Laurelville: A Mennonite Church Center (1943 -1993)

 Laurelville: A Mennonite Church Center (1943 -1993)

When the Mennonites purchased the Laurelville camp they soon turned it into a cultural and church center for their denomination during the second half of the 20th century. If this effort sounds grandiose today, in the 1940s the founders were talking about a small group in a relatively small region east of the Mississippi River. Geographically, the camp along with the denominational publishing company in nearby Scottdale were within one-day car-driving distance of their large Lancaster and Franconia communities in eastern Pennsylvania, the Rockingham County Mennonites in Virginia, and the  Amish Mennonites in Holmes Wayne County Ohio and Goshen and Elkhart, Indiana. To the north were the Kitchener Waterloo Mennonites in southern Ontario. All of these communities became a part of Laurelville. 

At the heart of the Mennonite community were Abram Jacob (AJ) and Alta Metzler and they were also at the heart of Mennonite Laurelville for several decades. AJ’s story along with the other founders is vividly told in Where There is Vision: The Laurelville Story 1943-1993. Spanning most of the century, AJ (1902-1996), with unbounded energy and inexhaustible optimism, moved and awakened the Mennonite Church. One historian said he seemed to be everywhere--except at home. At home at Laurelville and Scottdale were Alta Maust Metzler (1905-2000) and a family of six children.  

Alta Maust had grown up in nearby Springs, Pennsylvania, and became friends with AJ at Eastern Mennonite School (now University) and thought she was marrying an aspiring entrepreneur; he was already a plant supervisor in an apple canning company. Soon after marriage, however, Alta’s husband was called to Christian ministry as a pastor, evangelist, publisher, and camp director. During the early years, every Spring Alta and six children would drive to Laurelville to get ready for the summer as she later reflected: “I put an awful lot of work into that place--opening each building, getting out blankets and sheets, cleaning out those buildings. Then in the fall, the last event was the early October Association weekend. Sunday afternoon cars would leave and we would be left with all those buildings to close up.”

After a few years, AJ and Alta leased a small plot of land from the Camp to build a family cabin. The family carried stones from the nearby creek for the foundation and a large wood burning fireplace. Alta admits about that “early project of starting Laurelville I was in on a lot, including committee meetings, because I knew as much about it as AJ.” Her gentle, accepting spirit enveloped and encouraged many beginning with her own children, and when she entered her retirement years, Laurelville had a cabin named Metzler’s Cabin and her children wrote a book: Things We Have Known: Through the 20th Century with AJ and Alta Metzler, edited by their daughter Alice Roth. 

Meanwhile, two other people represent much of the Laurelville evangelical and churchly spirit, especially its Christian spirit of witness, experimentation and outreach during the second half of the 20th century. Arnold Cressman (1928-1998) and Reid Carpenter (1938-   ) were both born in the Christian church, Cressman among the traditional Mennonites of southern Ontario, and Carpenter in a conservative Congregational church in Connecticut. Both had a high view of youth ministry; both incorporated business leaders into their projects; and both were visionaries and dreamers.  

In his 20s Arnold Cressman was a pastor and also earned a college degree in English and Bible. By the mid-50s he and his wife Rhoda Garber had moved to Scottdale where he headed up the denominational board of Christian education which included youth ministries and congregational life. Cressman idealized the 1970 Mennonite youth assembly in Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, for its iconoclastic tone. And because Laurelville emerged from summer young people’s institutes at Arbutus Park in Johnstown, the youth emphasis was natural to Laurelville’s ministry. 

In 1968, Cressman was named  executive director of Laurelville Mennonite Church Center where his favorite biblical verse was Proverbs 29:18: Where there is no vision, the people perish. Ever the optimist, Cressman turned the traditional wisdom into a positive: where there is vision the people thrive, and when Laurelville’s 75th anniversary history was written, the title was: Where There Is Vision. During Cressman’s tenure, his dreams, persuasions, practical skills and risk-taking transformed Laurelville. Association: membership doubled, old buildings were redesigned and new ones added. Innovative programs trained youth and addressed critical issues in the church, business, society, the arts and families. 

Much of the above comes from Cressman’s wife Rhoda who supported him and Laurelville for most of its Mennonite sponsorship since 1943. She noted that “Arnold proposed long-term goals but also kept Laurelville flexible to respond to immediate challenges.” He called his style "aiming at a moving target," and the goal was the Hebrew Shalom. Cressman resigned as director in 1977, but assisted with programming for the next decade. Along with his wife Rhoda, another great contributor to Laurelville’s aesthetic was the Dutch American artist Jan Gleysteen who achieved some coordination in style, design and tone. Gleysteen  teamed with Cressman for several decades of Anabaptist heritage tours to Europe. The legacy continues with the Anabaptist and Mennonite names of the various cabins and buildings.  

Reid Carpenter came to Pittsburgh in 1961 and gave many years of his life to Campus Life as a regional director for Pennsylvania and neighboring states. Young Life was a Christian outreach program especially to young people, and Carpenter did it with Christian rock bands and youthful authenticity, often teaming with the British evangelist and pastor John Guest. Young Life grew from the hundreds to the thousands under Carpenter spanning from McKeesport’s inner city school to Mt. Lebanon’s affluent district. Carpenter needed resources to fund his evangelistic project and soon was connecting with Pittsburgh donors who created what was called The Pittsburgh Offensive, a group of leaders for many years hosted by Dora Hillman, widow of the regional industrialist J. Hartwell Hillman. Monthly this group came together to share with each other in prayer, personal sharing and song with one goal: to pray that Pittsburgh will become known for Jesus Christ.

The informal network grew to many ministries and organizations from drug rehabilitation to prayer breakfasts, but one of the longest standing institutions was a month of Fall Youth weekends at Laurelville. Already in 1963 Carpenter's organization would bring bus-loads of high school youth to Laurelville for weekends where along with rock music and mud battles, many youths made confessions to commit their lives to Jesus Christ. Today, over five decades later these groups still come to Laurelville under the name of Pittsburgh Kids Foundation and thousands of youth are impacted by this program. 

AJ Metzler’s dedicatory prayer at Laurelville asked that all who stayed on the grounds would feel God’s touch in their lives in a new way: that “the Lord would bless everything from the highest leaf on the tallest tree to the last tea cup on the kitchen shelves.” The prayer may have envisioned a distinctive era of food services with the arrival in the mid-70s of Susie Ellen Bontrager (1929-2018) from Hutchinson, Kansas. Maynard and Jan Brubaker, longtime Laurelville staff and volunteers, had known Bontrager from their voluntary service days on the south side of Chicago where Bontrager had cooked in the public schools. 

Born the ninth of ten children to an Amish family, Bontrager brought a decade of rural élan to cooking, serving up summer thresher-style meals to guests. Always a positive spirit, she often came out to the dining room at the end of a meal and greeted the guests with a positive Christian testimonial, her breads and dishes becoming favorites from the youngest children to the oldest grandparents. She  somehow kept a staff involved in serving labor-intensive family style sit-down meals in the evenings. Susie loved the kitchen and dining room, calling it a “labor of love” to which God had called her. When she left Laurelville to return to Kansas to be closer to her mother, she spent the rest of her career as food services director of the Hutchinson (KS) Public Schools. She left behind an unusual legacy and a book: Susie’s Quantity Recipes & Laurelville Family Favorites (1984).    

Institutions often have mixed and complementary movements within themselves, and during Laurelville’s 50 years of quite focused Mennonite identity, it was also increasingly used as a retreat center beyond its denominational patrons. In the early 1960s Sherwood Day addressed an association members’ meeting with the title: God Uses Church Centers. When Laurelville changed its name in 1963-1964 from a camp to a church center, this identity shift may also have acknowledged God's calling for Laurelville as an organization to serve all churches. About this same time, Reid Carpenter was bringing busloads of Pittsburgh youth from many church backgrounds, including some from little Christian identity. This season of growth had Laurelville serving churches and organizations outside of the Mennonite tradition and needing year-round facilities. Buildings were winterized, moving Laurelville into a year-round venue. 

Meanwhile, the Mennonite presence diminished in western Pennsylvania with the Scottdale-based denominational offices moving to other locations; regional conferences and congregations diminished in size. Also, in the 1940s Laurelville was among the earliest of Mennonite camps; by the end of the century, over 50 camps and retreat centers had emerged, many now located in areas of the North American Mennonite world which Laurelville had earlier served. As a result, Laurelville returned to its roots, honoring its Mennonite heritage, but also recognizing its longer western Pennsylvania context and giving greater attention to the region and the larger Christian community. And that will be the subject of the next era.   

A comprehensive account of this period can be found in Harold and Ruth Lehman’s 50th anniversary book  Where There is Vision: The Laurelville Story 1943-1993. Alta and AJ Metzler’s descriptions can be found in Things We Have Known: Through the 20th Century with AJ and Alta Metzler, 2010, Alta’s comments, pp. 94-95. Arnold Cressman’s description comes from Ferne Cressman and Rhoda Garber Cressman in the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia On-line. Reid Carpenter’s story can be found in Chapter 5, “The Master Connector and His Web of Influence: Reid Carpenter, the Pittsburgh Offensive, the Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation, et al., in Michael King, Bob Jamison and Bruce Barron, Steel Faithful: Stories of God at Work in Pittsburgh, 2018; Also Terry Burkhalter video with Brad Henderson on YouTube: Celebrating 55 years of Partnership with Pittsburgh Kids Foundation, April 18, 2019.  Susie Bontrager information comes from her obituary and her book Susie’s Quantity Recipes & Laurelville Family Favorites (1984).