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).