Category Archives: Mennonite
Buckhorn Mennonite Church
Buckhorn Mennonite Church began in 1930 when itinerant ministers invited people to gather and hear preaching in the local public schoolhouse. For forty-three years, Buckhorn church served a remote highlands community in Hardy County, West Virginia. In 1973, Buckhorn merged with nearby Cove, Cullers Run, and Mt. Hermon to form Mathias Mennonite Church, an MC USA congregation in the Virginia Conference.
Young adults from Trissels, Zion, and Lindale congregations followed their ministers into the highlands, teaching Summer Bible School and Sunday school during the ‘30s and ‘40s. Maude Geil (Lantz), twenty-one, taught Bible School at Buckhorn in 1940. During the day, Maude instructed children in the schoolhouse or outside, and she stayed overnight in a tent or a trailer that Northern District business people supplied for the two-week Summer Bible School sessions.
Young adults like Maude Geil, Robert Alger, Kathryn V. Showalter (Shank), and Linden Wenger supportively drove to Buckhorn, about thirty miles north of Broadway, Va., to teach and encourage the folks in this remote region. Dozens of Virginia Conference young adults taught Summer Bible School in the highlands during the ‘30s and ‘40s.
A small Mennonite community emerged at Buckhorn in the 1930s, with ministers on a preaching calendar coming to the schoolhouse about once a month for worship services. During winter, services didn’t always occur because of impassable roads. But there was a cycle of annual communion services and occasional baptisms when a bishop came to lead the service.
Buckhorn was among two dozen Northern District congregations that emerged in the early twentieth century missions awakening, the work of Virginia Conference itinerant ministers in the highlands of Virginia and West Virginia. Mennonite youth followed, like Helen Trumbo (Shank), who, at 17-18 years of age, taught five Bible School sessions of two weeks each during one summer in the early 1940s.
In 1948 the small Mennonite congregation in Buckhorn asked District ministers to help them build a meetinghouse. In May 1949, Bishop Timothy Showalter preached a dedication sermon for the new cinderblock building. Mennonite evangelist William Jennings, from a Virginia Conference congregation in Tennessee, followed with revival meetings at the church.
During the 1930s and ‘40s, dozens of young adults in Virginia Conference taught Summer Bible School in the highlands. At the same time, city mission churches began, prompted by dynamic mission energy. Further, missionary speakers from India, Africa, and South America helped Virginia Mennonites see beyond their home-based mission efforts. In one remote mountain setting, however, at Buckhorn Mennonite Church, near the Lost River State Park, Mathias, W.Va., Conference ministers and lay workers helped build a congregation during a several-decade season of Holy Spirit-inspired mission.
Sausage Eating Event March 9, 2022
An article written for Eastern Mennonite School
We Will Follow
Yesterday I preached the morning sermon at a Mennonite church in Hartville, Ohio. That’s the town where I grew up. They’ve asked me to write a history book about the congregation.
At the end of the worship service, we sang, “We will follow, we will follow Jesus, we will follow everywhere he goes.” A simple Zimbabwean traditional tune, the song gave congregants the chance to affirm our desire to be followers of Christ.
The message was entitled “Called to Remember,” and I used Exodus 17:14 for my thoughts. Moses had been called to write down Israel’s stories in order to remember them.
I won’t soon forget the simple affirmation and conclusion in song after I preached. With instruments and congregational voices, we affirmed that we want to follow Jesus everywhere he goes.
We Are One in the Spirit
We are One in the Spirit reminds us that as Christians work together in love, they can change and positively impact the world. Written in the 1960s, I first learned the song in the early 1970s. I chose to lead this wonderful song as a congregational response song following the sermon yesterday.
The new Voices Together hymnal editors decided to publish this favorite tune, which is not included in many songbooks. The refrain is the strong part of the melody, in which we express that in our love, others will know Christ.
These are days of continual discernment. At the church where I lead music occasionally, we meet outside for worship during the pandemic. We are deliberating on when and in what ways we can use our sanctuary again for worship. And I noticed that the new hymnal editors used inclusive language in the third verse, an appropriate exercise of updating terminology for a different era than when Peter Scholtes wrote the lyrics in 1966.
Not only in matters of discernment, which are ongoing in every generation for the church, but in our outreach must Christ be known in our love. The verses of this song are in a minor key, but the transition to the refrain flashes a major chord, indicative of the strength in this song’s assertion that the world will know Christ through our love.
Visit North Carolina Churches
This is the Day
At a large family reunion in Montezuma, Georgia, in early August 2021, my relatives sang, “This is the day that the Lord has made.” Over two hundred attended the reunion, and folks from many walks of life knew the lyrics from memory. My paternal family came from numerous U.S. states and several countries in Central and South America.
“This is the day” first emerged in the late 1960s and since then has become a very familiar Scripture song. I sang it as a teenager in church and youth group in the early 1970s. The song has endless variations for singing and is easy to accompany with a guitar.
During a Saturday morning reunion in the red soil of central Georgia, our family reunion members took time to sing songs and listen to a devotional. The chorister chose “this is the day” for the first of four songs that we offered to the Lord from memory.
I may never forget the rich four-part a capella harmonies, the enthusiasm of hearing soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, and the meaning carried from the ancient psalmist to our time. Three millennia after a poet wrote Psalm 118:24, we Yoders in Montezuma, Georgia, confessed our assurance in God’s love and sustaining grace through the familiar lyrics of “this is the day that the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it.”
