Tag Archives: Virginia

We Came Seeking Peace

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(A devotional shared with the Board of Brethren & Mennonite Heritage Center, May 2024)

Our spiritual and biological ancestors came to the Shenandoah Valley seeking peace. In the 1750s, Dunkers migrated to Virginia. By 1860, Dunkers had seventeen church buildings in the Shenandoah Valley. It helped with migration when the Great Valley Road improved in the 1840s, making travel to Rockingham County easier for the second and third wave of Dunker immigrants.

The Mennonites also came seeking peace, migrating to Virginia in 1728. However, their settlements were short-lived as they were forced back to Pennsylvania during the French and Indian War (1754-1763). They returned in large numbers after the Revolutionary War, again seeking peace, settling in the Linville Creek region of Rockingham County. By 1860, their perseverance had borne fruit, with seven congregations established in Virginia.

Dunkers and Mennonites came to Virginia amidst the enslavement of Africans. They sought peace after European settlers pushed the Catawba, Iroquois, Algonquian, and Siouan further west.

During the American Civil War, seventy-two young men, about half of them Dunkers and half Mennonites, headed north, seeking to escape the clutches of Confederate conscription. Though they sought peace, the men were caught by two scouts, only two, and then imprisoned in Richmond. There, the Dunkers and Mennonites convinced the Confederate government of their principles of peace and nonresistance, and the legislators gave the Brethren and Mennonites exemption from fighting in the war.

Our Brethren and Mennonite paths of peace continued to intersect into the twentieth century. In the early 1900s horse and buggy era, Mennonites couldn’t always go to their church because of distance, mud, or snow, so they visited nearby Brethren, Baptist, and other denominational churches. Mennonite Samuel Blosser figured out how to artificially incubate chicken eggs in 1885, while Brethren businessman Charles Wampler Sr. was the first to incubate turkey eggs in 1922.

In 1909, Henry and Bettie Keener led the vigorous twentieth-century Mennonite mission movement in West Virginia. Henry moved to Harrisonburg from Maryland, attended Bridgewater College, and was ordained by the Mennonites for mission work.

The Brethren, Quakers, and Mennonites united in their pursuit of peace and worked together after World War I. Their collective efforts led to the creation of the Civilian Public Service, which allowed conscientious objectors to perform alternative service during World War II.

During the 1960s, Charles Zunkel, pastor of Mill Creek Church of the Brethren, chaired The Rockingham Council on Human Rights. Zunkel worked on a steering committee with John A. Lapp and Eugene Souder, both Mennonites. The Council on Human Rights used the church’s influence and teaching for needed social change without conflict and violence. They worked to acquire housing for African Americans in Harrisonburg, integrate public schools, reform the hospital to assist African Americans better, and sought to have restaurants serve African Americans. Zunkel and Lapp went together to attend Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech in August 1963.

A full-page Daily News-Record ad appeared on January 31, 1967, strongly opposing the U.S. war in Vietnam. The writers addressed their letter of concern about Vietnam to the U.S. President and members of Congress. About half of the several dozen well-known Valley signatories were Brethren, and half were Mennonites.

In 1973, leaders from sister denominations attended when four to five thousand Mennonites met under a large tent at EMC for their national gathering. Dr. Wayne F. Geisert, Bridgewater College President and Moderator of the Church of the Brethren, attended the week-long Mennonite Conference in Harrisonburg. During the 1970s, Brethren and Mennonites worked together in a local chapter of New Call to Peacemaking.

A Church of the Brethren farmer, Fred Smith, joined Mennonite Pastor Eugene Souder, and they chaired the Rockingham Concerned Citizens in 1979. They worked hard but did not stop Coors from building a brewery in the Shenandoah Valley. Souder raised moral concerns about alcohol, and Smith opposed the pillaging and commercialization of 2000 acres of prime farmland.

Since the early 1990s, the Brethren and Mennonites have worked together to produce a thirty-five-volume Believers Church Bible Commentary. Scholars like Christina A. Bucher, Church of the Brethren, and Mennonite theologian Willard Swartley led the project. Many of us sing from Hymnal: A Worship Book, a testament to our shared values and beliefs prepared by churches in the Believers Church tradition. A dozen musicians from the Church of the Brethren and an equal amount from the Mennonite Church (MC) worked on the hymnal project, produced in 1992.

Since 1989, many Ukrainian families have migrated to the Valley, seeking peace like Mennonites and Brethren. The Ukrainian immigration story is much like the Mennonite and Dunker stories of the 19th century—each group came seeking peace. A JMU professor credits the Mennonites and Brethren for helping many immigrant families in the past four decades, like the Ukrainians who came seeking peace.

John Jantzi, administrative executive of the Shenandoah District of the Brethren, grew up Mennonite in central Ohio. Jantzi’s father taught me at Rosedale Bible College when I was a young man. Jantzi and I come from the same Mennonite background. Our fathers were both named Elmer, and both lived from 1925 to 2007. Both John and I came to the Shenandoah Valley seeking peace.

I’ve driven to the farms of two millennial Mennonite families from Augusta County who attend Zion Mennonite Church in Rockingham County. They bring their children on a 45-minute one-way drive to Broadway, Virginia, where my wife and I attend. We’ve traveled to visit them on several occasions, taking them a meal when a baby arrives or showing up for a cookout. Both families live along Westview School Road, and I was surprised recently to discover that the Shenandoah District Church of the Brethren office is at the corner of Westview School Road and Valley Church Road; we’ve driven by the office many times, not knowing it was there.

Perhaps that’s an analogy of Mennonites and Brethren in the Shenandoah Valley. We’ve lived side by side in Rockingham and Augusta Counties for 250 years or more, often passing each other. However, for twenty-five years, we have worked together at this wonderful Brethren & Mennonite Heritage Center, an invaluable resource for all to come and learn the story of denominational cousins who came seeking peace.

A 1980 Chapel at Eastern Mennonite College

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On May 14, 1980, while students on the EMC campus in Harrisonburg, Virginia, used typewriters, a wooden card catalog with drawers in the library, and wired landline phones to call a friend in another dorm, one of the more memorable chapels in campus history occurred. Jim Bishop sat on the auditorium’s front bench. Student leaders surprised and honored Dr. Myron and Esther Augsburger for their fifteen years of service to the college, 1965-1980. Ordained in the Virginia Conference, Myron Augsburger spoke in North America and other continents, raising the school’s profile. Enrollment doubled during his tenure, and in 1980, it peaked at 1,014 full-time undergraduate students. Myron pulled a rope to conduct a prank the students affectionately set up for him since he had dealt with pranks in the chapel during his presidency. Confetti, balloons, and rice cascaded onto the cheering, roaring, appreciative, and packed Lehman Auditorium crowd with people sitting in the balcony. Jim Bishop’s younger brother, Michael, directed a rousing rendition of “606,” a hymn from The Mennonite Hymnal.[i] Among the undergraduates in the auditorium were students from across the United States, including from the Virginia Mennonite Conference, some of whom wore the traditional prayer veiling. That Wednesday chapel, at the end of the school year, with spiritual input, robust singing, and sharing from the legendary Augsburger couple, during an era of growth and good feelings, was one of the high moments of college life at EMC during the twentieth century.

[i] Elwood Yoder and his wife Joy Risser Yoder, married six months earlier and undergraduate students at EMC, attended the May 14, 1980 chapel. For more information about the chapel, see “606: The Persistence of Community,” a video by John L. Ruth, at https://discoveryvirginia.org/606-persistence-community, and Donald B. Kraybill, Eastern Mennonite University, 2017, 235-236.

Travelers on the Road

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David Augsburger helped me discover new courage several years ago. Afterward, I understood the Spirit’s presence in our conversation, like an Emmaus road epiphany. David had a remarkable presence when he conversed with me, giving his new friend full attention. As told in the following stories, David walked the mile with three travelers and helped them bear their load in the face of uncertainty, pain, and separation.

1) At the 2019 Mennonite Church USA Convention in Kansas City, Missouri, I saw Dr. Augsburger (1938-2023) in the large delegate assembly hall. I hustled across the room to introduce myself to David. He was friendly, and when I said I was writing a bicentennial history book about the Trissels Mennonite Church, Broadway, Virginia, he fully engaged with me and began telling stories. David’s detailed accounts from fifty-five years earlier came so fast from his incredible memory that I asked him to slow down and give me an interview when I could record his stories.

A year later, during COVID, David came prepared for an hour-long Zoom interview; he was in California, and I was in Virginia. David told me story after story about his formative ministry years in the 1960s as a pastor and radio speaker. He was hired at Trissels Mennonite Church when he was twenty-four, in 1962, serving until 1971. With his low and soothing bass voice and a keen theological mind with the gift of rhetoric, he became the main speaker on The Mennonite Hour radio ministry in 1966, broadcast on over a hundred stations by the end of the ’60s.

After forty-five minutes of listening to David’s pastoral stories, he sensed I was carrying a load of concern in my heart. David encouraged me to talk about being a Mennonite Church USA delegate and the difficulties I was experiencing, and he soon drew upon his professional counseling tools. By the end of the hour, I had been heard, encouraged, blessed, and prayed for. Following the interview, through tears, I realized I had been on the Emmaus road with a traveler who helped me carry the load.

2) In the mid-1960s, Pastor David Augsburger hurried to the house trailer of a depressed and dangerous man who lived near Trissels Mennonite Church. The neighbor occasionally came to church, and David knew the man, but on this day, he sat inside his house with a loaded gun. A neighbor had called Pastor Augsburger, asking if he would help. With a booming voice, David approached the door and announced his arrival. The man inside told him to stay away, but David continued to speak so that he knew David intended to open the door and enter.

When David, about twenty-five, sat down on the sofa in the house, unharmed, he asked why his friend was sitting in the house with a loaded gun. The response was that the man’s wife had left him, and he intended to use the gun on her. At the end of an hour of conversation with David, the man broke down and wept. Then he stood up, took his gun outside, and chopped his gun to pieces. David explained that for this mountain man, his gun was like a right arm, and to destroy it meant a change had taken place. David talked to the man’s wife and got the two together, and he agreed to shape up. David’s courage to open the door and enter, his presence in that house trailer with a loaded gun, his counseling abilities, and his willingness to walk the mile and bear the load defused a dangerous situation.

3) From a man struck with polio early in life, who walked with a limp and a crooked cane, David Augsburger learned that “every person is beautiful in God’s eyes.” David stated that he didn’t learn that truth in seminary but in the bee house of Dan Showalter, the man with polio. Dan tended bee hives at different places around the Trissels Mennonite Church community. One day in 1966, Dan Showalter taught David a lesson he never forgot.

Dan gave David a taste of each kind of honey he raised, and the taste varied depending on where the bees drew their pollen. David learned from the experienced Dan Showalter that each person is unique and special in God’s eyes, just like each variety of sweet honey in Dan’s collection tasted different. But David learned something else that day—that Dan Showalter had a son who had joined the army and was estranged from the Mennonite community. The son had left because of a Mennonite minister who didn’t try to get to know him, so he was gone, in Germany, in the U.S. Army.

David attended the World Congress on Evangelism in 1966, held in Berlin, Germany. David told Dan he wanted to meet his son in the army. When David met the Showalter son at an airport table in Germany, the son began to weep. No pastor had ever cared to get to know him, to find out about his journey, or to walk the mile with him. But in Germany, far from the bee hives of the soldier’s youth, sat David Augsburger, twenty-eight, younger than the Showalter son, and they talked for two hours. David suddenly looked at his watch and realized his airplane would depart in four minutes. They dashed to the gate, and David only made it onto the airplane because Showalter, a U.S. military man, used every advantage he had in Cold War Germany to get David driven by car to the plane, which he boarded.

Like on the Emmaus road, Dr. David Augsburger walked with three travelers, listened to their stories, and helped to carry their load. In God’s eyes, every person is beautiful— a lesson David Augsburger learned in a Rockingham County bee house became his guiding star.

Eastern Mennonite High School Moved Toward Independence, 1964-1982

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In 1952, Samuel O. Weaver’s high school English teacher insisted that he learn how to diagram a sentence. Sam saw no need to learn how to diagram a sentence, and he told A. Grace Wenger, his EMS teacher, that he intended to return to Newport News and milk cows for his brother. She replied to Sam that he didn’t know where the Lord would call him and that he should learn how to diagram a sentence. Sam graduated from high school, college, and earned a Master’s Degree, though sixty-seven years later, in a 2019 interview, Sam laughed and admitted that he still does not know how to diagram a sentence!

In spite of not being able to diagram a sentence, God used Sam in a mighty way during his twelve years as principal of EMHS, 1969-1981. A. Grace Wenger was right—Sam didn’t know where God would lead him or in what capacity he would serve the church. It was in the late 1960s that Sam was called to lead Eastern Mennonite High School as it sought to become independent from Eastern Mennonite College.

Dr. Myron Augsburger, President of EMC, needed a high school principal with financial and marketing skills. So he hired Sam Weaver to head the high school in 1969. To lead the high school, Sam needed training in education, and he enrolled in a Master’s program at James Madison University. In the meantime, Weaver relied on dependable teachers already working at EMHS, like James Rush, David Mumaw, Lois Janzen, Harvey Yoder, Marvin Miller, Ron Koppenhaver, Gloria Lehman, Esther Augsburger, Sam Strong, and Vivian Beachy. In 1977, Sam hired Ernest Martin to develop the academic program at the school. Knowing little about academics, Sam acknowledges that “Ernie saved my hide,” by establishing increased trust and reputation in the community for curriculum at the high school.

Sam Weaver and Dorothy Shank 2019 EMHS (Andrea Wenger photo)

In the fifteen-year process of creating an independent high school, Dorothy Shank ably chaired the EMHS Board, 1974-1981. In an era when few women served as leaders in the Mennonite church, Dorothy prayed about the decision, and then said she would help the school as the first woman chair of the Board. It was Dorothy, in an interview, who stated that we all stand on someone else’s shoulders and that it is important to recognize God’s faithfulness in launching a strong and independent EMHS in the 1970s.

Eastern Mennonite School began as a high school in 1917, but it soon added junior college classes. When the junior college grew into a four-year program and earned accreditation in 1947, it created an identity problem for the high school. By the early 1960s, with enrollment growth in the college, visionaries in Virginia Mennonite Conference got busy and built a separate building for the high school in Park View, first used in 1964. Over Christmas break in 1963-1964, students and teachers picked up books from the college library and moved them to the new high school campus nearby on Parkwood Drive.

A few years after the high school moved into its new building, the EMC Board wanted the high school division to support itself, and according to the college’s business office, EMHS was operating at a deficit. In 1967, according to EMC accounting methods, the high school deficit was over $69,000. The Executive Committee of the EMC Trustees, which presided over the high school, asked the high school to balance its budget within five years. With Sam Weaver at the helm of the high school, the school reached a balanced budget by 1973. While Sam was the Principal, he gives credit to people like Daniel Bender, Dwight Wyse, Shirley J. Yoder, and Glendon Blosser for helping to set the financial ship of the school in good standing.

The years of Sam Weaver’s leadership at EMHS, 1969-1981, were tumultuous years in the United States, with the Vietnam War, an era of rebellion and protest for youth, and rising inflation driven by rising oil prices. Still, students kept coming to EMHS, from as far away as Pigeon, Michigan, Sarasota, Florida, the Tidewater region of Virginia, and northeast Ohio. By 1977 the high school had 277 students, with a waiting list. Sam’s Christian education philosophy relies on ownership of a student’s education from the home, the church, and the Christian school. Students tested Sam’s leadership, to be sure, but the school grew in many ways and earned its charter in 1982.

Dorothy Shank remembers that during her tenure as Board Chair in the late 1970s she worried when good teachers left EMHS for other positions. She prayed God would send the school good replacement teachers. She especially worried when Marvin Miller, an outstanding music teacher, 1966-1981, left EMHS. “But,” Dorothy rejoiced in the interview, “God brought in Jay Hartzler,” another exceptional music teacher.

In a 2019 interview with Sam Weaver and Dorothy Shank, they noted the excellent support for the high school from Virginia Mennonite Conference churches in the 1970s. Sam visited Districts and churches and encouraged support. Consequently, churches in Virginia Conference stepped up and supported their high school, through a Congregational Aid Plan formulated by Glendon Blosser. Sam notes the way Conference Districts sent delegates to the Board meetings, like Robert Mast from Chesapeake, Va., and Ike Oberholtzer from Newport News. In return, the EMHS Touring Choir began a spring circuit of singing in many of the supporting churches, leading them in worship and song.

Programs and buildings seemed to spring up in the 1970s, attracting many students to attend. The school built a new fine arts addition in 1972, and while Dorothy Shank served as Board Chair, the school added a gymnasium, finished in 1976. In Park School, a former public school located next door to the high school that EMHS used as early as the 1960s, the high school set up an Industrial Arts program and Art program. The college set aside rooms for high school students in Maplewood dorm, and to the present has not charged for the use of Lehman Auditorium for the annual high school graduation.

Dorothy Shank remembers that the tone of moving toward separation was tense at times, but by 1982 the two schools went different directions on amicable terms. And Sam Weaver, the balding principal who established the financial and church-based foundations for the school, decided it was time for him to move on. In 2019, an EMHS faculty member publicly recognized Sam at the annual National Honor Society Induction, when his granddaughter, Julie Weaver, joined the society. As Principal during the 1970s, Sam had signed all of the Honor Society documents.

It is not by our power, as Dorothy asserted, but by God’s grace and faithfulness, that EMHS moved toward independence from the college in the 1970s. There had been those at the college who entertained ideas on what to do with the building should the program be discontinued. With good leadership, EMHS became a viable church school, a process that began in the 1960s and culminated with a charter in 1982.

Staying with the denomination

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What does a letter buried in an Indiana archive have to do with questions about staying in Mennonite Church USA today? Quite a bit, I’d argue. The letter, which I found in our denominational archives eight years ago, reveals that some of the earliest Virginia Mennonite leaders believed in the value of a church-wide association of congregations. Upon finding the letter, I had a little party of one by the copying machine in the lobby. Since then, I’ve discovered more stories confirming that in each era, Virginia leaders have spoken for, written about, and defended the value of staying with the denomination. Please consider these brief vignettes that I think provide significant direction for today.

1853: That thin and yellowed letter in the Indiana archive came from the pen of Virginia Mennonite Bishop Martin Burkholder. Thirty-six, he wrote a letter to a Pennsylvania Bishop friend, and asked that he and other ministers in Lancaster Conference consider helping him create a general conference of Mennonites. Burkholder and Bishop Samuel Shank Sr. made several circuit trips to Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, and Canada, asking for a general conference to be formed, but to no avail. After Bishop Martin Burkholder passed away a few months before the Civil War began, it would be decades until his vision for a Mennonite association of area conferences came into being. The great irony of my search in libraries and archives along the east coast, and then finding the letter in Indiana, 157 years after it was written in the Shenandoah Valley, is that having a national archive is one outstanding rationale for staying with a denomination long term.

1897: A year before the Mennonite Church got organized in 1898, Virginia Bishop Lewis J. Heatwole traveled to Elida, Ohio, for preliminary meetings. He and other ministers like Christian Good and Samuel M. Burkholder went to see what was happening, and to report back to leaders in Virginia. L. J. Heatwole faithfully traveled to the early meetings of the Mennonite Church, and kept Virginia Conference informed about wider church developments. With L. J. Heatwole’s clear leadership toward participating, Virginia Conference joined the Mennonite General Conference in 1911.

1919: When Virginia Mennonite Conference met a year after World War I ended, it adopted eighteen fundamentals of faith. Conservative in nature, the articles were adopted, almost word for word, two years later by the Mennonite Church. Virginia Conference’s action, adopted at my home congregation in Broadway, Virginia, October 18, 1919, held significant influence and sway on the Mennonite Church for nearly two generations.

1942: When critical ministers urged Virginia Conference to leave the Mennonite Church during WWII, Bishop John L. Stauffer reacted strongly. Though some thought the broader church had become too liberal, Stauffer stated that Virginia needed to stay and not leave. Bishop Stauffer, then President of Eastern Mennonite College, had significant church wide experience, and he urged the Conference to stay in the denomination. Stauffer’s voice, along with others, won the day.

1981: Ruth Brunk Stoltzfus waited patiently to speak at the Mennonite Church Convention in Bowling Green, Ohio. The hot topic was whether women could be involved in ministry. Her speech at an open microphone stirred many, and helped to create action in the direction of accepting women in leadership. Virginia Bishop Glendon Blosser ably and gladly served as Moderator at the 1981 Bowling Green Conference, the seventh of eleven Virginia Mennonite leaders to serve as moderator of the denomination.

1997: My wife and I took our family to Orlando, Florida, for the Mennonite Church General Assembly in the summer of 1997. While our three young children enjoyed the fun times for kids and we soaked up the Florida warmth, I served as a delegate from Virginia Conference. We took our kids to Disneyland after the Mennonite Church made proactive plans to integrate with the General Conference. Owen Burkholder, from Harrisonburg, served in 1997 as both denominational moderator and as Virginia Conference minister, the lead executive staff position.

2019: Today’s issues are different than in the past, but in other ways quite similar. I teach history and Bible to descendants of Bishop Martin Burkholder, whose letter I found in Indiana. I try to help them understand the high value their ancestor held in organizing a general conference. Further, I will take a bit of Bishop Burkholder’s spirited vision with me when I serve as a delegate at the 2019 Mennonite Church USA Convention in Kansas City. My reading of Virginia Mennonite Conference history is that at each turn in the road of divisive issues, key leaders in Virginia Conference have spoken in favor of participation in the wider denomination. Such is the direction I would urge today.

Silver Lake Mill

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The historian got to turn an interior iron crank that released water at Silver Lake, Dayton, Virginia, which turned the early 20th century red wheel. The water flowed towards Cooks Creek, which drained towards the North River and eventually the South Fork of the Shenandoah River, which reached the Potomac River and finally the Chesapeake Bay. This mill was burned by Union soldiers during the Civil War and rebuilt after the war. As with the water which bubbles forth from the Silver Lake springs and ends up in the Atlantic Ocean, so our lives are interconnected and flow into the future in sometimes unknown and winding directions.

Silver Lake Mill, Dayton, Virginia, Rockingham County, Virginia July, 2016