In August 2024, my paternal family gathered in Montezuma, Georgia, for a reunion. Most of my family who attended the two-day event came from the Beachy Amish Mennonite tradition. We greeted one another, told old stories, asked new questions, sang hymns, and held an auction to pay for the expenses of the reunion. Over one hundred attended from Bolivia, Costa Rica, Texas, Missouri, Kansas, Virginia, Michigan, and Georgia.
Seventy years ago, my grandparents moved from Norfolk, Virginia, to Georgia with other Beachy Amish families. They sought farmland with fewer pressures of commercialization and development, aiming to move away from the most extensive U.S. naval base. A group of Beachy families bought farms in the red dirt soil of Montezuma in Macon County, Georgia. It wasn’t easy to farm in Montezuma initially, but eventually, they succeeded with dairy operations and crop farming, including cotton.
A large Beachy Amish Mennonite church emerged in Montezuma. My Grandfather Simon L. Yoder, ordained by lot at age 26, was one of the ministers. In the early Georgia years, he preached in German, but as he got older and the language in church shifted to English, Simon ended his preaching in the mid-1970s because it was too hard to express himself in a sermon in English. Probably thirty of Simon and Lydia Yoder’s descendants have become ordained ministers. Others have gone into self-sustaining missionary work in Costa Rica, Bolivia, Panama, Mexico, and Ecuador.
The reunion taught me again the value of accepting others who are different than I am. My wife and I were graciously accepted and never challenged for our different Mennonite lifestyle. We also accepted our relatives, whom we only see every 3-4 years, at these reunions. To open the reunion, I read from my Grandfather’s parallel German-English Bible from Psalm 102:18, “This shall be written for the generation to come: and the people which shall be created shall praise the Lord. (KJV)” It seemed fitting to read the verse, as my grandparents have 1,701 descendants.
