1998 Hymns and Dylan

1998  Hymns and Dylan. Mennonite Publishing House projects: Jubilee curriculum, agency and congregational language use, Christian Living magazine, Sarah Kratzer,  Hymnal A Worship Book and earlier Anabaptist hymnals, Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, family singing, J.D. Sumner, Mennonite Youth Fellowship counselors, August Wilson plays, Connellsville High School football, immigrant ancestors John Miller and Magdalena Lehman, other family events.

A repeated theme in my journal after my return to Mennonite Publishing House (MPH) for congregations in the mid-90s was how to do more with less. You are right, a cookbook title, but it also meant how to expand sales with fewer expenses.  The two biggest income streams were a children’s Sunday school curriculum called “Jubilee” which functioned quite well under the leadership of Rosella Wiens Regier of the Faith and Life Press at Newton Kansas. At that point, the main publishing groups were the Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren, but we also had participation of the Brethren in Christ and the Mennonite Brethren. A second big income stream was the Adult Bible Study which moved along okay when I changed editors (1995). On balance Jubilee children’s curriculum met the needs of congregations who wanted an Anabaptist and biblical story curriculum. We still had sufficient sales that we could invest in the color and media which would make it what teachers considered easy to teach. Having the Mennonite Brethren and Brethren in Christ around the table helped give the curriculum a conservative spiritual and ethical flavor which fit many of our congregations, and our publisher Robert Ramer always encouraged this direction.    

Still, some critics were detecting New Age influences which, as near as I could tell, meant insufficient traditional evangelical language. The New Age concern was also driven by the growth of this generic religious literature in the big box bookstores such as Barnes and Noble. Granting an ongoing paranoia within American Evangelicalism about New Age, I discovered that our own modern Anabaptist writers and editors had a parallel paranoia about the Evangelical community and publishers who provided most of the language of Christianity in North America. They simply substituted an institutional Anabaptist language of peace and justice.

Not everyone among the local churches was so keen on our institutional language however. What I discovered in re-entering the Mennonite publishing field was that the conservatives were more selective in their language choice, neither jettisoning traditional Christian language nor adopting whatever seemed trendy among the left wing political and cultural chatterers. When I started editing in curriculum in the 70s the traditionals would send us letters—often handwritten and signed sincerely in Jesus—that they did not understand our language. What I also learned is that the conservatives are very polite; indeed they did understand our language and simply disagreed with our word choices. They preferred to see sin and salvation appear as well as meditation and mediation. But by discreetly saying they could not understand it, they could avoid lengthy debates with an editor like me (we, of course, called it dialogue).

When I returned in the mid-90s the conservatives had refined their strategy even further. When they disagreed with our language choice, they didn’t even bother to write letters or by now an e-mail; they simply stopped buying or affiliating. If conservative Anabaptists wanted some biblical realism or carried some pessimism of human potential (outside of Christ and the church), they could now buy their curriculum from other pacifist Anabaptist publishers in Virginia or Kentucky, or there was always our evangelical cousin David C, Cook.

No less in trade books the choices were many, as Anabaptist publishers multiplied and every respectable major (and minor) Christian publisher was offering some Anabaptist themed or authored titles. I tried to steer our editors to a mediating position of being explicitly Anabaptist in content and also explicitly Evangelical in tone and spirit. Most of all, I tried to appeal to what elicited people to buy our curriculum. From our surveys, it was ease of access, ease of use, and finding denominational distinctions. I wanted our writers, marketers and editors to think of these variables from the standpoint of how a member in Winnipeg, Phoenix, Archbold or Lancaster may view these issues. The Mennonite publishing personnel tended to view these variables with the assumption that the institution was the denomination, any dissent by the local congregation was called a lack of denominational loyalty. I considered this approach as little more than self-indulgent therapy for our staffers—which we could not afford.

Although I woke up many a morning before dawn thinking finances and nurturing the big projects, one of my joys during those years was a small project, a little magazine called Christian Living. This family and community monthly brought in only about fifty thousand of our three million dollar annual revenue, so it was more of a small pleasure, the closest to a general interest magazine we had left, which a generalist would enjoy. And I found the 1970s editors such as Daniel Hertzler, Helen Alderfer and Ken Reed stimulating staff associates who had also given me opportunities to write as a young person such as “Coming Home to Holmes County,” (1971). Christian Living came out of an older literate tradition which also took interest in a middle-brow Mennonite reader of the arts, culture and community. I considered it an Anabaptist version of Saturday Review, Eternity or the Atlantic Monthly, only the latter of which survives. I wrote a paper on the magazine for a “Mennonites and the Family” conference which John Roth organized at Goshen College in 1999. I wish I could find it.

The magazine had fallen on hard times, especially when the attempt was made to turn it into a narrowly focused family and how-to raise children monthly; this focus alienated, even angered, some of the regulars and older readers, and it never caught on as a general family magazine. The new potential readers were young baby boomer families who were raising kids, and it seemed to me commendable in attempting to expand readership; it may not have been helped by the polarizing style of the editor Lorne Peachey during the late seventies (1978). Circulation continued to fall, and after Peachey left in the mid-80s, my neighbor the conciliatory missionary editor David E. Hostetler tried to give it more of the community diet. David Hostetler left for Laurelville in 1990, and staff changes continued, including our publisher J. Robert Ramer finding Steve Kriss, a Johnstown student at Eastern Mennonite University. Kriss took a fling at multi-culturalism on which he still seems to thrive today over near Philadelphia. By the end of the decade the subscriptions stood at 3,000 which were hard to sustain economically. Still, I thought it had cultural and Christian merit.

In 1998, we decided to outsource some of the work by having Steven Nolt, a young professor of Goshen College provide editorial help, as well as Myron Augsburger, the evangelist and educator from Eastern Mennonite University. By 1999 we had Sarah Kratzer (now Sarah Kehrberg) come for a summer internship, and she stayed on as staff, picking up managing editor responsibilities, and it took on a renewed editorial focus. Both Sarah and Steven Nolt often picked up younger writers, and we gathered themes which went from Manhattan to Zaporozhye with stops in places like Millersburg. We did major profiles of people such as the fashion designer and seamstress Julie Musselman, Mennonite World Conference president Nancy Heisey, and the mega-church pastor Leslie W. Francisco III. My strict sister Miriam Kratzer wrote a “Dear Mary Martin” family advice column—a Mennonite version of the Jewish talk radio maven Laura Schlessinger, although I believe neither was aware of the other. None of this diet was new to the longer tradition of Christian Living or to what Merle and Phyllis Goods’ Festival Quarterly had done so well from 1974 to 1996. I look back at those Christian Living issues as invigorating and affirming Christian and Mennonite culture, faith and literature, but its magazine life was short, ending when the Mennonite Publishing House collapsed in 2002, but that is a later story.

One of the strengths which Sarah Kratzer brought to Christian Living was reviewing new music with her musical background and training. Sarah was a music and history major at Bethel College in Kansas, but I knew her as a strong vocalist and a violinist from childhood days. She had played in the in the Cleveland Symphony Youth Orchestra and in the Central Christian High School orchestra and ensembles, as well as giving violin lessons to children in the community. On May 25, 1996, she gave a recital at the new music hall of Kidron’s Central Christian High School. I have never seen anything quite like this where a 17-year-old high school senior could put together such an enjoyable and well-attended program of her own performance (piano, voice, and viola), her Suzuki students, and finally her family (“For the Beauty of the Earth” with Amos, Esther, Martha and Hannah). When Sarah was in school in Kansas she played viola with the Wichita Symphony for a few years, and I was able to attend one of her concerts when I had meetings in the area.

The big hymnal seller for MPH during my years was Hymnal A Worship Book which was released in 1992 by the Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren. I was on the side-lines as this latest hymnal was being developed, and I believe it took a human relations manager and musician such as my predecessor Laurence Martin to bring it off. The groups had quite different traditions, especially the Brethren who had already largely assimilated into the American religious mainstream. In the same way that Goshen College professor Mary Oyer left a broad stamp on the 1967 Mennonite Hymnal, the Eastern Mennonite University professor Ken Nafziger left his own stamp on the 1992 Hymnal A Worship Book. Both Oyer and Nafziger had mid-life conversions to appreciate the richness of international music, especially African drumming.

The missionary movement had spread Anabaptist churches all across the African, Asian and Latin American continents, and week-long world conferences on a six-year cycle would especially bring these churches into contact with North American Mennonites. Hence, international music took a much larger profile in the 1992 Hymnal as did a number of new hymns such as the first one “What Is this Place” which expressed an Anabaptist simplicity and community. At the same time the 1992 Hymnal picked up some older Mennonite pietistic hymns such as the second one “In Thy Holy Place We Bow.” One other element which the 1992 Hymnal navigated with some delicacy and success was the need to update American English language usage, especially gender terms such as man, at the same time honoring the literary tradition of the original poetry and verse. These language issues were some of the issues we needed to respond to as publishers.      

The new Hymnal was an eclectic but quite satisfactory mix for modern Mennonites at the same time that the older hymnals continued to sell well among the traditional Mennonite and Anabaptist groups which were growing even faster than the moderns.  Music is a large part of many religious traditions, and its special niche among the American Mennonites has to do with the tradition of acapella singing which continues today. From mid-nineteenth century when Joseph Funk started printing shaped notes music in Rockingham County in Virginia, four-part harmony singing characterized the American Mennonites which tied them to the amateur singing school tradition. Hence, for Mennonite publishing, music books and hymnals were an important product for congregational worship beginning with the 1908 Church and Sunday School Hymnal, 1927 Church Hymnal and the 1968 Mennonite Hymnal.

We kept all of these hymnals in print, and when sales decreased among the modern Mennonite groups, sales increased among the traditional Amish Mennonite churches. When Hannah and Anson got married, we had under the benches a book we called “the red hymnal,” the 1968 Mennonite Hymnal for “The Love of God.” In my life time I had sung in all these hymnals from the old Anabaptist hymnal the Ausbund and Lieder Sammlung during my Amish childhood; Church and Sunday school Hymnal at Beechvale summer Sunday school and Maple Grove Mission; Church Hymnal at Pleasant View, Mennonite Hymnal at Kingview, and Hymnal A Worship Book at Scottdale. I call the Ausbund and Lieder Sammlung old but that should not mean disappearing; I’m quite sure they are by far the best-sellers among all Anabaptist hymnals in use today. The Amish Mennonite hymn singing tradition continues strong among the traditional groups, but today it is challenged among the moderns. During the time I post this, Garrison Keillor joined the Goshen College Mennonites for a hymnsing on his radio show Prairie Home Companion, at the same time that other congregations are abandoning this traditional singing for contemporary choruses led by what they call praise bands (vocals, guitars and drums).      

But we also listened to music; a summer evening July 17 of 1998 Alison Kraus and Union Station came to sing at the Pittsburgh’s South Park. Gloria, Elizabeth and I went to hear her. Niece Esther Kratzer was along; she was doing a summer internship at Mennonite Publishing House. A month later that same year, Art Garfunkel sang at Hartwood Acres where we generally went once a year for a Sunday evening picnic. But the big event for us was the next year when Garfunkel’s old partner Paul Simon did a concert with Bob Dylan at the pavilion near Burgettstown on Sunday evening, July 18, 1999. This was sixties music heaven as two of pop music’s greatest songwriters of our generation were together on stage. Paul Simon sang and played with a large band, what one local called a United Nations orchestra, multi-textured music much of which came out of his beautiful Graceland South African album, as well as some of his old sixties tunes such as “Bridge over Troubled Water.” Then he and Dylan did a few songs together: “Hello darkness my old friend...” 

Finally, Dylan finished the evening with his hard-driving small band which came right out of his old folk and then rocker days and his on-going re-interpretation of his own melodies and lyrics which were strained, croaking, and barely understandable, to me at least. Over the years Dylan’s never-ending tour has come to the Pittsburgh area about once a year, and I have often gone to hear him, as much for the poet as for the music. And as one who has never smoked pot, I still rather enjoyed this annual smell wafting up with the music. At various times son Jakob, neighbor James Lederach, or publishing colleague Josh Byler went with me, all three of whom knew ten times more about Dylan’s music than I did.   

I could write a whole book on family singing, and during these years when our extended Miller family got together, we sang. After Andrew died (he enjoyed doing oral prayers), we often did a singing prayer or grace at the table such as “Great God the Giver of All Good.” This was a warm-up for later singing, and Sister Rhoda made all of us a notebook of over a hundred songs called “Gathering Songs for All Generations” which we would use during those years. We also often sang extemporaneously from memory. When our immediate family got together, we now had an additional bass singer in Anson Miedel. Gloria could sing any song, it seemed, and she was the glue which bound us together in music often teaching our parts with the piano or strumming along with the guitar.

On November 21 of 1998 I saw The New York Times’ obituary of the southern gospel quartet bass singer J.D. Sumner. I had not heard Sumner’s low voice for many years, but his life reminded me of a whole stage of my life from shaped notes, to singing schools, our Miller brothers quartet, sister Rhoda’s Journeymen quartet, and finally to gospel music as entertainment (Sumner and Elvis Presley). On a November Saturday morning when we were working at the Mennonite Publishing House (so we could take off the next Friday after Thursday Thanksgiving), I sent an e-mail note to my brothers and sisters entitled “J.D. Sumner Died.” In any case, music was important to Mennonite Publishing House and to our family.

In 1996 we put a large hot tub into our back yard which we enjoyed especially in the winter when it was cold and one had the contrast of the cold air and the hot water. It was also comfortable to the muscles after jogging, distance running, playing tennis, or people at the office or classroom. Elizabeth and her high school friends used it on weekends, as did Mennonite Youth Fellowship (MYF) on occasion when we became sponsors about this time. This was my second turn (1973) as youth sponsors, and we had a good MYF group, but I always felt utterly incompetent to serve as counselor, primarily because I out of touch with youth and had no abilities as a  counselor. Fortunately, the rest of the adults (Gloria, Ken and Debbie Millslagle) were much better at this. 

What I did enjoy were focused activities, and during these years our MYF joined the Allegheny youth in Bible quizzing at Johnstown. We were finalists every year I served and participated with speedsters who knew the book of Romans backwards and forwards. I especially remember Adam Bucar, Cory Scott, and Karl Stutzman; I was quoted in the Allegheny Conference News: “My competitive juices really are in gear. The spirit of the day is so nice.” Another highlight of our youth sponsor term was an April dessert theater which I did not attend but friends told me about it when I returned several days later. They said the emcee Joel Shenk (impersonating Levi Miller) was especially funny; my awkwardness and stuttering thanks to theatrical Joel and the kids raised $750 for the St. Louis Convention that summer.

The MYF dessert theater was largely music and improvisational comedy theater which our family had been watching on Saturday Night Live. Our family grew up with these weekly idiotic skits from Chevy Chase to Tina Fey; one of our favorites was Jonathan M. "Jon" Lovitz doing “Master Thespian” in the late eighties. Somehow, the show has managed to re-create itself and in 2013 as I write this, Gloria and I still watch it, although I often fall asleep around midnight. One time while I was in Chicago on June 6 of 1998 for meetings, some of us went to a performance of the Second City, the improv theater where many of the Saturday evening regulars got their start. One live performance was enough; I preferred the TV versions.

Another theatrical part of our lives in the nineties was of a different nature: the August Wilson plays. Whenever they were performed, we went. Wilson (1945-2005) grew up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, and I think we attended all of his 10 plays in the Pittsburgh Cycle, some of the most memorable being “Fences,” “Seven Guitars,” “Two Trains Running,” and “Jitney.” The plays came out of the ten decades of the 20^th century, and gave one an insightful experience into the joys and sorrows of African American life in Pittsburgh. But his characters (sometimes appearing in the next play too) by their very specific locality and dialect also gave voice to our common human cries of grievance, forgiveness, despair and hope. It seems to me Wilson stands somewhat alone in a select company of American playwrights such as Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neil.

Although Wilson had long since left Pittsburgh, he came back for opening nights and visits. One Saturday morning when Gloria and I went to the Strip District, I met him at a book store and told him I had enjoyed his play that weekend. He was friendly, but I did not want to bother him and his little daughter who appeared to be about kindergarten-aged; they should be allowed to look at books in peace. It was 1999, and the play was “King Hedley II” inaugurating the new O’Reilly Theater in the downtown Cultural District.  We saw most of Wilson’s works while the Pittsburgh Public Theater was still in the old Theodore L. Hazlett Jr. Theater on the North Side.

Another entertainment in the Fall was attending one of Gloria’s Connellsville High School football games. On Friday, September 11, 1998, this game was at Three Rivers Stadium, in what was labeled a fall football kick-off classic with the top western Pennsylvania teams: this time the Connellsville Falcons vs. the Mt. Lebanon Blue Devils and the North Hills Indians vs. the Upper St. Clair Panthers. I don’t recall who won, but it marked the end of the Connellsville Falcons as a western Pennsylvania football power under coach Dan Spanish’s leadership. The prior year Connellsville had won its section (conference) championship, having earlier won 8 conference championships, and going to the play-offs 14 out of 17 seasons. In 1991 Connellsville even won the whole western Pennsylvania championship at Three Rivers Stadium. After the year 2000, the program lost ground, and is still trying to recover as I write in 2013. But the first 25 years of Spanish’s leadership were football glory years with 169 wins and 82 losses and 8 ties. For our Fayette County locals who earlier called themselves Cokers and Mules with a heritage of coal mining and farming, it was always an extra pleasure to beat the well-heeled suburban teams of Pittsburgh.     

Another Fall event was family related when I attended a conference commemorating my immigrant ancestors John Miller (c. 1730-1798) and Magdalena Lehman (? – 1817). This John Miller was often known as Hannes, Crippled John and Indian John, the latter because he was present when the Indians attacked the Hostetler family (1947) in Berks County. This occasion was the annual meeting of the Casselman River Area Amish and Mennonite Historians, and J. Virgil Miller was the main speaker on September 19, 1998. At the time Miller lived in Sarasota, Florida, but earlier he had lived in Wayne County and was born near Charm, Ohio. He had taught and worked in Saudi Arabia for many years, all the while doing family research which he released in periodicals such as The Budget and Mennonite Family History. 

My father-in-law Roy R. Miller had followed Virgil Miller’s career and often pointed him out to me, so it was good to meet him in person, an unassuming but very bright family historian. Roscoe Miller of Walnut Creek was also present, and perhaps Leroy Beachy who often attended these meetings. In any case, these people were Holmes County’s strongest family historians. John and Magdalena had 11 children, and I read one of the descendent descriptions of son John Miller Jr. (for which Virgil had written the copy). In the afternoon we went on a bus tour of the historic Miller farm near Berlin, Pennsylvania, and dedication of a historical marker which read: John or Hannes Miller (c. 1730-1798), Amish-Mennonite immigrant of 1749 via Ship Phoenix, and his wife Magdalena Lehman (? – 1817) lived on this farm, called Miller’s Choice according to a deed of 1785. Their eleven children were born in Berks County, PA and lived in Somerset County at least part of their lives. There were 92 grandchildren. – the Casselman River Area Amish and Mennonite Historians 1898.” 

Many other family events happened this year, but I will simply mention a few: during the summer we traveled to Turkey for a few weeks (June 25 to July 7) to visit Lisen and Jakob. We were part of a group tour of the historic sites and cities of Turkey, also on the tour were Lisen’s Reichenbach family and with her Kreider grandparents. Unfortunately, my main memory of the trip was of an unraveling young marriage, and my main (as in pain, strain and insane) contribution was to make it even worse. By the end of the year, Jakob returned alone from Turkey and teaching, and spent the last two weeks of January 1999 with us, and I wrote in my journal that I thought those days may have been some of the most enjoyable weeks of my life. ”He is growing and developing his own identity, and I’m very proud of him as a teacher and son, most as a son. I want to bless him every day and lift him up to the only wise God our Savior and Lord.” One day we went skiing and in the evening prayed and smoked cigars; no wonder everything was rose-colored in my journal. Jakob told me about some of his British friends who were teaching in Turkey with him, and now he was thinking of studying at the University of London next year.  

We also celebrated my mother Mattie’s 80^th birthday in June and Gloria’s 50^th birthday on April 26. Our small group (Millers and Brubakers) came to our house and said we’d take Gloria on a Sunday walk on a path behind the Southmoreland Elementary school and the golf course ending up at the at the nearby Cactus Star Restaurant where Gloria was surprised by relatives (Stutzman family Carla and Maurice and sister Bonnie) and friends (the Halfhills Becky and John). Her sisters’ humor tended to favor age-specific gifts of various patented laxatives and fruits (prunes). Another part of her birthday was May 9, 1998, with the tennis Virginia Slims Legends tour (Chris Evert, Billie Jean King and Evonne Goolagong) holding court at Monroeville. By the end of the year Nathan Daniel Koontz and niece Esther M. Kratzer were married on December 28, 1998, at the Sonnenberg Mennonite Church. They were a part of a long string of Miller nieces and nephews who would be married in the next decade. That summer Esther had served as an intern at Mennonite Publishing House. Dear reader, I confess I’ve jumped around some here, but we’re back on a theme of publishing, music, and family. Next year we’re heading for Russia.

Most of this comes from memory but assisted by my little black Mennonite Publishing House 1998 date book, my journal notebooks, and personal files. The section on Mennonite Publishing House language use comes from a web article https://themennonite.org/opinion/40-years-of-peace-and-justice/ which appeared in The Mennonite (November 17, 2009). Background on the Garrison Keillor radio show at Goshen College on May 2, 2015 can be found at https://www.goshen.edu/photos/2015/a-prairie-home-companion-live-from-goshen-college/

The Paul Simon and Bob Dylan concert of July 18, 1999, was reviewed in both the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review the following day. The section on J.D. Sumner comes from a November 21, 1998 e-mail note in my correspondence file with the subject “J.D. Sumner Died.” References to our Scottdale MYF quizzing appeared in The Allegheny Conference News (June 1999, 2). On our immigrant ancestor John Miller, see Virgil Miller, Anniversary History of the Family of John “Hannes” Miller Sr. 1730-1798 (Morgantown: Masthof Press, 1998).

1997 Life Passages

1997  Life Passages, Lydia O. Kretzinger (1897-1997), Maurice and Carla Stutzman, Wedding of Hannah and Anson Miedel, the marriage ceremony, Daniel Hertzler, singing, the Laurelville reception  and Hannah; Mennonite men’s prayer breakfast, Daniel (Dan) Lint, Kent Hartzler’s counsel, gender groups, Kingview fun Night, an African evening in 1998, John Howard Yoder (1927-1997). 

The years of 1996 and 1997 were ones of joyful life passages for our family, and I wrote in my journal on New Year’s Day that we had finished a good and healthy year; Elizabeth was baptized and joined the church and has a sincere faith. She is graduating from Southmoreland and heading for Goshen College in the Fall. Jakob and Lisen Reichenbach have completed a year of teaching in South Korea and had shown themselves remarkably resilient in difficult and adventuresome situations. Gloria has an extremely (I know, I like superlatives) successful teaching career with an intuitive sense of how to combine profession, family and church. Hannah is engaged to marry Anson Miedel and both are on their way to medical school in the Fall. Hannah had finished an outstanding Fall of co-editing the student newspaper at Eastern Mennonite University. I concluded: “So I have much to be grateful for, and I will gladly say this.”

Even sorrowful life passages had a joyful side when an aunt had kept the faith in a full and productive life for a century. Gloria’s aunt Lydia O. Kretzinger died on January 2, 1997; she was born on April 10, 1897. Lydia was Roy R’s favorite sister and confidante, a member of the family who often had a place at the table when we visited. Like Roy, she was a collector and her Sugarcreek house was filled with collectibles from moving metal coin banks to oil and vinegar cruets; she had two corner cabinets filled with them and gave one each to Gloria and Bonnie. Lydia Kretzinger lived most of her life in Sugarcreek, but in her mid-nineties she had moved to Walnut Hills Retirement Community at Walnut Creek. Carla and Maurice Stutzman kept a good watch on her while they lived near Sugarcreek.

Meanwhile the Stutzmans moved to the home place at Bunker Hill where they built a kind of grandma house addition for Berdella. By 2002, Carla and Maurice also rebuilt the old Roy R. and Berdella house, enlarging and modernizing it with a brick façade all around outside, keeping the feel of the original rooms of the smaller family house inside. The new house with all its modern amenities retained a remarkable live-in museum feeling with which Carla’s father Roy R. would have been pleased. With a large basement complete with kitchen and recreation room and a large open garage, their homestead was excellent for Miller (Roy R.) and Blosser (Berdella) family gatherings and hosting Walnut Creek Mennonite and Hiland youth groups as their own children moved through their school years.

But the big event for our family that summer was planning for Hannah and Anson’s August wedding. We knew it was coming because they had been best friends from their last year at Southmoreland through their college years at Westminster and Eastern Mennonite University. Because Tom and Margaret Miedel lived also lived at Scottdale, and we had known each other since the romance began five years earlier, it was relatively easy to coordinate things together. I remember Margaret planted an extra garden of flowers that spring, many of which ended up at the wedding or reception. Religiously, Anson had grown up in the Pennsville Baptist Church, but at some point he threw in his lot with the Mennonites. I was always grateful Hannah found a mate with a biblical and Christian indoctrination and sound personal morals from his Mt. Carmel School and Pennsville Baptist days, even if our traditions differed on issues such as women in ministry and participation in military service.  I also sometimes thought Anson’s Baptist background may have helped him understand Hannah’s Andrew and Mattie Miller clan who had from the Maple Grove Mission years absorbed elements of conservative Protestant and Baptist culture: “Since Jesus Came Into My Heart” and “You Can’t Get to Heaven on Roller Skates.” When our extended family got together and we sang lots of gospel songs, they seemed strange to our own children, but Anson once told me they seemed familiar to him.

In any case, Hannah and Anson needed a minister for the ceremony, and the Mennonite pastor Linford Martin was heading for Indiana, and our new pastors Conrad and Donna Mast had not yet arrived in town. So the Scottdale editor and elder Daniel Hertzler stepped up, and he and his wife Mary gave them counseling, and Daniel officiated the ceremony in his cryptic unadorned style. Hertzler was an unusual combination of biblical scholar, church editor, amateur naturalist, and Mennonite pastor, all of which he did with considerable success. They asked me to give a meditation, as Jakob had earlier, but I demurred not wanting to spoil the occasion. John Roth and sister Ruth were then returning with the family from Costa Rica and he gave a memorable marriage meditation on Jesus saying that my yoke is easy and my burden is light. My sister Rhoda with great vigor led the hymn “O God, Your Constant Care” with the meetinghouse full of family and friends confessing in harmony God’s care from our “dreams of youth” to “the passing of the years.” I thought of our ancestors and future generations to come; I wept such that I could hardly sing.

If transition clergy needed to be secured for the wedding, the same for the reception venue—Laurelville Mennonite Church Center. The center was the natural place to have it because Hannah had worked there off and on since her junior high school days. But over 300 guests were coming which was over the capacity of the old Dining Hall, plus Laurelville’s other guests committed that weekend. Laurelville was building a large new gymnasium which was under roof but not finished, not even the doors attached. Turning the open air gymnasium into a wedding reception hall became a community project. Maynard Brubaker provided a lift and we spent a half day stringing up little lights to form a starry ceiling. Then on Friday afternoon Tom Miedel took a Hilltop Labs truck, and we borrowed tables from the Scottdale Mennonite meetinghouses and from the Southmoreland High School cafeteria. The Laurelville cooks (Marilyn Schlabach and staff) brought the hot food over from the main Dining Hall in our old Chevy Celebrity station wagon which we had left at Laurelville when I left the staff. Anson had rented china and silver for the place settings, and everyone was fed a full dinner, including a traditional southwestern Pennsylvania cookie corner with one of my mother’s big Amish quilts hanging above it.  Anson had secured a steel band to play in the evening; there was dancing and visiting. The evening ended with my brother Paul and Veryl Kratzer shooting off a fireworks display on the nearby tennis courts, while Hannah and Anson headed off to the airport. They were going to spend a week in Aruba.

The weekend included two other extended family events of the Blossers and Millers. Gloria’s extended Berdella Blosser families were meeting that Sunday at cousin Bob Blosser’s place near Scottdale where he and Laura lived; we could only attend a part of it. In the meantime, our extended Miller family summer outing was also that weekend, which turned out be for all practical purposes the wedding. But I remember they stayed around for the Sunday morning, and we went out to join them for worship. One of the final projects was on Sunday afternoon when Tom Miedel and his sons in law Jim Farmer and Ryan Maxwell came and we picked up the tables and returned them to the meetinghouses and Southmoreland school. I was tired out, and foolishly became angry and argued with Jakob. Later that evening Jakob and I took a long walk, smoked a cigar, and things looked up again. The following week, I was writing in my journal, that I got up early, and it was a refreshing week with the only glitch being our young Ringneck pheasants roaming in the Arthur Avenue neighborhood. By September 15, I knew things were back to normal when Hannah sent me a nice birthday card which said let’s put the fun back into dysfunctional. She was referring to her father.

Hannah was an honest daughter with a bright mind, a gentle spirit, Miller emotions and lots of common sense. She always wore her achievements lightly. During high school, she was the high academic achiever, but took an art and drawing class which somehow figured lower on her grade point average, and ended up ranked 10^th in her senior class. By her senior year her teachers and counselors tried to be supportive, but they could not hide their disappointment that their prize student did not pursue a more selective east coast school than Eastern Mennonite University (EMU). Still, at EMU Hannah had a good model in Lee Snyder, the academic dean who took her on as a protégé. Snyder during that time became interim EMU president while Joseph Lapp was on sabbatical or leave. I’ll never forget the note Hannah sent that her heart was heavy as Snyder handed the gavel back to Lapp when he returned. By her 2^nd year at EMU, Hannah was already given an early acceptance at the Hershey Medical School, but she waited on Anson’s medical school decision before making any final choices. Hannah was not untouched by our Miller madness when she sent a dispairing letter saying “My life is a mess.” The dilemma was on whether to take this or that course or whether to volunteer at a camp in Oregon or Laurelville that summer. She chose Oregon. Hannah took full advantage of EMU’s generosity and small college flexibility with an honors program, travels in England, a term abroad in Ghana, assisting in directing a play, and editing the student newspaper. Hannah worked as a summer intern at Mennonite publishing that last summer before her wedding, for her father at least a good transition.             

Over the years, an important institution to navigate through life’s transitions was our Mennonite men’s prayer breakfast on Saturday mornings. It was begun by my friend Daniel (Dan) Lint back in the 80s, or for as long as I can remember since we came back from Venezuela. Our pastor Linford Martin was supportive as is our current pastor Conrad Mast. It would have long since died out if Dan had not stayed with the organization. Once a month on Saturdays, we get together with one person in charge of breakfast and another the devotions. Mainly through Dan’s nurturing, the institution has somehow managed to survive gender and church mergers. Why would or should men want to get together by themselves anyway?  At one point a few matrons showed up, presumably to show there were no male privileges in the Christian kingdom, but we knew that already. We simply outlasted these women, and they eventually stopped coming. We actually invited the women to come as Valentines in February, but that did not work out either. Since half of us were single for some reason (widowed or divorced), that cut into the regular male crowd. The February women seemed more like my dear Gloria; they came under duress in a kind of Buster duty (much preferring to sleep-in on Saturdays). Eventually, we simply cut out the February Valentine breakfast; attendance got better.

The prayer breakfast model was our leader Dan who paid little attention to these kinds of cultural issues and only promised a good breakfast and good fellowship, often including a good discussion. The institution, as I noted, survived through the merger of the two congregations and often has picked up a few neighbors and friends. Dan Lint was quite an accomplished cook in his own manner, and took his turn regularly serving large helpings of eggs, sausages, fruits, toast and cheese. Sometimes Dan and I would do breakfast together, going to the County Market (24-hour supermarket) early in the morning, buying what was needed before breakfast. Dan had a core of people he believed should be there, and he would call us during the week and remind us to attend and noted who will serve breakfast—the discussion or devotional seemed secondary. Sometimes, if you are not up and ready by 7:00 o’clock, Dan might call you that same morning and discreetly tell you not to let him down. Some of my best memories of people are from this group such as the artist Ivan Moon, the editor Paul M. Schrock and the entrepreneur Mervin Miller, all of whom have since died.

But a young man also stands out, Kent Hartzler. Kent was with us for a few years in the late 90s when he was marketing manager for Herald Press. For whatever reason, people sometimes said things in this setting which helped me; I’ll give an example from the Fall of 1997. After our youngest daughter Elizabeth left for Goshen College, I fell into a depression. Hannah and Anson had left for Philadelphia. Jakob and Lisen were heading for Istanbul in Turkey. I had felt sad when Jakob left for Kidron about a decade earlier, but we still had other kids at home. Elizabeth was the last one, and in the evenings, I would hear her steps on our stairways. That September I listened for the steps every evening, but they did not come. I shared this with the men one October morning, and they all seemed to know what I was talking about.

Kent Hartzler, one of the youngest men there, said he empathized with me and that probably his father felt this, and that my own father may have felt this way when I left (actually, I don’t believe Andrew did, but I got the point). But then he surprised me by stating the obvious; our fathers made it, and we should too. Get over it, Levi, you left your parents’ house; the kids will be okay. According to Kent this transition was all natural, perhaps as natural as the blue sky over Pennsylvania’s Big Valley and its nearby football team. I never forgot this counsel from a young man and have tried to remember it at other life changes and transitions. Kent soon left us, going on to eventually head up the Mennonite credit union, today called Everence.

One other subject was publically broached for this first time in this breakfast. One morning Daniel Hertzler wondered what Scottdale would be like without Mennonite Publishing House. Daniel was a biblical scholar and a sage who reflected on the Hebrew prophets and exile, as I recall. I think that was the first time we talked so openly about the possibility of Mennonite publishing moving or closing, and Daniel talking about it in the context of the prophets whom he loved and that one cannot be attached forever to one place or institution. I often thought Daniel’s theological spin on Scottdale and Mennonite publishing as exile was valuable, and the image stayed with me for many years.

While we are on gender related institutions, it seems to me that there has been value in them, and Gloria has for decades been a part of a women’s birthday dinner, a cohort which goes out for dinners about once a month. Her Goshen College alumni women’s group got together annually in various parts of the world. Mixed groups often played tennis together, but we also had men’s and women’s groups with whom we played. It is for women of course to say what value they see in their gender groups, but I have found value and enjoyment in men’s groups.

Another Kingview institution emerged while we were in Venezuela, a mid-winter annual fun night. This participatory theater and music had become the rage in the early eighties, and everyone wrote to us about what they called Fun night, that’s a capital F. I’m not sure if it was in reaction to Mennonites historically being fairly somber and upright types, that my generation decided it was time to make up for lost time of laughing. I think I first thought of this in the 80s when I went to Walton Hackman’s funeral over near Souderton among the Franconia Mennonites. After the funeral in one of the rather plain meetinghouses Henry Landes, one of Walt’s neighbors, sidled up beside me and assured me that if I would stick around after the burial and lunch, the informal session would have plenty of jokes and laughing. I decided to leave for home which was a four-hour drive anyway. Apparently the same was true of Paul Erb’s funeral which also happened while we were in Venezuela, and people wrote that it was so much fun, and everyone had such a good time telling humorous stories. We all have to do what we need to do regarding our backgrounds, but I somehow missed the sourpuss and American Gothic Mennonites and Amish. I regarded humor as a basic and long-standing survival strategy among my own stream of Amish and Mennonites, hence no special need for extra fun in church, generally thinking of fun being like joy, all the better for being un-intended. 

  

In any case, by the late nineties, fun night had become institutionalized into our local church culture as the one evening of the year, you could be a fool, playing into character or against character. Small groups were in charge, wrote original scripts, did elaborate sets and decorating, and it may have been an evening on a cruise ship, a one-room country school, a western dude ranch, or on an African safari.  Members such as Nelson Waybill, Alta Dezort and Jack Scott were good at various aspects of theater, but often the shows were simply home-grown operettas with unlikely actors. The seats or benches were removed from the Kingview auditorium and entire meetinghouse would be turned into a huge theater in the round, often the make believe beginning already by having parking attendants acting as police officers or ticketing agents. Playing in character were often Mervin and Arlene Miller as effete and impossibly hard-to-please travelers, complaining about accommodations and perks not being up to their high expectations. During these years, one memorable night, Kent (mentioned above) and Stephanie Hartzler came out an opening high above the auditorium sliding down through the air suspended by a cable. I have no idea what their drama and characters were (possibly Tarzan and Jane), but for many months afterwards we talked about Kent and Stephanie flying through the open air in the church auditorium.

      

But the one I remember best was in 1998 when our small group (Kim and Diane Miller, Maynard and Jan Brubakers, Robert and Linda Koch) planned an African theme led by Lord Stanley (that would be Kim Miller) as the American journalist out to look for the Scottish missionary, as in “Mr. Livingstone, I presume.” His side-kick was Sir Artless Cook (Robert Koch) and they meet some natives dancing beside a large kettle with a bright West Overton fire underneath. The natives (that would be Levi, Gloria, and the Moons, Dan, Ivan and Naomi) were singing “Can, Can, Can, Cannibal…” to the tune of “Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl…,” the old 1962 pop song. Eventually some missionaries appear (our new pastors Conrad and Donna Mast) who sing the Beatles tune “Help I Need Somebody.” They sing so plaintively that the cannibals are moved, feel needed and affirmed, and join in the song, with  Naomi Moon calling to the missionary singing at the piano (Conrad): “Don’t go so fast; o make it last, my little Mast.” In the end, all is resolved, they give to the Save the Animals fund, and Lord Stanley will contribute an article to the New York Post. 

I remember this scene, of course, because I wrote and directed it, but there must have been a half dozen in an evening (each somewhat self contained and better than mine) such as the one with Kent and Stephanie Hartzler (above) flying down on the cable. After acting or singing in your own scene, you moved on with the crowd and became part of the participatory audience for the rest of the evening.   When the two congregations (Scottdale and Kingview) merged in the next century, fun night ended. But for two decades of the 80s and 90s the Kingview fun night brought some excitement to our long western Pennsylvania winters. 

This year began with family transitions, and we’ll connect to the world stage from the family: Hannah was in the audience when the theologian John Howard Yoder visited Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) in January of 1997. She not only heard his speech, but I remember she told me she asked a question. What made Yoder’s appearance especially significant was that he was on a short list as one of the greatest Christian theologians of the twentieth century. Yoder’s brilliant mind and writings such as The Politics of Jesus did more to give credibility and public discussion to pacifism in the 20^th century than anyone since the time when the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy had given this teaching in the 19^th century.  Both Yoder’s messianic pacifism and Tolstoy’s nonresistance appealed to the life and teachings of Jesus. What also made the EMU appearance significant was that Yoder had been banned from Mennonite public appearances during most of the decade (cf  Yoder, 1947, 1972, 1988).

By 1992 Yoder had been exposed to be one of the Mennonites’ most successful sexual predators of young women and was undergoing church discipline and rehabilitation by the Indiana Michigan Conference. Hence, his Harrisonburg visit was one of Yoder’s first public appearances since the disciplinary process had achieved what the church officials called "closure," although it was hardly closure for many of the women whom he had violated. Leo Tolstoy has a further parallel in that the Russian apostle of love and nonresistance and his wife Sophia Behrs also had one of the most abusive and conflicted spousal relations one can imagine. And while we’re on the subject, in Washington this year the President Bill Clinton was having sexual relations with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky which almost brought down his otherwise quite successful presidency. As a youth my own family had taught me that human failings and sinfulness seemed to co-exist alongside of our achievements and virtues, even within the same person. By the end of the century, the pattern continued. That Fall of 1997, I had asked Steven Nolt to do a profile of Yoder for the magazine Christian Living. He sent me an e-mail on the last day of the year: John Howard Yoder died on December 30 of that year.

Most of this chapter is from memory and from personal files of the period. The hymn we sang at Anson and Hannah’s wedding “O God, Your Constant Care” appears in Hymnal A Worship Book (Mennonite Publishing House, 1992, 481). Hannah’s despairing “My life is a mess” letter from EMU was written January 13, 1994. The Kingview fun night section is partly drawn from a script entitled “Kingview Fun Night, March 13, 1998” in my Ideas and Activities file of 1998. On John Howard Yoder, EMU professor Ted Grimsrud’s blog is good reflection on Yoder’s  pacifism, his sexual abuse, and traditional nonresistance http://thinkingpacifism.net/2010/12/30/word-and-deed-the-strange-case-of-john-howard-yoder/ Steven Nolt’s article appeared as “Critic and the Community: John
Howard Yoder among the Mennonites,”Christian Living (April-May 1998, 4-8).

1996 Israelis and Palestinians

1996  Israelis and Palestinians.  Allegheny Airlines, Pittsburgh Airport, Committee on Uniform Series Meetings, New Orleans,  Boston and New England, travel games; Israel and Palestine, the historic biblical story, current life and politics, Thomas Stransky, the Mennonite and Jesus’ tradition of moving, love and forgiveness.

My childhood was hearth and home; in my sleep I could hear Buster (our dog) thumping his tail on the porch floor; at dusk I was whistling and heading home for my own bed while my brothers slept out on the hillside; on our Holmesville driveway, I placed a sign “A Future Farmer Lives Here.” It was the storge of C.S. Lewis’ four Greek loves, the homely and domestic affection. As a Miller family, we did very little travel except one-day excursions to the Columbus and Cleveland zoos and traveling with my father to where ever the evangelists landed in Ohio. So, I was an unlikely candidate to do a lot of traveling during my adult years, and yet as my interests and work would have it, I did my share of travels. I think it started from mission and service, the summer of 1965 when I joined the Mennonite voluntary service unit among the Pruitt Igo high rise dwellers on the near north side of St. Louis, Missouri. It simply kept on going for several years in Puerto Rico. There were Mennonite Publishing House (MPH) travel and Venezuela living. Sometimes, family vacations could be attached to school and publishing conventions. With time I learned that generally one made better decisions based on some frame of reference greater than oneself, whether statewide, national or international.  Furthermore, travel brought some excitement, occasional boredom, often enjoyment, and always appreciation for a return to 903 Arthur Avenue. 

For four decades I flew with Allegheny Airlines and US Airways. I traveled by air from the times Allegheny Airlines was an efficient regional carrier in the 70s, had its hub in Pittsburgh, then bought up smaller carriers such as Piedmont, and eventually evolved into US Airways. During the 70s I made many a morning trip to Chicago with Paul M. Lederach for meetings in which during the hour and 10-minute flight we were all served a full and warm breakfast (omelets), juice and coffee and an extra roll which Lederach always requested. Somehow, with few exceptions, the stewardesses (still young, attractive and female) could serve everyone and get back to their seats for landing at O’Hare. MPH emphasized frugality, and members of the clergy and the armed forces could travel on a stand-by discount, and so the people who traveled with me such as Paul Lederach and Arnold Cressman generally would get on the plane late. We were all seated in the cabin and then they would come: an unlikely cohort of Mennonite ministers and members of the American armed forces. I don’t recall that Lederach ever missed a flight. Since then, food and ticketing have all diminished, of course, and about ten years ago, I stopped flying US Airways; they often cost more and had fewer flights from Pittsburgh. As I write this, US Airways with headquarters in Tempe, Arizona, has merged with American Airlines.

Scottdale was convenient to reach downtown Pittsburgh but not the airport out in Moon Township; we were an hour and a half south and east of the airport, depending on the traffic. But during the pre- 9-11-2001 period, I developed some expertise in leaving Scottdale about two hours before a flight,  running through the parking lot and walkways directly back to the gate, getting my boarding pass as the last people were entering the plane. Right on the plane as the door was closing. Or I would go to the ticket counter and they would call out to the gate, saying hold it, one more passenger is coming, a morning run, and l got a seat. I don’t believe I ever missed a flight, even if it was close many times. Now, of course, that all has changed; I go early, and I take off my shoes and belt, thanking the kind TSA workers for searching me. Several years ago, I absent-mindedly opened my zipper fly after removing my belt. The bemused TSA worker told me to keep going and that they were not that invasive yet.

I usually did not go to the ticketing counter because I carried my bags. I think I got leery of sending bags through back in the sixties when Gloria and I went to Colombia and our bags arrived several days late, and it was a lot of bother. Looking a little scruffy seemed a small cost for the benefit of simplicity and efficiency. Early on I bought a canvas bag in which on one side I could take a change of underwear, an extra shirt, running shoes, and on the other side I stuffed the files and papers I needed for the meeting. And even with carry-on, one can take some hearth and home along; I always had room for my little black genuine leather toiletry bag which I bought at Maxwell Brothers in Millersburg when I left for Malone College in 1965. I replaced the zipper one time, but the leather and plastic lining have remained durable, and it has served me well for five decades. Dear reader, I do admit, however, that simplicity should not trump decorum. Traveling to New York overnight with only my brief case and a clear plastic freezer bag of a toothbrush and briefs stuffed inside was not a good idea to my traveling companion.

I also had my familiar spot at the Pittsburgh airport parking lot; although this easy-to-find spot directly out from the belt walkway and to the left was less storge than the ease of always being able to find your car when you returned. Before the new 1992 airport, I often used the Campbell Road park and fly because of its ease to and from the old airport. Finally, the large Alexander Calder mobile greeted you hanging in the old Pittsburgh lobby, and it found its way into the new airport as well.  One could talk of similar routines at Chicago O’Hare with the nearby Hampton Inn, the Travel Lodge, the Four Horseman Restaurant, the latter eventually populated by Marlin Brando look-alikes in dark glasses, black derby hats, and big Cadillac limos awaiting in the parking lot. We moved up the street to the more comfortable Marriot Hotel for eating where one night who should appear but our old Bruderhof neighbors from Farmington. Christoph Arnold and a few communitarians were having a late night drink after a day of visiting the Chicago-area Christian colleges, presumably giving them counsel on leadership, communal living and family life.   

Once a year I would go for a week of meetings hosted by the Committee of the Uniform Series which met in several cities on a rotating basis, but regularly we landed in the old Royal Sonesta Hotel in New Orleans French Quarter.  The one hundred-year-old Committee was under the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the old hotel were a perfect match for each other-- a throw-back to times when things were still going good for this ecumenical organization and the old hotel whose carpets were sometimes comfortably thread bear. We were a rather traditional group and preferred to go to places where you could still get a hot water bottle placed under your pillow in the evening. The hotels gave us special rates and the NCC gave us subsidies, so the costs were reasonable. In New Orleans we were among fine cooks, jazz bands, carnival parades, and colorful necklaces. If you happened to be in the streets in the evenings, you might also be entertained by slightly drunken women flashing their boobs from the iron woven balconies. Still, with all that evening entertainment, and let’s say it was a distraction, we managed to do good work with preparing Bible studies for our churches.

The committee reached back to the turn of the century when most of the Protestants got together around the common text—the English Bible. Denominational representatives created outlines which surveyed the Bible every six years. We did some book studies and a few thematic studies, and in an earlier day provided a common Bible study for most of the country’s Protestant churches; we even had a temperance (alcohol) Sunday every quarter. By the 90s it was about one third membership of African American denominations, a few mainline denominations, especially the Methodists, and smaller groups such as the Church of God Anderson, Brethren and the Mennonites. The big enchilada among these groups was the Southern Baptist Convention, which still sent a group of a dozen editors and biblical scholars. The committee had good revenue from royalties of independent publishers such as David C. Cook and Gospel Light; hence the outlines we created could subsidize some of the smaller and poorer publishers and denominations. A number of the African American denominations also used the outlines for their children’s Sunday school materials, and this work increased their representation.  

I loved the mix of people because it was one of the few settings I attended where such a theological, cultural and racial mix could work and worship together—for a whole week. Unfortunately, the big umbrella with a common Bible would not last. During the late nineties, the Southern Baptists pulled out and created their own outlines; their denominational leadership was becoming more conservative and ours more liberal; the NCC was less than transparent concerning its finances (at least to the Southern Baptists’ satisfaction), and finally the remaining representatives tended not to vote for Southern Baptist officers. Whatever the combination of issues, I missed the Southern Baptists when they left, and I’d like to think they missed us too. 

The genius of the Uniform Series Outlines was to provide a biblical text and all the denominations could do their own interpretative writing. In some ways, it was a Protestant Sunday school lectionary. I helped celebrate its 125^th anniversary when we met in Indianapolis, Indiana, in April of 1997.  I also remember the week because the National Basketball Association Pacers were at home that week, and the visiting New York Knicks were in our hotel. So one night I went to the nearby Market Square Arena to see them play, which included Reggie Miller and Patrick Ewing, the latter approaching the end of his career. 

In mid-July 11 of 1996, our family took a New England trip tied to a school conference, which was a kind of reprise from the trip Gloria and I took twenty-four years earlier (1972). Now  Elizabeth, Hannah and Anson went along; Jakob and Lisen were in Korea. Our first stop was at Newport, Rhode Island, which is kind of an over-sized houses place. In 1972, as a part of the Newport Music Festival, Gloria and I heard a four-piano concert at the Breakers with snow flakes falling from the ceiling at the end (we’re talking during August). This time we went to the International Tennis Hall of Fame . Then it was on to Boston where we stayed several days near the Boston Commons, hence visiting make way for the ducklings and bookstores. We hiked and took day trips out to Concord, one day swimming in Walden Pond, now one end turned into a public beach. We visited the Concord Library and the Sleepy Hollow graveyard where Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Luisa May Alcott were buried. We visited many of the same places where we had been earlier, but now added the Louisa May Alcott House, and we followed the Revolutionary War trail from the Old North Church up to the Bunker Hill monument, which Elizabeth refused to climb. On July Fourth, the Boston Pops played at an outdoor venue at the Commons and exploded fireworks.  

We ended the trip going up the Portland, Maine where I attended a school conference and late one night we visited the L.L. Bean store in Freeport which is open twenty-four hours a day. What I remember most of this trip was the new meaning of this part of American history and literature, now also at least on some levels appropriated by our children. In Boston one day, we were walking down the street and met Michael Dukakis, the Democratic candidate for president during the late 80s. Another day we sat with Red Auerbach (okay, his statue), the Celtics basketball coach with this trademark victory cigar. I used to follow Auerbach’s Celtics during the Bill Russell, Bob Cousy and John Havlicek years, and always enjoyed hearing comments by the great center Bill Russell, who is also a philosopher. But I suppose the other element of family trips has simply been having time together; on this trip Hannah, Anson, Elizabeth, and Gloria and were playing card games non-stop when we traveled in the van. Sometimes in the evenings, I would joined them for Rook (the only card game I really know).      

Outside of America, I had my first introduction to the Middle East from the Bible stories and when people such as the Mennonite Bishop Harry Stutzman made the trip to Israel and came back with pictures and stories (1949). So when the National Council of Churches division on Christian education offered a travel seminar to Israel and Palestine in 1997 from April 28 to May 15, I was interested.  Representatives from various protestant denominations joined the travel seminar as a part of the celebration of the 125^th anniversary of the Committee of the Uniform Series with generous foundation money making it affordable. The National Council’s very capable and consummate staffer Dorothy (Dot) Savage ran the trip and had planned into it about every aspect of one might have wanted for historical, theological, educational and socio-political views. For two and one-half weeks we visited biblical sites all over Israel and Palestine: around Jerusalem, north to Tiberias (Galilee), and south to the Dead Sea and Ein Gedi. We explored biblical archeology at the temple walls and at the caves where the Dead Sea scrolls were found.

We heard Nora Carmi and Naim Ateek at Sabeel, a Palestinian study center which had appropriated liberation theology to the Palestinian cause. Carmi lifted up a copy of Donald Kraybill’s The Upside Down Kingdom , saying it was one of the best Palestinians’ reading of the Jesus and the New Testament. The Jewish lecturer Binyamin Schlossberg and the evangelical scholar Steven Pfann described Hebrew life and early Christianity. Professor Nafez Nazzal described the emergence of Islam as we visited the dome of the Rock and other Muslim holy sites. Old Testament scholar Randall Bailey travelled with us, giving fascinating Afro-centric interpretations to our experiences and the scriptures. Maria Harris, a Christian education specialist, also traveled with us, reflecting on our experience in relation to her latest book  Proclaim Jubilee: A Spirituality for the 21st Century, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996); she told me she leaned quite heavily on the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder.  We heard a lecture by Jesus Seminar participant Arland Jacobson and case studies from attorneys for the Palestinian cause. We visited the Jewish national shrines such as Yad Vashem, the holocaust memorial.

But enough of this name dropping. Two main things took me to Jerusalem, the biblical story and the current politics and life of the region. First the biblical story where for two weeks, I enjoyed having a place and physical image for the names, geography and places of the Bible and Jesus. I ate fish (Talapia) from the Sea of Galilee, swam (floated) in the Dead Sea, and one day Carmichael Crutchfield and I spent a day walking and running on top of the walls of  old Jerusalem (you could actually could do this). Crutchfield, pastor of the Mother Liberty Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Jackson, Tennessee, was a great traveling partner because he also enjoyed the physicality of these places. I experienced many worship services such as the Anglican cathedral up on top of Mount of Olives and one Sunday afternoon a hymn sing with the Mennonites at Patricia Shelly’s house in East Jerusalem. Well, but now we’re getting into contemporary life, and let’s stay with the historic story.

I’ve generally accepted the Hebrew and Christian story and text as basic documents and scriptures handed down to be appreciated on their own terms as sacred literature. Hence, I never felt the interest to sharply distinguish, for example, the Jesus of history with the Christ of the church. There certainly is value in historical criticism and the whole apparatus which goes with it, and I’m thankful for the Enlightenment to our culture. Still, other critical readings (from the New Criticism of the 50s to the many Post-Modernisms of today) can understand and appreciate the texts, authors and readers on their own terms. The devout over the centuries have taken the appreciation and obedience approach, and they were everywhere obvious at the Christian, Jewish and Muslim sites. 

But the biblical story was often overwhelmed by the present conflicts in Israel and Palestine. A taxi driver points to the house where his parents were evicted after the 1967 war. One afternoon Carmichael Crutchfield and I visited a Palestinian family who lived in a UN housing settlement where tennis shoes were hanging from the electric wires, commemorating the lives of youths the Palestinians considered as martyrs for their cause. Our intent was to visit a Mother who was an expert seamstress, selling dresses for added income. But inside the house we were really in a shrine for her teen son who had been killed by the Israeli police. I grew sadder by the moment as this Mother described her son as a virtuous innocent who had grown up throwing stones at the Israeli police and was now a martyr. I grew sad because his younger brothers and sisters were listening and were growing up in a culture of hate and vengeance. At the other end by Tiberias (Sea of Galilee) one evening I went to a hot spring spa and met a Israeli mother who had brought her daughter who had a nervous disorder; the warm water was good for her daughter, she said. She had grown up in a kibbutz and told of how they had evolved into now having private property. She told me of the constant insecurities of her life and family and her hopes for a better future for her children. In 1997 suicide bombings were still quite common in Israel. Both of these women reminded me of Gloria and gave personal meaning to the lectures and talks we had been hearing.

Still, aside from the personal stories of sadness and tragedy, I’ve never weighed in strongly regarding my international and political learnings on this trip, partly because I didn’t know what to say, and I’m generally skeptical of one-trip authorities. I have lived with many of these voices among my associates, people who strongly condemn Israel and American policies and legitimize Palestinian resistance, under the category of justice. However, I could not join them then and will not now two decades later. I remember Thomas Stransky, the rector at Tantur the Catholic hospitality and study center where we stayed. Stransky suggested that in a greatly polarized situation of authentically competing claims, one can choose to become an advocate for a side. But this approach may also increase the conflict and inhibit one’s ability to listen and speak to all sides. His own calling at Tantur was to work and speak with all sides, and hence he was slow to announce answers or take strong sides to the Holy Land’s deep conflicts and contradictions.

I have often reflected on our Amish Mennonite and perhaps even biblical folk tradition since that trip. Historically, the Amish and Mennonite tradition is to forgive and even accept the social order and then to move on, not to resist. When Switzerland and Germany were inhospitable and unjust in the seventeenth century, we came to Pennsylvania; when the Ukraine and Russia went totalitarian in the twentieth century, we moved to Manitoba and Paraguay. With Mennonites and Amish, justice is a penultimate value and a measure for the state to approximate. But for the Christian community, justice is always trumped by Jesus’ teaching and way of love, reconciliation and forgiveness.

None of this wisdom is easy or immediate, but it is a long-term commitment, even if it means moving. We have tried to raise our children in a culture of health, acceptance and goodwill not in a culture of hate, resistance and vengeance. Tevye the milkman was also Tevye the Mennonite as he sadly moved his family out of Tsarist Russia. Would the Palestinians have a better life, especially for their children, if they accepted more of their current situation or moved to neighboring countries? At what point might it be better to believe that Israel may stay for a while, even if nothing seems permanent of our earthly kingdoms, even Jerusalem? Perhaps Palestine will sometime become a friendlier place, but in the meantime? I realize that this approach may sound like pure foolishness, and it will not solve all the governing issues. But I’m afraid it may be about the main offering my tradition, and perhaps even Jesus’ tradition (as mediated by our Catholic host Thomas Stransky) authentically brings to the table. I began this travel chapter with hearth and home which in my experience, I could assume the state would protect. Israel and Palestine gave me a chastened and saddened reminder of what happens when the state will not or cannot provide this protection.  

Much of this chapter would give the impression that I was the main traveler in our family, and because of my work I was. But Gloria loved to travel, and much of our romance was spent on stories of Cali in Colombia and a Roy and Berdella Miller family month-long trip to the West Coast, hitting all the National Parks along the way one summer in the mid-fifties. Gloria enjoyed traveling and in December of 1996, when her brother Les was in New York we went up to see him and a taping of the Bill Cosby Show. Les was an assistant to the director and at the shooting of the Cosby show episode, Bill Cosby himself came out to meet us at the end of the evening, now late at night. He asked our forgiveness for the late evening in finishing of the show. He said he knew as Mennonites we wanted to get back to Pennsylvania that same evening to milk our cows. As I post this chapter, Cosby is better known for allegations of rape than of family humor. 

We made it a Manhattan Christmas visit, shopping at Macys and going to one of the Christmas shows of the Radio City Rockettes. A few weeks later between Christmas 1996 and New Year 1997, Gloria was off for a week in Costa Rica serving as a guide for my mother Mattie and Miriam’s daughter Hannah to visit with my sister Ruth and John Roth in Costa Rica. They were Goshen College Study Service Trimester leaders during that school year. I stayed home. 

Most of this chapter comes from memory, my date book, and my journals and personal files from this period. I generally made a manila folder file of trips such as the one to New England and to Israel and Palestine. The 1997 Israel Palestine travel seminar section especially drew from “A Book of Experiences and Reflections” which was compiled by the National Council of Churches staff after the tour

1995 Mennonite Publishing Redux

1995  Publishing Redux. Mennonite Publishing House finances, Reuben Savanick, J. Robert Ramer, Nelson Waybill, Jack Scott, Awanda Pritts, Paul M. Schrock, Faith & Life Press, Congregational Publishing, John W. Sprunger, Faith & Life cooperation and conflicts, Gospel Herald ends, Neuenschwander Brothers, neo-conservatives, people and ideas, publishing issues, Good Books, Merle and Phyllis Good.

Soon after I returned to Mennonite Publishing House (MPH), it began to sink in with me that the institution may be, well, sinking financially. We were deeply in debt, over five million, and every year our treasurer Reuben Savanick would travel to Lancaster and the Farmers Bank folks for an extension to our borrowing and also to extend our line of credit. Every year until 2002, he came back with a positive report, but we were losing ground in our annual net revenue. At the time we remained hopeful. Next year, we would do better; we would have a new hymnal, an engaging curriculum, or a best-selling cookbook which would give us positive numbers. We were like the perennial farmer who always believed that the harvest would be better the following year; the drought would not last forever. We were a Christian ministry and vital to the Mennonite church. Still, a dark financial cloud was never far away; our region’s steel mills had been around for over one hundred years, but now they were empty and abandoned hulks.  

After another year of minus net revenue even small gains on paper, we had to ask, might we at some point run out of money? I think it was especially apparent one time when Reuben said that the last financial move a cash-strapped organization does is to not make payroll. One must pay the employees. The fact that Rueben said that let us know that he had given it some thought, and it reminded me, that that specter was around the edges. Actually, the over-indebtedness had been around the edges since the late seventies, when my old boss Paul M. Lederach used to call the alarm, but we considered him somewhat of a Cassandra anyway, so when Mennonite Publishing House was able to go for another two decades (in spite of building an underfunded warehouse), high indebtedness seemed the new normal. The financial issues regarding MPH are many faceted, of long standing since mid-century, and I am not the person to describe the financial story of Mennonite Publishing House; I won’t even mention numbers. I can best tell of the people and events around that story, and a big person in that story was Rueben Savanick.

Reuben was one of the most amazing people I met at Scottdale for his high level of commitment and competence in business, theology, and community. Reuben was a chemistry and physics teacher at Christopher Dock High school in Montgomery County where his wife Martha (Marty) Detweiler had grown up. Next, he went to the Mennonite seminary at Elkhart, and studied theology, and by 1979, he returned to Scottdale where he had grown up. He worked for our civic and industrial growth organization where he teamed up with Alma Stoner who became his associate during his MPH days. Soon, he was also leading the Westmoreland area deaf church which had earlier been led by his parents. Reuben was the son of Paul and Ferne Hernley Savanick who we had known well when we first moved to Scottdale.  They would lead the community deaf services on Saturday evening, and always included the Paul’s song “Jesus Loves Me.” During the early seventies, Gloria and I had Bible classes for the hearing children.

Soon Reuben joined Mennonite Publishing House as treasurer and pursued an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh. Reuben was joining a company where his grandfather Henry Hernley had worked in 1908 as a linotype operator; his mother Ferne Hernley had worked here as a youth in 1938. His father Paul worked here in the mid-50s, as did many other Hernley relatives. Reuben was uniquely fitted for his treasurer and vice-president work at Scottdale, bringing many leadership qualities in one person: I had seldom seen a person who seemed to have such a broad conceptual understanding, quite tender personal feelings, and also a micro-whiz ability on technology and numbers. When we went to electronic communications and or changed programs, Reuben took the lead. Positive, steady, and talented, Rueben had a tremendous commitment to the employees of Scottdale, and whatever else one may think of the institution; many of us had Reuben to thank for keeping the doors open and for keeping 100 people with employment. I know the terms are clichés, but a servant leader he was and a mensch.

Reuben’s best friend and colleague was our publisher J. Robert Ramer, one of the greatest enigmas with whom I ever worked during my professional life. Ramer had led a business and technical school faculty at Edmonton, Alberta, and was the son of the bishop and evangelist Clarence (C.J.) Ramer. He had served as chair of the MPH board for a number of years before taking this position. Robert was married to a Phyllis Showalter, a nurse from the large Harrisonburg Virginia, Showalter clan. In other words, Bob was well prepared professionally to be our CEO and also well-connected within the Mennonite subculture.  If Bob was intelligent, organizational, and pragmatic, he was also corporate. Leaders before him addressed every issue, problem and success in religious euphemisms or agency speak: “our publishing journey is going through a valley.” Something like that, but Bob did not. He addressed the denominational publishing business as practical organizational and financial issues. He was also politically conservative, which was quite unusual in the publishing setting in the post-sixties era. Bob was about the only person I knew at Scottdale who subscribed to the National Review, the journal which had been founded by the Catholic intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955. I enjoyed conversations with Bob, and he loved to tell stories of his Canadian experience and what he called these Excited States.

Bob was intellectual and pragmatic, he was also paranoid and had few close friends at Scottdale, partly because that was the nature of his personality and no doubt re-enforced by survival instincts. He kept many of the employees at arms’ length because if they had come closer, they may have been dangerous. Many long-term employees saw Bob as an interloper with insufficient appreciation for them, MPH traditions, and southwestern Pennsylvania culture. Bob’s paranoia was combined with strength of character such that he was able to keep a strong publication board in obedience to him and also took on the traditional MPH establishment, most of which was still hanging around MPH. Among the left-overs was Nelson Waybill, who many viewed as being next in line to lead the organization. Since Waybill was not selected, he became a de facto passive-aggressive opposition party within the organization.  

Probably in most organizations, Waybill would have left after losing the top job or would have been asked to resign. Reuben’s uncle Ralph Hernley had done this a generation earlier when Ben Cutrell was selected for the top job. But for whatever reason, Waybill decided to stay another decade. Waybill’s employment was further complicated because his wife Marjorie, a fellow-employee, was also the best children’s editor among the Mennonites. With a new Jubilee children’s curriculum in the works, Marjorie could pretty well dictate her conditions for employment—and her husband’s.   

Another top finance person for the Mennonite Publishing House leadership was Jack Scott, the head of the Provident Bookstores. Scott was a one-time theater major who could give a stand-up talk on any topic with various levels of drama, gesture and volume. On hearing his lengthy soliloquies and advertisements, one could not help but think of Shakespeare’s advice to the players, against over-acting, that “in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.” Scott was a member of the MPH old guard from the Cuttrell administration, but Ramer had incorporated him into his publishing leadership. Jack also had earned an MBA at the University of Pittsburgh, and was eloquent about spread sheets, year-end financial reports and the values and of the Provident Bookstores. So with two MBAs and one ex-business dean there was no lack of business understanding at MPH. But I also learned during those years that one can understand finance and business language and still reach various conclusions. For example Jack Scott seemed to have such an overwhelming sense of the importance of the church’s publications and the Mennonite heritage and witness that he seemed to project a divine inevitability for MPH. His dexterity with numbers and speech only added to the surreal atmosphere of MPH being too important to fail.   

Two other persons sat around the publisher’s table during these years, Paul M. Schrock and Awanda Pritts. Awanda Pritts was a protégé of Reuben Savanick and headed up the human resources or personnel department, bringing a strong practical and local wisdom to the group. Although a quick study, she only joined the leadership group after Nelson Waybill retired in the late nineties; hence she left less of an imprint on the organization than some of the others. Paul Schrock at Herald Press, the book division, came out of the editorial end of publishing, but Paul had a strong entrepreneurial sense in promoting new titles such as the More-with-Less Cookbook, as well as selling photos for many years and dealing in various real estate, photography and home building projects. He had been with MPH since the sixties, and by the mid-nineties, Paul was worn out from over-work in the earlier decades. He suffered from physical ailments, had an emotional break-down, and was waiting for retirement at age sixty-five.

I tried to make my own contribution with Congregational Publishing and wanting to make changes, sometimes in a hurry. I inherited a staff of about a dozen whom my predecessor Laurence Martin had nurtured in a good way, but we could not sustain that number of people. We had to reduce staff which was painful. Second, we had a sometimes cooperative relationship with Faith & Life Resources, the Kansas Mennonite publisher with which we were merging. A number of cooperative projects were working well with them and simply needed modest changes or nurturing. The Jubilee children’s curriculum produced by an Anabaptist consortium was among those, and I chaired its council for a number of years.

Our editorial contribution Marjorie Waybill retired, and we brought in Rose Stutzman and her family came from Puerto Rico. I think the Stutzmans were the last family to move to Scottdale to work at MPH. Our Adult Bible Study was in crisis because the editor David Hiebert was publishing well-meaning but sophomoric writers for readers whom he used to call the “pillars of the church.” The readers did not catch the humor, however, and the confidence level was low and sales declining. I simply pulled this publication over to my own desk, and signed on engaging, sophisticated, but trusted writers such as Sue Clemmer Steiner of Ontario or Leonard Beachy from Indiana. Choosing appropriate writers, I had learned was half of editing, and the cohort I brought in continued writing for the next decade with the aging publication thriving.

Several other elements were more difficult to address. John (J.W.) Sprunger, our marketing manager, had been released as the publisher at Faith & Life and was a source of some conflict between our two organizations. On the other hand JW had a direct and favorable line with our executive Bob Ramer, re-enforcing our publisher’s paranoia and JW’s job security.  The Faith & Life Press, although much smaller, was financially at the very other end of MPH; in the early 90s, it had considerable fund balance and savings but these were rapidly being depleted,  especially on youth products with small returns. Because Faith & Life controlled the creation of these youth products, and we were the biggest partner, we were getting large bills for the creation of youth curriculum in a small market. I simply pulled MPH out, and we produced our own no frills youth Sunday school curriculum for a few years. This move created a fierce conflict and wasted energy; it was a mistake. When the money ran out, Faith & Life sacked its free-spending publishing staff, and I should have been more patient and waited it out.

Finally, there was the denominational weekly Gospel Herald which the editor Lorne Peachey was spinning off as a separate entity with its own board. This move was partly a merger mandate to create a periodical for the two denominations, but it was also a survival impulse by Peachey and denominational executives. Because of our indebtedness, MPH had a high overhead which no one wanted to own. This overhead aversion was especially felt by the bookstores and the magazine personnel. The latter needed only an editor, a computer, and an office and could outsource the printing. In any case when the Gospel Herald staff and publication got a chance to get out, they bolted. I probably would have done the same, but this half-million dollar loss in cash flow and income made it harder to manage what remained of MPH. I suppose I also thought that the editor Lorne Peachey may have had something to do with our high overhead, what with the large deficits he ran up with earlier MPH magazines. 

If the MPH financial fund balance was low, the intellectual fund balance was even lower, stuck in a post-sixties Mennonite liberalism and attached to remnants of liberation theology, as the carrier of Anabaptism. Conservative thought was considered well thoughtless, and what most bothered me was there was the lack of an intellectual muscle to defend traditional Anabaptist Mennonite and Christian thought and values upon which our congregations lived and grew. What I found at MPH were mainly thoughtless and unexamined platitudes best personified by our local comic shtick called the Neuenschwander Brothers. The MPH staffers Ron Meyers and Merrill Miller did an appropriation of the Smothers Brothers, the leftist political act CBS had cancelled in the early seventies. Taking on a folksy rural Mennonite persona, the Meyers Miller duo would throw barbs at the sleepy Ronald Reagan, stupid Republicans, and idiot Newt Gingerich and by implication the majority Mennonites who overwhelmingly voted for them. I must have heard the military intelligence joke a hundred times (really, military intelligence?). Please laugh. It was not that our politicians did not deserve satire; it was that reducing religion and culture to a partisan political ideology had become embarrassing.

I tried to provide some leadership in having a Mennonite conversation with neo-conservative thought. In 1996, Robert Ramer and I attended a “Culture in Crisis and the Renewal of Civil Life” conference at nearby St. Vincent College with civil society speakers such as James Q. Wilson, Glenn C. Loury, Linda Chavez, Midge Decter, and Gertrude Himmelfarb. It seemed to me regarding the important role of community and family, the neo-conservatives were on a common cause with traditional Mennonites and Amish. We had sessions with Ron Arnett, a Brethren communications professor who was now teaching at Duquesne University, as well as Ann Rogers the religion editor of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette; she was a graduate of Gordon-Conwell, an evangelical school in Boston. Other times, we hosted Mennonites such as Shirley and Stuart  Showalter from Goshen College; Richard Kauffman from Christianity Today and later The Christian Century, and Daryl Byler and William Janzen from the Mennonite Central Committee offices from Washington and Ottawa. I also arranged  conversations among some Lancaster leaders (Richard Thomas hosted us at the Lancaster Mennonite High School) with James Nuechterlein the managing editor of First Things and another day with the Don E. Eberly of the civil society and fatherhood initiative (fathers as seatbelts) projects.  It seemed to me that we lived off of ideas and we needed a broader and richer diet than what I called the Liturgical Left. An additional project during those years was to develop a Mennonite Publishing House: Editorial Theological Identity statement which would give editors some guides on changing issues at the time such as biblical interpretation and human gender and God language issues.

We all worked hard, and I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night or early in the morning, worrying about the future of this company which I had rejoined. We were up against several big changes in our society and in our printing and publishing industry. There was the challenge of replacing aging printing equipment. We were one of the few remaining denominational publishers which still owned its own printing presses, but our equipment was becoming antiquated and we did not have access to capital to replace it. Second and even bigger, the digital revolution in electronic communication was with us and we knew it whether with accounting systems or in ways of communication and reading. Our MPH culture was print and paper oriented, and the transition was steep, even if already in the seventies we had home-grown savants such as Mervin Miller and Joe Yoder converting to computer technologies.

But our very innovation and self-assured isolation may have made it more difficult for us to adapt to standardized electronic systems as these programs emerged on the market. Although we did not know it at the time, we were approaching the end of independent bookstores, even chains, as we know them, and we took pride in the Provident stores. And there was increased Mennonite denominational pluralism. Denominational publishing, and I include here the whole Protestant Church Owned Publishers Association (PCPA) crowd, was probably one of the slowest industries in adjusting to the pluralism and the changing faces of our local congregations, our customers. Rather than adapt to the changing tastes, theologies, and themes of our congregations (they after all had choices in buying), we were still complaining about their lack of loyalty.   

Finally, our Scottdale community increasingly had a culture gap with the rest of the North American Mennonite and Amish communities; Scottdale and Mennonite Publishing retained an industrial mid-twentieth century ethos, culture and style. We lived along side Fayette County, the poorest per capita income region in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile by the end of the century, the Lancaster (Pennsylvania), Holmes (Ohio), Waterloo, (Ontario), and Rockingham (Virginia) counties, as well as the suburban Mennonites, had moved to a post-industrial affluent culture. Even on multi-culturalism and minorities, the expanding Hispanic population moved to economic growth regions, not to southwestern Pennsylvania. When a Mennonite Central Committee group called Damascus Road came and gave us a neo-Marxist interpretation of race in America, it seemed more theoretical and even comical than relevant. The program did little of practical good and made little sense to a region of unemployed steel workers. A wealthy culture seemed to have greater appreciation for the vocabulary of what was called white privilege.

The nineties were during the Clinton growth economy years, and I’ll never forget when my sister Ruth Roth came to Scottdale and quite innocently asked why the church did not give us new or at least up-dated offices and facilities—the way they had back home at Goshen, Indiana. None of these issues I’ve mentioned in the past few paragraphs may have been decisive, but the cumulative effect made it a steep climb to approach the next century successfully. There is a tide in the affairs of people, and although we can accelerate or inhibit that tide, we could not reverse a three-decade trend of institutional decline. Our MPH leadership and staff were quite talented, deeply committed, and had a long background in church publishing; with lesser leadership, the Scottdale publishing project probably would have ended a decade earlier.

In the meantime, there was the spectacle that other publishers may actually be doing worse. In July of 1996, Good Books of Intercourse, Pennsylvania, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Our friends Merle and Phyllis Good were overextended financially through borrowing and promissory notes, and now some elderly persons were in danger of losing their life savings and retirement. Sad stories of financial loss surfaced, and in adopting a re-organization plan, some of the creditors wanted to divest quickly; and others wanted to allow the re-organization plan to take its course. A flurry of letters and documents came from both sides, but a reorganization plan was ultimately accepted with the Merle and Phyllis Good still in charge but with tighter spending controls.

In the meantime, Merle Good, especially, seemed to have gathered a good number of opponents during his climb as publisher, writer and theatrical promoter. The bankruptcy became a forum for his opponents, to put it colloquially, to bring him down. After the bankruptcy, our own MPH weekly Gospel Herald and then the Lancaster’s Intelligencer Journal did major stories of the Goods’ failures; the Lancaster Conference had a public hearing and listening committee. I remember visiting Merle during this period when I was in Lancaster, and he showed up at an out-of-the-way restaurant in disguise with dark glasses; his first question was whether I was coming as a friend or a spy for MPH. I was coming as a friend, but I could understand his misgivings; the Goods had been a not always friendly competitor with MPH, and Scottdale people had considerable Schadenfreude over the Goods’ troubles.

The tipping point for the Goods was probably that their own board members who had the largest financial investment in the company stuck with them. I recall I talked to attorney Elvin Kraybill soon after this transpired, and he said he hoped the creditors will not liquidate quickly and take huge losses. With tighter economic controls, he was confident the operation could be profitable.  Sure enough, by the end of the decade the Goods were discharged from the US bankruptcy court, and the debtors were on the way to being repaid. Gloria and I sometimes stayed with the Goods overnight when we went to Lancaster, and one Saturday night during this time we stayed with them, walking to the East Chestnut Street Mennonite meetinghouse for Sunday worship and leaving immediately at the end. The Goods had resigned all positions in the congregation, conference and Mennonite World Conference. It was all painful for everyone, and I hoped our Scottdale company and staff would never need to go through such an ordeal.  

Most of this chapter comes from memory, date books, and personal files and journals of 1996. The Jack Scott description from Hamlet is in Act III, Scene ii. The story on the Good Books appeared “A Good Deal Turns Sour for Mennonite Investors,” Intelligencer Journal (November 5, 1996, front page and inside).