Sunday In A Mennonite Community--A Cross Cultural Experience, August 18, 2019

On this past Sunday, August 18, 2019, my wife Candice wanted to go to church at Faith Hills Mennonite Church in Crockett, Kentucky, where we have several friends in the community and congregation.  We have attended church there in the past a few times and I have attended and written about the last day of school in their religious based school.  I also have one novelist friend, Emily Steiner, in the congregation and community and have written about three of her novels on this blog.  I regularly do business with several people in the congregation including having used those people for the roof on my house, regular mechanical work on my vehicles, repairs on my septic system a few years ago, a new deck several years ago, and buying produce and pasture raised chickens from two families in the congregation over the last several years.  I know several of these people well and respect and trust them tremendously.  Sunday services at this church start at about 9:30am when most people arrive and spend nearly half an hour in silent meditation in the sanctuary.  Services usually end at about 12:30pm and conversation in church might last another half hour before everyone departs. When we attend any kind of service there, I always try to wear dark pants and a long sleeved solid blue shirt buttoned in the sleeves and collar just as most of the men in the congregation do.  Candice, who is in a wheelchair, will always wear a long dress but usually does not wear any kind of head covering as all the female members do.  I will address this topic a bit later in the post. 

Anonymous Mennonites Walking--Photo by Huffington Post

When we arrived, the family greeting congregants at the door and whose father was teaching Sunday school were friends of ours from whom we had just bought fifteen pasture raised chickens and some tomatoes a few days before.  There were also several others whom we knew in the congregation on this particular Sunday.  But we did not know the man who preached the sermon.  He was visiting from another congregation.  As he began to preach, he stated that he had not expected to preach on this particular Sunday but had been preparing to preach in another church the following week on the topic from the highly structured "Adult Bible Studies" book which all these congregations use.  Those "Adult Bible Studies"  books are written, printed, and distributed quarterly by Rod And Staff Publishing which is also in Crockett, Kentucky, and is one of the largest Mennonite publishers in the entire country while being located in a county which only had about 14,000 citizens according to the  2010 US Census.  The topic he said he was not prepared to preach about was from First Corinthians 10: 1-15, "Warnings From Israel's History".  The next week's topic which this preacher chose to preach on was "God's Order of Headship" from First Corinthians 11: 1-16. This topic concerns in part the fact that conservative Mennonite women always wear a head covering when they come in contact with others. From Candice's point of view, this made a significant change of topic since she had not worn any type of head covering to church which she never had before and had never heard a Mennonite preacher take up the subject.  Naturally, she felt that it was possible that she was "being preached at" which I also considered possible.  But in support of some of the mild mannered ways of Mennonite preachers in general, they rarely bring down hell fire and brimstone as I have seen in numerous Baptist, Methodist, Holiness, and Pentecostal churches which I have visited.  It is their way to logically discuss any topic in a calm, clearly audible voice without any shouting, jumping up and down, or pacing animatedly around the room.  But Candice even sent an e-mail message to one of our female Mennonite friends after we got home to inquire about the possibility that she had been the cause of the change in topic and was actually being "preached at".  She received an interesting and typically mild mannered Mennonite response which said: "To be honest, I wondered how it made you feel to listen to that message.😊 Like we heard in (sic) Sunday, I believe that it is God’s plan for all Christian women to cover their heads. However, we welcome anyone to worship with us, regardless of how they are dressed, including whether ladies cover their heads. I really hope you come back again soon! I enjoyed talking with you too."   

After church was over, there was a long period of conversation among many people in the congregation including one Candice had with a woman we had not met before who has also recently been experiencing neurological symptoms to the point that she has had to stop driving.  Her husband also approached me and asked many of the same questions about his wife's symptoms, what I knew about neurological disease, doctors and hospitals who treat such cases, and the nature of Candice's problems and impairment.  I gave him what information I had at the time and when we got home I also found that I had a medical school textbook on "Fundamental Neuroscience" which I offered to loan them by telephone.  I suspect that we are likely to share further information about this topic in the future and could even become friends based on our common problems.  

This discussion also made clearly apparent one major difference between conservative Mennonites and the general American population in how we seek, utilize, and pay for medical treatment.  Mennonites do not buy or use health insurance for Biblical reasons which are too complex to get into at this time.  When they become ill, they usually seek treatment from non-traditional sources before seeking treatment of a more conventional and expensive kind from mainstream hospitals and their staff.  They use some form of mutual aid or simply strive to pay their own medical expenses when they occur.  I have known of one young Mennonite woman, only 42, mother of 8 children from 2 to 16, who died of cancer in this community in the past two years because she sought non-traditional care when she first became aware of her disease.  That disease was untreatable by the time she had sought care at our local Appalachian Regional Hospital.  Her widowed husband is now trying to complete raising those 8 children while working a full time job at the aforementioned Rod And Staff Publishers.  

One form of mutual aid is discussed in this manner at the link contained herein:  "The Conservative Amish and Mennonite Medical Resharing Pool, based in Middlebury, Ind., requires groups of at least 10 people who are “active members or active participants of a Conservative or Amish Mennonite church” to form their own plan in order to join the pool, according to the program’s bylaws. Shares are paid quarterly by each plan depending on how many members each plan has. Amounts vary based on what medical needs are approved for coverage each quarter." My Mennonite novelist friend recently had a minor automobile accident which the local police ruled as having been her fault.  She paid more than $2,000 dollars to repair the other driver's car out of her own funds in addition to her own relatively minor medical expenses for a broken finger  since she did not have automobile insurance.  It is also important to note here that the Amish and Mennonites receive a religiously based exemption from complying with laws regarding required insurance as guaranteed by the First Amendment.  Perhaps, I will discuss this topic in greater length in a future blog post since I have seen several Mennonites I know who have either used mutual aid or their own funds to pay health, automobile, and funeral expenses because of the insurance prohibitions which they practice.  

Also, after church this past Sunday, the wife of one of my Mennonite friends invited Candice and I to their house for lunch where we have eaten on other occasions.  But, it turned out that this woman's father and step-mother were the assigned family to feed visitors that particular week and they also invited us to eat with them which we chose to do.  We have also known them for several years and used to buy fresh eggs from them for quite a while before I changed my eating habits more than a year ago.  It turned out that they had also invited a relatively young Mennonite couple and their four children to lunch who are members of another congregation in Grayson, Kentucky.   It was also our hosts 18th wedding anniversary which was mentioned but not made a great deal of.  I will mention that it is odd to see an elderly Mennonite couple who have been married such a short time.  But the first wife of this man died about 20 years ago of cancer and he married his current wife who was nearly his own age of roughly 50 or 55 and had never been married.  Their home was spotless which is how I have always found every Mennonite home I have ever visited.  The food was home raised, simple, delicious, and nutritious.  The wife gave Candice some leftover cucumber salad she had made along with a few cucumbers to make her own salad at home since she had liked the salad a great deal and made a point of saying so.  We stayed in the home about two hours and learned that the younger couple and their children, including the youngest girl who is less than 2, had just returned from a missionary trip to Guatemala.  The two older daughters, about 5 and 7, talked animatedly about how much they enjoyed Guatemala which is also interesting since I have rarely seen Mennonite children speak much in the company of other adults.  

Also, after church, I was stopped by another Mennonite woman who was inquiring about my having grown up in Knott County Kentucky where she had also grown up in a non-Mennonite home before converting and marrying a local man whom I have known for several years without having ever heard that his wife came from the same area I had.  We talked briefly about relatives we each had in Knott County and went our separate ways.  I would not be surprised if this doesn't lead to further such exchanges in the future.  

My wife and I will always maintain our business contacts and friendships in the local Mennonite community.  They are deeply religious, totally honest, hard working, self-sufficient, and respectable people who are frequently misunderstood.  I gain in many ways by knowing them and the small number of Amish friends I maintain also.  Once we set aside any prejudices or misunderstandings we have about these people, we stand to benefit in many ways which are impossible to foresee when we first meet them or encounter them in a business setting.