PARABOLA interviews Mennonites Merle and Phyllis Pellman Good in "Called to be Faithful."

 

Deep within Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, surrounded by miles of farmland, stands the town of Intercourse, home to Amish markets and Mennonite restaurants and also to the headquarters of Good Books, a publishing house owned and run by Merle and Phyllis Pellman Good. Phyllis, senior editor at the house, is a bestselling author whose books, including the Fix-It and Forget It Cookbook series, have sold more than 8.5 millions copies. Merle, publisher of Good Books, is also an author, most notably of Who Are the Amish?
    The Mennonites are a group of Christian Anabaptist denominations dating to the sixteenth century and well known for their devotion to nonresistance and pacifism. The Amish, who date back to the late seventeenth century, are an offshoot of the Mennonites who are known for their plain clothes and restrictions on the use of modern technologies including automobiles and telephones. Within Lancaster County live tens of thousands of Mennonites and Amish, many of them farmers. To learn more about each group, Parabola spoke with the Goods in a conference room at their offices in Intercourse.

Jeff Zaleski and Tracy Cochran

Parabola: Why do you make your home in Lancaster County?

Merle Good: I often say that my definition of “rooted” is that I’m the ninth generation on my mother’s side, the ninth on my father’s, all Mennonite farmers, within thirteen miles of each other, here in Lancaster County.
    We’ve lived in the center city of Lancaster, the same row house, for twenty-eight, twenty-nine years, but then drive through the country to work here in Intercourse, so we have the best of both worlds. We aren’t tempted to live anywhere else.

Parabola: Can you describe the difference between Mennonites and the Amish?

Phyllis Good: You have to understand Mennonites as a group that, at its most conservative edge, overlaps with the Amish, so that you would find it hard to distinguish an Old Order Amish person from an Old Order Mennonite.

MG: Around here, if you see buggies with black tops, they’re Mennonite buggies. The men won’t have beards. The women will have dresses with prints. Those are Old Order Mennonites. The gray-top buggies in this area are Amish buggies.

PG: All the way to people who are maybe practicing, but they are still charmed by some of the sociological aspects of what it means to be Mennonite.

Parabola: It’s easy to have the impression these days that many people have lost a sense of what really matters. What are the essential values to Mennonites and the Amish?

MG: I’d like to answer the question from the Old Order Amish and Mennonite point of view. Jesus said, “Be perfect as I am perfect”—trying to be as good as you can be. But alongside that, there is a very strong stress on humility. So you have this tremendous tension within the psyche of trying to be better, but not wanting to evaluate yourself too highly because we’re supposed to be humble; we shouldn’t try to put ourselves above others. You’ll see that tension in many, many of the discussions about values around here.

Parabola: On the one hand this is a noncomformist way of life. But you value conformity within the community.

MG: Our group has very much the sense of being nonconformed. We don’t expect to be the rulers of society. We feel called to be faithful even though it may seem ridiculous to other people. I’m talking about the Old Order way. Do we expect everyone to drive buggies? No. Well then why do we drive a buggy? We’re called to do this. It’s not a ruling mentality, it’s more of a faithfulness mentality.
    Is there a sense of loss about what’s happening in our society? The Old Order people would say “Yes,” but they’ve felt that way for a long time. They felt that way at the time of the Civil War. I think that sense of loss is much stronger among those of us who grew up on the farm and had generations before us who were all farmers, and suddenly we’re leaving the farm. My brother lives on the home farm, but he actually rents out the land to other farmers, and works for a relief agency and teaching school.

Parabola: There seems to be a very fertile tension between life in the modern marketplace and creating a home that is based on Christian values that run counter to mainstream culture.

PG: None of this holding together of tensions goes on without being very intentional. And we work at it. We live in downtown Lancaster and we love that, but we also attend a church, a congregation, that’s three blocks from our home. We’re part of a small group. We meet together whenever we want to, about once a month, and we’ve been pretty clear that we’re not a Bible study group, we’re not a group that’s trying to reach out to anyone who has particular needs; we’re there to look out for each other. It’s partly accountability, which is a big word in Mennonite circles, it’s partly just a nest—here I can talk to you about some of the tensions we have. We work at holding these things together. Certainly living here rather than in New York is one way. We wanted our kids to be raised close to their grandparents, and to have a chance to participate in this faith community that we were raised in and shaped by.

Parabola: Can you speak more about the role of community in defining what you consider home?

MG: There’s a quote from Dostoeyevsky, “He who has no people has no God.” I often say that you can’t follow God by  yourself. So that presumes community.

Parabola: Why can’t you follow God by yourself?

MG: In Christianity you need others in other to keep your faith vital.

PG: Not to lose your way.

MG: For worship. You don’t worship God by yourself, but you worship with others. And for discernment. Where is God leading us? Should we relate to this, should we start such or such a social service in our community? You don’t sit at home and say, “Okay, I’m going to do that.” Christianity is very much of a group process.

Parabola: While a community may envelop those within it, it also separates them from the people outside—this is highlighted by the Amish, who have become an object of curiosity even as they’re trying to remain apart. How does that relate to the Christian ideal that we are all brothers and sisters?

MG: I think the Amish would say that the Christian ideal is that we are all called to be faithful, and not everyone will be. Some will choose to be faithful, and some will choose not to be faithful. But this is not arrogance. It’s very seldom that you’ll hear an Amish person say that non-Amish are bad or going to hell. “I couldn’t say. I know what my responsibilities are” is very much the attitude. Which is part of the key, I think, to why you have twice as many Amish now as you did fifteen years ago. This is a growing, dynamic culture.

Parabola: You call it “growing and dynamic” yet its values include voluntary simplicity, rejecting growth for growth’s sake, knowing when enough is enough.

MG: Enough is a word I like a lot. There has to be enough. Our world is built on more. Gotta have more, gotta have more. But some people say, “This is enough. I’m content here.” So the community must have enough going, so that the people have a sense of rest and nest and home. In regard to what people outside say, it doesn’t matter much.

PG: You don’t set out to be nonconformed. You set out to be faithful, and nonconformity is what results. We enjoy this wonderful benefit of driving from home to work and going past people who are very intentional. And they are very practical, and they understand. I pass kids all morning on roller blades. They’re Amish kids. And they have cell phones. Yet, when a local Amish minister had a computer—he was publishing a little newspaper, and he had figured how to run this thing on diesel power or something—the other ministers came to visit him about the problem this was causing.

MG: And then he discontinued it.

PG: They negotiated. First he moved the computer to the barn, but then he was in the barn too much of the time, and he eventually gave it up.

MG: The president of Mennonite World Conference came to visit us, and he wanted to visit Amish leaders. So we went to see Joe, who was the editor of this paper, and a farmer, and we stood there and looked at this mainframe sitting in his barn. And the president said, “What’s going to happen if the Church decides this is too much?” And Joe said, “It’s gone.”

Parabola: You’ve used the word “intentional” a couple of times. What do you mean by that?

MG: I think in today’s world it takes intention to maintain values. You don’t just stay married, you must intend to stay married, and you must work at it. Whatever the value is, you must cultivate it. You might say, “We need to be together more as a family.”
It isn’t that we’re just going to complain about this, but we’re going to be intentional—we’re all going to work together to figure out how to do this, as a family. We’re going to sit down together more, because eating together is a very important value.

PG: If you want more than a romantic relationship with an ideal, you are going to have to find a practical expression of it that will hold you to it. Eating together is an example. It’s going to be inconvenient, it may mean that your child is only going to be in one sport rather than three.

Parabola: Why have Amish communities doubled? Do they take converts?

MG: They have large families, but they have close to 90 percent retention. Twenty years ago it might have been 70 percent retention. And some people do join the Amish church—very few, with no publicity. Because they know it’s going to very difficult, so they don’t make converts vulnerable to people asking questions. So the Amish are open to people joining, but it’s if you’re willing, and they’ll know if you’re willing by how you live. It’s a big step for a modern person to join the Old Orders. But you’re invited to consider it. Would you like to drive a buggy? [Laughter.]

PG: One day when our daughter was learning to drive, I ran into an Old Order Amish woman who had been one of their caregivers. And she was catching up with Kate and I said, “Oh, she’s learning to drive. I’m worried.” And she said, “How do
you think I feel when Elizabeth pulls out in the buggy, on this highway?”