Growing Up In Church
I'm trying to dream up a story for Chris Terrill’s upcoming "book" about growing up in Partridge. I think I'll write about incidents associated with going to church. I will tell the truth, mind you, so it's not a dream in the sense of being outside of reality. This is a practice run.
Actually, one of my first church memories is of having missed a service when I was two years old, in 1954. It was the service in which my 27-year-old father, David L. Miller, was ordained as a minister. Since the service was an all-day affair, my three-year old sister, Linda, and I were left at Uncle Edwin and Aunt Nellie's place. I heard only recently that my mother sat where she couldn't really see the goings-on. While she knew that her husband was designated by vote earlier in the service to be among the candidates for ordination, she could not see the process of drawing the lots. The method used was for each of the candidates to select a song book from a small table placed in front of them. In only one of the books was concealed a slip of paper. The person who picked up that book was promptly ordained. My father was that person.
Being too old to take a cookie when the plate was passed for the little ones during church was a particular disappointment for me one Sunday morning when church was held at the home of Mose and Amanda Yoder, about a half mile east of the East Eureka School location. When my mom shook her head “no” I didn’t dare disobey, and the plate passed me by.
Lunch followed the preaching services in the homes. The menu was basically the same each time: homemade bread, spread with peanut butter and corn syrup, and beet and cucumber pickles on the side. The adults got coffee. We ate in shifts, with the children first. Some of the benches we had sat on for church were re-purposed by fitting the legs of two benches next to each other onto low saw-horse shaped wooden supports, forming a long narrow table. More benches provided seating at the table. My mother was apparently not averse to breaking with tradition, when she once served chicken salad for sandwiches instead of peanut butter. She had a very practical reason for doing so. Their flock of laying hens had just been retired and added to their food supply, and it made no sense whatsoever to ignore that ready food source and purchase peanut butter, which seemed to her like an expensive luxury item. People visited for a while after the meal and then gradually drifted toward home or elsewhere to pay someone a visit in their home. In the evening the young people returned for a song service.
Locations for the church services rotated among the homes of members. Occasionally the services were held in a vacant house, with a designated family serving as hosts. I remember riding on a tractor (a Massey-Harris 55) out to the farm west of Miller Seed Farms to get that house ready for church. The tractor was necessary because of huge mud holes from a recent rain, and we slipped and slid through the mud holes to get to the house. My aunt Emma (Mrs. Oliver Troyer) was the tractor driver.
In 1958, a major reorganization took place, about the same time as Elreka Grade School opened with students from several surrounding smaller schools making up the student body. One of the school buildings that emptied out was East Eureka (at the intersection of Riverton Road and Illinois Avenue), and those in our church district began to hold Sunday School there. Every footstep was audible on the hardwood floors of the school building. My three-year-old brother Myron, who had a habit of going much too fast and noisily whenever he got permission to move from one place to another during the service, finally got the message about the need to be slower and quieter, but that proved to be distracting too. A titter swept over the crowd when they saw him inch his way across the floor, one foot placed in front of the other ever-so-carefully, quietly, and slowly, checking periodically to see if Mom was impressed yet. He was totally confused when she motioned to him to hurry up.
We had Sunday School only every other Sunday. On the Sundays in between Sunday School times, we, along with the people formerly from several other area Amish church districts, met for preaching services in the building now occupied by Ellen Nisly on the corner of W. Morgan and S. Herren Road, 1/2 mile west of Center Church. I often sat with one of my aunts or great-aunts when it was my Dad's turn to preach.
I have several memories of evening meetings during the mid-'50s. One meeting took place in the roundtop shed on the Jake Yoder farm, where Henry and Velma Yoder live now, on Riverton Road. I heard the hymn "Rescue the Perishing" there for the first time ever. I was a little scared about perishing (falling and killing myself would have been my worry-words) in the pit in center of the concrete shed floor. Someone explained to me that it was for working on the underside of vehicles, when the vehicle was parked on top of the hole. Even the thought of driving a vehicle so close to that hole gave me the shivers.
Coming home from church on the back of a low-sided wagon behind the 8N Ford tractor on a warm summer evening was a wonderful thing. Stars overhead, the cooling wind, and the nearness and safety of my family around me--such a pleasure. On one occasion, my grandparents and aunts and uncles were providing transportation for us, and had also offered Mahlon Nisly a ride home, since we were all going home past his home anyway. The driver, however, forgot to stop to let Mahlon off, and he couldn't hear the shouted reminders over the tractor's noise, so Mahlon bailed out of the moving trailer--safely, I guess, but I knew that it would be a very bad idea for me to try that.
I also recall sitting on the basement steps of the church house and listening to the youth group practicing their singing after church in the evening for a service they held regularly one Sunday afternoon a month at "Broadacres," an area facility for the elderly. I first learned the words to "The Love of God" and many other hymns in those listening sessions.
Our family's first vehicle was a '53 Chevy, probably purchased in about 1959. No more going to church behind the buggy horse, Steve, or on the Mayrath (an open motorized conveyance with a bench seat mounted on a four-wheeled frame), or on a wagon behind a tractor. I don’t remember mourning the loss, however.
After Center Church was built in 1959, we no longer met in the Sunday School house, at East Eureka School, or in homes. Most of those who had been part of several different Old Order districts now met together regularly in the new location. The land for Center Church was carved out of a corner of the farm where my dad had grown up. Before long, we began to use a portion of each Sunday service for Sunday School, with a preaching service following.
When it was Dad’s turn to preach at Center, my brothers had to sit on the front bench on the men's side where my dad could keep an eye on them. Sometimes he had to interrupt the sermon to tend to his boys. I remember him saying once, in "Dutch," from the pulpit, “Boys, you’ll have to behave a little better. Myron, you scoot a little farther this way, and Caleb, you scoot a little farther that way.” In those first months or years, the preaching happened in a mixture of English, German, and Pennsylvania German (sometimes called Pennsylvania Dutch--the Swiss-German dialect used by most Amish people). If we had visitors who understood only English, however, the preaching was entirely in English.
Downstairs, during the Sunday School hour, my Sunday School teacher drilled us on reading German in the old Fraktur script. I learned to read and understand it passably--for a seven or eight year old, at least. I was probably one of the youngest students to get this instruction, since the complete switch to using the English Bible in church happened shortly after this.
For about ten years, from about 1968 to 1978, our family and a number of others met on Sunday morning in a small church building near Arlington. It had been a Mennonite church earlier. No indoor plumbing had never been installed, so we brought a big insulated water jug from home for drinking water and used the outhouses when needed. The building of the Cedar Crest Church relieved the crowding situation at Center, and attendance at Arlington ceased.
At Arlington, the adolescents usually sat in the “Amen” corners, at the front of the sanctuary and to either side of the pulpit, in rows of chairs at right angles to the pews in the sanctuary. One morning my brother Lowell had put some small steel bearings in his shirt pocket before church, no doubt hoping to play with them surreptitiously during church. To his great chagrin, those steel bearings bounced out of his pocket when we knelt for prayer, and they bounced repeatedly and loudly across that hardwood floor, and rolled away. On the way home from church, Mom asked Lowell if he lost his marbles during church. “No. I lost my bearings,” he answered.
On the way home from church at Arlington, we often stopped in Partridge to pick up our Sunday paper. Outside the post office, in a box on a post placed there for that purpose, we sorted through the stack until we found the paper with our name on it. What a disappointment when our paper was not there. Rumor had it that at least one paper was missing nearly every Sunday. It was a nasty trick. Whenever we got close to Partridge, one of my brothers would usually say: “OK, half you guys duck. Now.” We ignored him, of course. We were packed in a lot tighter than seat belt and car seat laws in effect now would allow, and that was just fine with most of us, adolescent brothers notwithstanding.
Church was a huge part of our family’s life in my growing up years. When a service was going on, we attended, unless illness prevented it. In the process, we developed deep ties with others in our faith community, all the while benefiting from the solid foundation our mutual dependence on God provided.
Actually, one of my first church memories is of having missed a service when I was two years old, in 1954. It was the service in which my 27-year-old father, David L. Miller, was ordained as a minister. Since the service was an all-day affair, my three-year old sister, Linda, and I were left at Uncle Edwin and Aunt Nellie's place. I heard only recently that my mother sat where she couldn't really see the goings-on. While she knew that her husband was designated by vote earlier in the service to be among the candidates for ordination, she could not see the process of drawing the lots. The method used was for each of the candidates to select a song book from a small table placed in front of them. In only one of the books was concealed a slip of paper. The person who picked up that book was promptly ordained. My father was that person.
Being too old to take a cookie when the plate was passed for the little ones during church was a particular disappointment for me one Sunday morning when church was held at the home of Mose and Amanda Yoder, about a half mile east of the East Eureka School location. When my mom shook her head “no” I didn’t dare disobey, and the plate passed me by.
Lunch followed the preaching services in the homes. The menu was basically the same each time: homemade bread, spread with peanut butter and corn syrup, and beet and cucumber pickles on the side. The adults got coffee. We ate in shifts, with the children first. Some of the benches we had sat on for church were re-purposed by fitting the legs of two benches next to each other onto low saw-horse shaped wooden supports, forming a long narrow table. More benches provided seating at the table. My mother was apparently not averse to breaking with tradition, when she once served chicken salad for sandwiches instead of peanut butter. She had a very practical reason for doing so. Their flock of laying hens had just been retired and added to their food supply, and it made no sense whatsoever to ignore that ready food source and purchase peanut butter, which seemed to her like an expensive luxury item. People visited for a while after the meal and then gradually drifted toward home or elsewhere to pay someone a visit in their home. In the evening the young people returned for a song service.
Locations for the church services rotated among the homes of members. Occasionally the services were held in a vacant house, with a designated family serving as hosts. I remember riding on a tractor (a Massey-Harris 55) out to the farm west of Miller Seed Farms to get that house ready for church. The tractor was necessary because of huge mud holes from a recent rain, and we slipped and slid through the mud holes to get to the house. My aunt Emma (Mrs. Oliver Troyer) was the tractor driver.
In 1958, a major reorganization took place, about the same time as Elreka Grade School opened with students from several surrounding smaller schools making up the student body. One of the school buildings that emptied out was East Eureka (at the intersection of Riverton Road and Illinois Avenue), and those in our church district began to hold Sunday School there. Every footstep was audible on the hardwood floors of the school building. My three-year-old brother Myron, who had a habit of going much too fast and noisily whenever he got permission to move from one place to another during the service, finally got the message about the need to be slower and quieter, but that proved to be distracting too. A titter swept over the crowd when they saw him inch his way across the floor, one foot placed in front of the other ever-so-carefully, quietly, and slowly, checking periodically to see if Mom was impressed yet. He was totally confused when she motioned to him to hurry up.
We had Sunday School only every other Sunday. On the Sundays in between Sunday School times, we, along with the people formerly from several other area Amish church districts, met for preaching services in the building now occupied by Ellen Nisly on the corner of W. Morgan and S. Herren Road, 1/2 mile west of Center Church. I often sat with one of my aunts or great-aunts when it was my Dad's turn to preach.
Coming home from church on the back of a low-sided wagon behind the 8N Ford tractor on a warm summer evening was a wonderful thing. Stars overhead, the cooling wind, and the nearness and safety of my family around me--such a pleasure. On one occasion, my grandparents and aunts and uncles were providing transportation for us, and had also offered Mahlon Nisly a ride home, since we were all going home past his home anyway. The driver, however, forgot to stop to let Mahlon off, and he couldn't hear the shouted reminders over the tractor's noise, so Mahlon bailed out of the moving trailer--safely, I guess, but I knew that it would be a very bad idea for me to try that.
I also recall sitting on the basement steps of the church house and listening to the youth group practicing their singing after church in the evening for a service they held regularly one Sunday afternoon a month at "Broadacres," an area facility for the elderly. I first learned the words to "The Love of God" and many other hymns in those listening sessions.
Our family's first vehicle was a '53 Chevy, probably purchased in about 1959. No more going to church behind the buggy horse, Steve, or on the Mayrath (an open motorized conveyance with a bench seat mounted on a four-wheeled frame), or on a wagon behind a tractor. I don’t remember mourning the loss, however.
After Center Church was built in 1959, we no longer met in the Sunday School house, at East Eureka School, or in homes. Most of those who had been part of several different Old Order districts now met together regularly in the new location. The land for Center Church was carved out of a corner of the farm where my dad had grown up. Before long, we began to use a portion of each Sunday service for Sunday School, with a preaching service following.
When it was Dad’s turn to preach at Center, my brothers had to sit on the front bench on the men's side where my dad could keep an eye on them. Sometimes he had to interrupt the sermon to tend to his boys. I remember him saying once, in "Dutch," from the pulpit, “Boys, you’ll have to behave a little better. Myron, you scoot a little farther this way, and Caleb, you scoot a little farther that way.” In those first months or years, the preaching happened in a mixture of English, German, and Pennsylvania German (sometimes called Pennsylvania Dutch--the Swiss-German dialect used by most Amish people). If we had visitors who understood only English, however, the preaching was entirely in English.
Downstairs, during the Sunday School hour, my Sunday School teacher drilled us on reading German in the old Fraktur script. I learned to read and understand it passably--for a seven or eight year old, at least. I was probably one of the youngest students to get this instruction, since the complete switch to using the English Bible in church happened shortly after this.
For about ten years, from about 1968 to 1978, our family and a number of others met on Sunday morning in a small church building near Arlington. It had been a Mennonite church earlier. No indoor plumbing had never been installed, so we brought a big insulated water jug from home for drinking water and used the outhouses when needed. The building of the Cedar Crest Church relieved the crowding situation at Center, and attendance at Arlington ceased.
At Arlington, the adolescents usually sat in the “Amen” corners, at the front of the sanctuary and to either side of the pulpit, in rows of chairs at right angles to the pews in the sanctuary. One morning my brother Lowell had put some small steel bearings in his shirt pocket before church, no doubt hoping to play with them surreptitiously during church. To his great chagrin, those steel bearings bounced out of his pocket when we knelt for prayer, and they bounced repeatedly and loudly across that hardwood floor, and rolled away. On the way home from church, Mom asked Lowell if he lost his marbles during church. “No. I lost my bearings,” he answered.
On the way home from church at Arlington, we often stopped in Partridge to pick up our Sunday paper. Outside the post office, in a box on a post placed there for that purpose, we sorted through the stack until we found the paper with our name on it. What a disappointment when our paper was not there. Rumor had it that at least one paper was missing nearly every Sunday. It was a nasty trick. Whenever we got close to Partridge, one of my brothers would usually say: “OK, half you guys duck. Now.” We ignored him, of course. We were packed in a lot tighter than seat belt and car seat laws in effect now would allow, and that was just fine with most of us, adolescent brothers notwithstanding.
Church was a huge part of our family’s life in my growing up years. When a service was going on, we attended, unless illness prevented it. In the process, we developed deep ties with others in our faith community, all the while benefiting from the solid foundation our mutual dependence on God provided.
posted by Mrs. I (Miriam Iwashige) at
8:07 PM
1 Comments:
Thanks for this post Miriam. I loved the description of church because it reminded me of home while I'm way over here in Thailand. Mmmm.. homemade bread with peanut butter, pickles, black coffee... I love reading your blog and seeing tidbits of home here and there.
By
Lori Hershberger, at 10/05/2013
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