1988 Laurelville, Lolla and Yoder

1988  Laurelville, Lolla, and Yoder.  John J. Lolla Jr., Laurelville programs, Presbyterian Mennonite Shalom conferences, John Howard Yoder, Builders convention, ski retreats, Perry, Joe, Nelson, and Henry Brunk, Howard Brenneman, Laurelville Lyceum, Arnold W. Cressman, Susie Bontrager, transitions.

   

John J. Lolla Jr., was a Pittsburgh Presbyterian pastor and chair of the Presbytery Peacemaking Task Force. For five years from 1985 to 1990, we did Presbyterian and Mennonite Shalom Conferences at Laurelville Mennonite Church Center; they would never have happened without John (Jack) Lolla. Besides Jack, this chapter is about Laurelville programming, so if that subject is of limited interest, chapter 1989 awaits. In the meantime, I will give more of the Laurelville and international context. I think it was Ken Bowman in working with rental groups who suggested our getting together with the Presbyterians from contacts with some of their churches which came for retreats at Laurelville. The Presbyterian Church USA had designated the 1980s as a decade of peacemaking, and hence had funds and leaders available for this task. Internationally, during the 1980s Ronald Reagan was the American president, strongly anti-communist and during his first term presiding over a military build-up. Still, during his second term, he began to negotiate with the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev regarding Glasnost (greater freedom), arms control, and the diminishing hostilities.

In the Spring of 1987, we got an alert that General James A. Abrahamson was coming to St. Vincent College on April 30 to talk about a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a nuclear shield in outer space sometimes called Star Wars. A number of us met in a pre-Abrahamson conference for speeches against SDI, prayers, songs, and a candlelight procession. We then listened to Abrahamson who said that he believes in the Apocryphal book of Judith there is a quote that if the lamb is weak, it may tempt the lion and explained SDI. We had questions in hand for the Q and A, but instead of the scripted questions, our Scottdale friend Tom Zeller took over a mike and gave a rambling talk on peace, love and goodwill until he was cut off by the moderator. Abramson seemed to enjoy these theatrics and responded that he was not sure what the question was. I wrote in my journal that when sane people speak madness, we may well have a mad man speaking the truth even if we cannot understand him or appreciate him. Maybe this is part of the foolishness of the Gospel to which the Epistles refer.

During the eighties a kind of citizens' diplomacy was going on as travel groups, especially church groups, from the United States and Canada visited the Soviet Union in trying to establish person to person contacts and understandings. I remember during a Laurelville Association weekend, Rodney and Lorna Sawatsky and Milo and Edna Shantz of Ontario were returning from Russia on such a visit, coming directly from Moscow to Kennedy, then Pittsburgh to Laurelville on Saturday of association weekend. They gave us a report on their meetings, church services they attended and contacts, and we would sing the Kyrie eleison of the Russian Orthodox liturgy.  It was all so fresh and a hopeful period of peacemaking during end of the Cold War.

I date my interest in a Presbyterian peace conference idea a decade earlier one day back in 1979, while a part of a peace vigil in front of the Rockwell International building in Pittsburgh. I thought that many of these people who walked by us looking straight ahead were probably confessing Christians, good Presbyterians who might even engage in conversation, if we found appropriate forums rather than waving slogans at them. Shortly, that opportunity came when we had planning meetings with John J. Lolla, Plum Creek Church pastor; Ruth Rylander, activist wife of a Westinghouse executive (may she rest in peace); John and Claudia Agey, Pittsburgh Presbytery; and Robert Dayton, a judicatory called Synod of the Trinity. On the Mennonite side were John Stoner, Mennonite Central Committee, David E. Hostetler of Mennonite Publishing House, Sarah Wengerd, Allegheny Mennonite Conference, and Carl Laws Landis, Lancaster Conference.

But these meetings would not have come to much without the leadership and cooperation of Jack Lolla. Jack had grown up near Cleveland in a Catholic Presbyterian home and as an undergraduate studied religion at the College of Wooster, hence he had some acquaintance with the Amish and Mennonites. Later he had studied at Princeton and became a pastor in the Pittsburgh neighborhoods of Mt. Lebanon and now Plum Creek where he would serve for 26 years. But related to his main calling as pastor and preacher of the Christian faith, Jack was interested in reconciliation, peacemaking, and interchurch dialogue. Whether this involved hosting Middle Eastern youth (Jewish and Palestinian), discussions with the Palestinian Christian Mubarak Awad, or sponsoring the play “A Peasant of El Salvador,” Jack was involved  and sponsoring, always discussing the many facets of an issue. Jack had the heart of a pastor and the mind of a Calvinist attorney, believing if we somehow analyzed and discussed sufficiently, we could create an orderly, decent, humane and Christian solution. He enjoyed coming to the camp for planning sessions over lunch, and then we could get into theological discussions of Mennonite and Presbyterian approaches to reconciliation, peacemaking and justice.

Out of these conversations we would name themes for the conferences, and select speakers and seminars. There were many activist groups and peace conferences since the sixties, but the uniqueness of these conferences was that they drew in rank and file members (generally about 200 attending) who were veritably interested in peacemaking by the pacifist Mennonites and in the just war Presbyterians. The planners had no sense of immediate action and membership changes of the two traditions but an appreciation for our denominations and histories, although the categories were much more blurred than would appear in these generalizations; there were varieties of just war Christians, politics of Jesus types, and  two-Kingdom non-resistance among the participants. I remember introducing the first evening with the colonial Quaker story, inserting a Mennonite farmer who had a cow which kicked him repeatedly; finally the Mennonite told the cow: “In spite of my best efforts to treat you well, you keep on kicking me, knowing full well that I cannot beat you. But Bessie, I do want you to know that if you keep on kicking me, I can sell you to my Presbyterian neighbor, and he can beat the stuffing out of you.” That was actually an old Paul Lederach story.

We had topics and speakers such as J. Lawrence Burkholder, Goshen College; Ulrich W. Mauser, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary; David W. Shenk, Eastern Mennonite Missions; Johnnie Monroe, Pittsburgh Presbytery; Ted and Gayle Gerber Koontz, Ben C. Ollenburger, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries; Rich and Peggy Kilmer, Barbara G. Green, Presbyterian Church USA. One year we moved the conference to the Spruce Lake Camp north of Philadelphia to draw in more of the eastern Presbyterians and Mennonites. The worship was often Presbyterian in tone except for the singing which was pure Mennonite acapella hymn singing (thank you, Karen Moshier Shenk) seemingly enjoyed by both groups. An example of the courtesy was before the first meeting when a Presbyterian pastor asked me what kind of wine the Mennonites use at communion. He said he was thinking we were somewhat Germanic and wanted to accommodate our tastes; that same day Arnold Cressman, a Mennonite worship leader, asked me if the Presbyterians were expecting wine and if so what kind. As it turned out, both groups were happy with grape juice.  

Most of the speakers we contacted readily agreed to come, but we ran into a glitch with John Howard Yoder who the Presbyterians were especially interested in engaging, being acquainted with The Politics of Jesus. We contacted him to come in 1990 and he agreed, but when our choice became known among the Elkhart, Indiana, Mennonite institutional leaders, we began to get calls and notes. I remember specifically a call from Paul Gingerich at the Mission Board saying that Yoder may be under church discipline by the time our event would be held one year out. I was going out to Elkhart, in any case, so I called Yoder to see if we could talk about this. He invited me into his home and with awkward hospitality told me of his many assignments among the Mennonites (mostly at no pay) and of his good standing with his employer (the University of Notre Dame). I mentioned to Yoder that these issues were not in question but the concern that he might be in church discipline by the time of our conference. He said that if the question needs to be raised it probably was not wise to move ahead but that we seek another speaker which we did.

The Presbyterians planners were somewhat perplexed and also impressed that a church would have this level of accountability with its most famous theologian. Alas, by 2015 as I review this incident, talk of behavioral accountability with John Howard Yoder seems like a joke, but we did not know what we now know. For that same conference we invited a Colorado pastor, the anti-nuclear activist Peter Edgier who soon volunteered that he also had what he called “woman problems”; among other things his wife was trying to divorce him. We however decided to keep Ediger on the program, although I think it was one of his last Mennonite appearances. The last I heard he had moved to a dessert location (atomic site) in one of the western States. Meanwhile, we missed Yoder at another Laurelville event in March 1-3, 1990 when we invited the eight European reconstruction workers and students (1952) to Laurelville for a few days we called a “Concern Retrospective” on March 1-3, 1990. Yoder declined the invitation saying that he was “concerned for considerations of procedure and discretion which properly ought to apply in the interpretation of recent events when:

   a)      The actors are alive;

   b)      There are political stakes in the analysis; and

   c)      The conveners have a stated bias.”

The remaining seven Concern people gave papers and Paul Toews spoke to an invigorating mix of Concern members, peers such as Lawrence and Harriet Burkholder and younger Mennonite leaders (John D. Roth,Sara Wenger Shenk, A. James Reimer). We had all lived with this groups’ influence especially concerning church leadership (or anti-leadership) during the latter third of the twentieth century. But all acknowledged Yoder’s singular intellectual leadership to the group and movement.

Ironically, despite Yoder’s misgivings noted above, at this meeting little was said about Yoder’s discredited sexual theories and behavior. Yoder’s paradoxical greatness and lechery have remained a part of Mennonite life during my four decades of church and professional career. It was still several years away (1992) when Tom Price’ articles would expose him as a long-standing sexual predator. I suppose because Yoder represented the Mennonites so well on the big issues, we were reluctant to confront him on personal and domestic issues which he so effectively denigrated. Already in 1986, I had written an article for the monthly Christian Living  “John H. Yoder and the Mennonite Community,” noting his complicated denominational relationship, quiet transition to Notre Dame, his theology of the church, and his moral (or immoral) behavior. After consultation with church leaders, the editor David E. Hostetler and I agreed not to publish; three decades later after reading the Mennonite Quarterly Reivew (January, 2015), I regret our decision.  

Yoder’s critique of Mennonite nonresistance or as he called it “second wind” was of a similar nature. I always felt it was disingenuous for Yoder to suggest that Mennonites arrived at or embraced their nonresistant biblical pacifism because the Niebuhr brothers (Reinhold and H. Richard) approved of it. Mennonite nonresistance had a history going back to the Schleitheim and Dortrecht confessions, and most of the Mennonite pacifists during 1930 to the 50s never heard of the Niebuhr brothers. I have never seen Yoder give a shred of credible evidence for this Niebuhr influence which he used so effectively to discredit nonresistance as naïve, unmissionary, and self-righteous. I often thought of John Howard Yoder as our 20^th century version of the 19^th century Leo Tolstoy, both singular achievements in writing on peacemaking, and singularly flawed in applying it personally.  

Although we called these annual meetings Presbyterian and Mennonite, other groups interested in peacemaking also attended such as the Lutherans and the Episcopalians. People would ask how similar conferences could be held in other parts of the United States and Canada, and my response was usually try to find a John J. Lolla Jr. to develop them. By the early nineties, the meetings discontinued, in part because we as planners had moved on to other topics, and perhaps also in part because the meetings were fueled by the Cold War. Probably none of us thought the Cold War would end so quickly. Jack and I kept in touch with an occasional lunch or visit after I left Laurelville; he held somewhat of an idealized view of us as Mennonites and Amish. I had the impression he preferred this ideal view as a foil for his own Presbyterian church. And maybe I did the same regarding Jack and the Presbyterians for the integrity with which he served his own congregation and denomination so well. Jack would report on his historical labor of love to the congregation at Plum Creek. The result was a five-volume history called The Creek Runs Deep: Two Centuries of Salvation History (2008).  As of this writing in 2012, Lolla is pastor of the Northmont Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh and still involved in peacemaking.

Because Laurelville used the Shalom theme as our label, we often tied some theme of peacemaking into other programs. For several winters we had builder’s conventions, and in 1987, Marlin Miller the Elkhart Mennonite seminary president came to talk to us on “Peacemaking, Families and Builders.” We posed the question of how people committed to biblical peacemaking deal with conflict in labor and management relations. Building was one of the highest vocational choices among the Mennonites and Brethren in Christ so it seemed a natural with seminars on employer employee relations and conflict management by Chet Raber of Lancaster; on liability insurance by Bruce Hummel and my brother Paul of Holmes County; family and business relationships by Doris and Lester Glick of St. Petersburg, and sub-contractors by Mel Slabach of Sarasota Florida. Architect LeRoy Troyer of Mishawaka, Indiana, gave a lot of input, and we had representatives from organizations such as Habitat for Humanity and Mennonite low-cost housing projects in Kentucky. These combined with worship (good singing), and local tours of construction sites, and remarkable people such as Ron Harrer from Phoenix, Arizona. He gave an inspiring autobiographical speech on “God Called us to Build.” We held the convention in January at the Holiday Inn on Lido Beach in Sarasota, Florida, so there was also an attraction of vacation and sunshine.

Other off-campus retreats were called “Hopes and Slopes,” skiing retreats out at Keystone in Colorado. This again was based on some of our members’ interests, and combined with some topics related to our members or speakers being nearby. I think Roland and Thelma Shenk of Lancaster County suggested this retreat, and Roland was on our program committee. Ross T. Bender was pastor at a Denver, Colorado, congregation at the time and also the president of Mennonite World Conference. So we skied and had dinners and evening talks on the Mennonites around the world. Another interesting evening was with board president Ralph and Liz Hernley’s son Rod who lived in Denver and was a veritable guru on Colorado skiing and handicapped Olympics. Rod’s one leg was shorter than the other, and he had developed equipment specifically for handicapped athletes. An outstanding skier himself, he was an entertaining and informative speaker on everything from snow to computers to survival.

One of the enjoyable elements of these events was that Gloria and the children went along, as did brother Paul and Carol’s family and many Laurelville members who knew each other like family. We stayed in a condo with Perry and Fern Brunk of Harrisonburg, Virginia, which provided its own gentle theater for our children in that Fern might appear as a friendly Shakespearean ghost at any hour of the day or night in our rooms and pick up a conversation. Fern was in an early stage of Alzheimer’s. Fern and Perry and all the Brunk brothers and spouses (Henry and Edna, Nelson and Ruth, Joe and Mary Louise) were an adventuresome lot and great friends and supporters of Laurelville over the years. Sadly, Perry’s life ended soon after this retreat in an accident. Betty Miller always went along on these retreats to handle the registrations and logistics, well, to make them work. Closer at home, during the winter student and church-related groups often came to ski in the Laurel Highlands during the day and had lodging at Laurelville.

I learned a lot from the people who came to Laurelville. I already mentioned the farm conferences (1985) but later after the initial crisis, Howard Brenneman of Kansas came to speak as a keynoter on what we labeled “the renaissance of North American agriculture.” Brenneman’s son Greg had earlier served on the Laurelville summer staff so there were some connections, but Brenneman told of how he had been let go when Hesston Corporation hit hard times and was bought by Fiat, an Italian corporation. Brenneman carried no animosity toward Fiat, and mentioned that for every difficulty there is some positive element, and it was time for him to move on. To the farmers, he said with farm land prices low, the positive was that now was actually a good time to get into farming if one was open to living simply, work hard and forego all the big new air conditioned equipment and winter vacations in the Caribbean. I never forgot Brenneman’s reality check on difficulty, and later met him again when he was reviving the Mennonite Mutual Aid (now Everence) organization in Goshen, Indiana. But that is a later story.    

The 50-year Laurelville history Where There Is Vision has a chart which shows that the period from 1984 to 1990 had the highest number of program people days in the camp’s history. I doubt that record will be topped, but I take no special credit for it. I came along at a time when  Bob Brenneman was at his best in youth programs, and for the rest I simply programmed along my own interests and was blessed to have program committee members who gave generous weekends of ideas and support: Rita Berg (may she rest in peace), Louise Cullar, John Eby, David E. Hostetler James Lederach, Roland Shank, Lester Weber and Sara Wengerd. Association members were supportive such as the Stoltzfus Josts (Ruth and Timothy) of Columbus who were attorneys, so we had a conference of Mennonite lawyers; we simply expanded what might be called Anabaptist affinity groups which were already in existence, such as doctors, builders, farmers and restaurateurs. A lot of these groups eventually moved into the Mennonite Economic Development Association (MEDA) conventions.

I enjoyed music and the arts, so we did a series of what we called Laurelville Lyceums, utilizing our good food services and bringing in some music group or lecturer on a winter evening. In essence we provided for the western Pennsylvania neighbors an evening entertainment for what our more traditional guests got for an entire weekend. People would eat a good meal—sometimes theme related—and then we would go up to the meetinghouse where a fire was going in the open pit, and we’d hear a concert by artists who had some local ties such as the Goshen College Chorale, the Hartville Conservatives’ Harvesters, or the Bruderhof Youth (at that time the Farmington Bruderhof had a singing group under the direction of Merrill Mow). Or we would hear outstanding speakers with some local connections such as Owen Gingerich (Harvard astronomer), Stanwyn Shetler (Smithsonian director), and Byron Yake (Associated Press executive). These individuals and groups always had general interest in the 19^th century American lyceum sense of hearing quality programs; they were well attended and often covered by the local and regional press. Yake was here while one of his correspondents Terry A. Anderson was a hostage by Shiite Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, so that brought extra meaning and media attention.

The Laurelville years were some of the happiest years of my professional life, but sad changes also happened, and I’ll mention two transitions of people who were Laurelville institutions: Arnold Cressman and Susie Bontrager. Arnold Cressman was the personification of Laurelville during the sixties and seventies in the same way Abraham Jacob (A.J.) Metzler was Laurelville during the forties and fifties. As executive director of Laurelville, he served as the visionary who took Laurelville from a camp to a retreat center with what he called cutting edge programming (think Shalom). By the time I came on in the mid-eighties, he was still around, trying to be helpful but also considered somewhat intrusive and dated. Eventually, the board diminished his perks such as providing a car and fuel and then Arnold’s health and liver gave out; it was an unhappy transition, all the more so because of our indebtedness to Arnold’s earlier service. 

Susie Bontrager was a large and generous cook from Kansas who provided huge and satisfying meals for the guests. This was at a time when Laurelville’s one main meal, usually in the evening, was still served family style, and one had the sense of sitting down to a meat and potatoes thresher’s meal. At breakfast she delighted the kids with little brightly colored sugar cereals which their parents denied them at home. A charismatic and good-natured woman, Susie was not without her fans. On the other hand, by the end of the seventies an international More-with-Less Cookbook high-fiber and low-sugar diet had become de rigueur among many baby boomers; it was no longer a good match, and Susie returned to Kansas; we had a revolving door in the kitchen until Marilyn Schlabach from Harrisonburg, Virginia, came and did so well in the nineties.

So I thought of Laurelville transitions and that my own would soon come due too. We arrived at Laurelville from the Venezuela and Mennonite Publishing transition, and I had thought of the Laurelville assignment as a five-year project, so more of my own needs and interests. We sponsored Re-Entry, Missionary Kids and even week-long Transition Retreats, generally in cooperation with the Mennonite mission and service agencies. I was interested in theology, community, music and ethics, so we had retreats about those issues and needs, but I have already gone too long here. Well, one more, a music and worship seminar which Kenneth Nafziger of Eastern Mennonite University and I sketched on a napkin in the dining hall one summer in the late eighties; it’s still running. And there was the writing. In addition to the programming I was responsible for promotion and communications during my years at Laurelville.

Ah, writing. Even early in the mornings before dawn, I was writing my own personal project of a novel, but for that you will need to wait until another year. I was going to say “dear reader” but I do not wish to annoy you further. In my defense, because I took the idea of the years as chapter heads directly from James Boswell (Life of Johnson), I thought I might also borrow from him this form of address. Peace. 

Most of this material is from my memory and from my journals and personal files from 1987 to 1989. My 1990 date book says “call John H. Yoder” in January , and I recall my visit at his home quite well, I think it may have been during the Mennonite seminary’s January pastor’s week of that year.  On Yoder’s sexual misconduct, Tom Prices’ six articles appeared in the Elkhart Truth (June 29, July 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 1992); available on-line at Ted Grimsrud’s website http://peacetheology.net/john-h-yoder/john-howard-yoder%E2%80%99s-sexual-misconduct%E2%80%94part-one/    Yoder’s critique of Mennonite nonresistance appears in “The Nonpacifist Nonresistance of ‘the Mennonite Second Wind’” in Nevertheless: Varieties of Religious Pacifism (Herald Press, 1992, 107-114). Yoder’s letter to Rodney Sawatsky and me on not attending the Concern retrospective conference at Laurelville is in my correspondence file. Good background on Laurelville and the people day statistics can be found in Where There Is Vision: The Laurelville Story 1943-1993 by Harold and Ruth Lehman (Laurelville Mennonite Church Center, 1993, 94).