second Saturday of July at Wise’s School which is located on SR 557 between Berlin and Charm, Ohio. The auction is designed to raise funds for four different Amish schools in the Doughty Creek and Becks Mills, Ohio area. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Amish Country Events, Amish Values

Holmes County Garden Tour by Every Woman’s House

July 12, 2014 by jdschrock

Earlier this week I saw a post on Facebook by Beth Beechy, of Winesburg, regarding this year’s Holmes County Garden Tour. Beth is one of the founder of Circle of Friends and has a blog on the organization’s web site at Beth Beechy – Confessions of a Peace Lover. So early this morning, before the tour began, I headed over to one of this year’s tour locations near Mt. Hope, Ohio. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Amish Country Events, Amish Country Folks, Amish Values, Holmes County Area Scenery

The Amish Know How to “GIT ‘ER DONE”

July 1, 2014 by jdschrock

Last Monday, during a thunderstorm, an Amish home north of Mt. Hope, Ohio was struck by lightning. Today I took these pics of the new home that is going up in its place. I spoke briefly with a neighbor and one of the children that lived in the home. During the storm, when the lightning struck, there was only one person in the home, a twenty something old son. The parents were away on a trip to Pennsylvania when it happened. The young Amish man, noticing fire in the downstairs of the home, crawled out a window in the pouring rain, onto a porch roof, and started yelling for help. Folks in the adjacent house heard him and promptly brought a ladder to rescue him. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Amish in the News, Amish Values

The Ausbund Anabaptist Hymnal by Leroy Beachy

May 2, 2014 by jdschrock

Over the last year, I have been following the progress of ‘The Ausbund Anabaptist Hymnal Display’ as Leroy Beachy, the owner of the many collectible Ausbunds, has been designing and building the display. Recently, upon its completion, the entire display was transported to the Amish/Mennonite Heritage Center, about a mile from Leroy’s shop. This is a magnificent addition to the Center and I’m excited that it will be available for viewing by the public. I’m also pleased that, Rachel Mast, currently employed at Christian Aid Ministries in Berlin, Ohio was able to meet with Leroy and put together the details of ‘The Story of the Ausbund’. I’m certain you will find this article quite interesting.
JD Schrock

I just came from the Amish & Mennonite Heritage Center where I was perusing its latest display, a collection of 31 editions of the Ausbund, a hymnbook that the Anabaptists have used continually since the 1500s. Many of the books in this rare collection made their way across the Atlantic Ocean with Amish and Swiss Brethren families who emigrated to America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The families were fleeing religious persecution in Switzerland and Germany.

The Ausbund Anabaptist Hymnal Display at the Amish/Mennonite Heritage Center
The Ausbund Anabaptist Hymnal Display at the Amish/Mennonite Heritage Center

I was especially interested to find that two of the copies are believed to have been carried over by my ancestors, Jacob Raber and Michael Yoder. The Jacob Raber family migrated from Bavaria to Holmes County, Ohio, in 1837 and Michael Yoder came to America in 1825. An inscription on the flyleaf of Michael’s book dates 1791 with flyleaf inscriptions by Michael’s father Samuel, who was an Amish bishop in Germany, Michael himself, his son Daniel, and Daniel’s adopted daughter Sarah.

The collection of Ausbunds had its beginnings in 1962 when 33-year-old Amish man, Leroy Beachy, was looking for a keepsake at his recently-deceased grandpa’s estate sale. “The keepsake could just as well have been a hammer or a pocket knife,” Leroy told me when I visited his home outside Berlin earlier this week. But Leroy ended up with a 1767 edition of the Ausbund.

At that time Leroy had no interest in history or collecting books. “I was 32 years old before I recall having ever heard the word ‘Anabaptist’ or that the Amish come from Switzerland,” he told me. That’s why it wasn’t hard for Leroy to give up his copy of the Ausbund two weeks later when a German professor from the Wooster College stopped by and offered Leroy two, newer good copies of the Ausbund in exchange for his older one. It was an edition the professor was missing from his collection of Ausbunds and other German language books. “Two-for-one seemed like a good deal to me,” Leroy said.

Later that year, when Leroy attended classes to learn how to read German handwriting, he remembered the inscription on the flyleaf of his grandpa’s Ausbund. The next time he visited Wooster, he stopped by the German professor’s house and asked to see the book. Flipping to the front, he read, “Dieses Lieder Buch gehört mir Christen Joder zu” (this song book belongs to me Christen Yoder).

“Now I was interested,” Leroy said. Christen Yoder was Leroy’s great grandfather five times removed who had immigrated to America in 1742. Although it took some persuading over the course of the next year, Leroy was able to eventually buy back the book, along with the professor’s 20 other editions of the Ausbund. After that Leroy kept collecting Ausbund editions from estate sales and book auctions. There are still six editions missing in the collection of books that date from 1564 to 1935.

The Ausbund Anabaptist Hymnal with English translations.
The Ausbund Anabaptist Hymnal with English translations.

Of the 140 songs in the Ausbund, 65 were composed in a castle prison in Passau, Germany. Their authors were Anabaptists condemned by church and state authorities for pioneering the idea of the separation of church and state. “It was a very serious time,” Leroy said. “Many of the songs were written in prison by people who had a death sentence hanging over them.”

Knowing they might die, these writers wanted nothing more than to encourage their children and loved ones to stay faithful to the teachings of Jesus and the apostles. “The songs are not just something that rhymes,” Leroy said. “When you sing them, you know what these writers believed.” Some of the Ausbund songs have secret messages in acrostic form. The songs may have been smuggled out or memorized by prisoners who were later released, Leroy said.

After the songs were compiled into the Ausbund, the hymnbook became a forbidden book. Evidence of this can be seen on the title pages of the hymnals printed between 1538 and 1742. There is no publisher name and no place and date of publication. By 1742 and thereafter, the date of publication and the printers’ names again appear on the title pages. It was a sign of a newfound freedom of religion for the Anabaptists in America.

Today the Amish always start their worship services by singing three hymns from the Ausbund. The second song is always the beloved Loblied, which takes fourteen to thirty minutes to sing in the traditional “slow tune.” On any given Sunday morning, this sacred prayer hymn is being sung at about 1,100 locations at the same time, Leroy informed me. There are 2,200 Amish congregations in the Eastern United States. Each congregation holds a church service every other Sunday, and all start their service at about the same time.

The songbook does not have any musical notes. “When you sit on your mother’s lap and hear the tunes every other Sunday in church, the songs are in your memory by the time you are 11 or 12 years old,” Leroy said. The tunes were borrowed from other religious songs of the time, medieval folk songs, and Gregorian chants. Leroy acknowledged that the tunes are difficult for people not of Amish background to learn.

Although they know the tunes well, many Amish do not understand the words of the songs, which are written in an archaic German dialect. To help remedy this problem, an eight-member committee spent 12 years translating the hymns into English. The translations were compiled into a two-volume book, Songs of the Ausbund, which were published in 1998 and 2011. Although the Amish still sing the songs in German, these books are available to help those who have retained the use of the Ausbund to better understand their meanings.

As he entered his eighties, Leroy knew he was reaching his sunset years. He did not want to see his collection of Ausbunds sold and was contemplating what to do with them. That’s when the Amish & Mennonite Heritage Center called and asked about moving his collection. “This was the solution,” Leroy said. “Now the books can be somewhere where people can learn from them long after I am gone.”

“The same proves you as gold,
Yet is gracious to you as children,
As you further remain in My teaching,
I will never leave you.

For I am yours and you are Mine,
Therefore where I abide there you shall be,
And who vexes you touches my eye,
Woe unto him at that day.”
–Ausbund (hymn number 7, verses 8 and 9), English translation

Moving Leroy's Ausbund Hymnal display to Behalt, The Amish/Mennonite Heritage Center
Moving Leroy’s Ausbund Hymnal display to Behalt, The Amish/Mennonite Heritage Center

Filed Under: Amish Country Folks, Amish Values

Amish Fundraiser for Woodside Rest – 3000 Pizzas Sold in 6 Hours

November 23, 2013 by jdschrock

Today I participated in an Amish Fundraiser. The Amish community is famous for working together to raise a new barn, when one of their members or neighbor’s barn burns down. They are also quite adept at raising funds for various needs and causes in the community. A number of years ago I helped out with a pizza fundraiser, so I said yes when Mr. Hostetler asked me to be one of the van drivers. I got up at 5:30 this morning, before first light, and headed over to Walnut Creek to pick up “my people”. Last time I went, I drove a couple of Amish men around to sell and deliver pizzas. This time Emilene Hostetler and Melissa Miller got the honors to distribute the goods. This was the first go around for the young ladies, I think they were a bit nervous as to how this was going to go down. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Amish Values

Marie Monville – One Light Still Shines (A Story of Redeeming Love)

October 26, 2013 by jdschrock

This morning I went up to The Gospel Bookstore in Berlin, Ohio to a book signing event that Eli “Small” Hochstetler arranged with Marie Monville, author of “One Light Still Shines”. In the book, Marie shares her story of the tragic events that rocked her, and her family’s world, in October of 2006, seven years ago this month. The tragedy: The shooting of young Amish school girls at The Nickel Mines Amish School in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania by her husband, Charles. After shooting the girls, Charles committed suicide. I already had a copy of this excellent book and was deeply touched by the message of forgiveness, amazing love, and hope in this small Amish community, amidst unimaginable grief and pain. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Amish Values, Books & Reviews

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