Yes­ter­day the fam­ily vis­ited Vineland NJ Men­non­ite Church.

We were com­ing after 8:30 Mass at Julie’s church and arrived a few min­utes before the wor­ship ser­vice while they were doing their reli­gious edu­ca­tion pro­gram. But the dis­tinc­tion between reli­gious ed and wor­ship was min­i­mal, almost non-existent. Atten­dance at both was near-universal (about 110 total) and much of the wor­ship itself was reli­gious edu­ca­tion. There was a series of 15 minute’ish ser­mons (deliv­ered by var­i­ous men), bro­ken up by some four-part a capella singing (beau­ti­ful), recita­tions from a Bible verse they were mem­o­riz­ing and kneel­ing prayer (a sur­prise the first time, as they all spin around sud­denly to face the back, kneel and pray).

It’s prob­a­bly one of the most reli­giously con­sci­en­tious com­mu­ni­ties I’ve seen. A lot of the ser­vice involved review­ing belief struc­ture. Their book of dis­ci­pline is very slim, not much more than a tract, but it’s some­thing they use and they spent part of the time read­ing from it. Much of the wor­ship hour was meant to rein­force who they were, why they were and how they were–to explain over and over why they led their dis­tinc­tive life. Theirs is a vol­un­tary asso­ci­a­tion for those who agree to fol­low the author­ity of the group’s teachings. I sus­pect that every adult in the room could give a detailed pre­sen­ta­tion on con­ser­v­a­tive Men­non­ite faith and give detailed answers about points of doctrine. At the risk of insert­ing my own opin­ion I will ven­ture that the wor­ship ser­vice felt a bit dry (as Julie said, there wasn’t a ounce of mys­ti­cism in the whole pro­ceed­ing) but I don’t think the mem­bers there would feel offended by this obser­va­tion. Excit­ing the senses is less impor­tant than review­ing the val­ues and liv­ing the moral life.

Visu­ally, the group is strik­ing. Every man in the room wore a long-sleeved white dress shirt but­toned all the way up, dark pants and black shoes; all had short hair and only one or two had facial hair. I was more dis­tinc­tively plain in my broad­falls and sus­penders but the effect of sixty-or-so men and young boys all dressed alike was visu­ally stun­ning. Like a lot of plain peo­ples, the women were more obvi­ously plain and all but one or two wore lightly-colored cape dresses and head cov­er­ings (I later learned that the excep­tions were new­com­ers who weren’t yet mem­bers). Seated was seg­re­gated, women on the left, men on the right. Gen­der roles are very clear. There were kids–lots of kids–all around, and a big focus of the ser­mons was fam­ily liv­ing. One extended ser­mon focused on dis­cern­ing between pro­vid­ing well for one’s fam­ily vs. greed and the bal­ance between work­ing hard for your fam­ily vs. giv­ing up some things so you can spend time with them. Kids were present through­out the ser­vice and were rel­a­tively well behaved.

The church itself was called a meet­ing­house and was plain–no crosses of course. Peo­ple sat in pews and there was a raised area up front for min­is­ters and elders. The build­ing dou­bled as a school­house dur­ing the week and its school­rooms had a lot of Rod and Staff books, famil­iar from our own home school­ing. A mem­ber described the school as one leg of the three-legged stool, along with church and fam­ily. If any one part of the equa­tion was lack­ing in some way, the other two could help insure the child’s moral wel­fare. School was free for church mem­bers but was open on a tuition basis to non-Mennonites. These out­siders were required to make cer­tain lifestyle choices that would insure the school stayed rel­a­tively pure; the most impor­tant require­ment was that the fam­ily not have a tele­vi­sion at home.

My reg­u­lar read­ers will have one ques­tion on their mind right about now: did any­one invite us to lunch? Why yes they did! We didn’t even have to prompt it. We knew a cou­ple there–M and J, who run a restau­rant in the local farmer’s mar­ket, a favorite Sat­ur­day morn­ing stop for us. They took us under their wing when they rec­og­nized us, sit­ting with us dur­ing wor­ship and then show­ing us the school. J said that if we came back again we could come over for lunch. Then she back­tracked and offered that we could come now, explain­ing that the church had had recent dis­cus­sions over whether it was too pushy to ask first-time atten­ders to lunch or whether they should restrain them­selves and invite them on the sec­ond visit. Wow, a church that thinks about this?!

So we fol­lowed them to their place for lunch. It was a won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity to ask more ques­tions and get to know one another. Meals are impor­tant. Julie and I had won­dered why there were Men­non­ites in Vineland NJ of all places–and two Men­non­ite churches at that! Short story is that there had been a civil­ian pub­lic ser­vice facil­ity in Vineland for con­sci­en­tious objec­tors and Lancaster-area Men­non­ites decided that “the boys” sta­tioned there needed the ground­ing of a local church com­mu­nity (appar­ently other C.O. camps were scenes of debauchery–Mennonite drag rac­ing in Col­orado Springs was cited). This became Norma Men­non­ite Church, which still exists and is another local church I’ve been mean­ing to visit for years (hi Mandy!). In the 1960s, there was a great round of lib­er­al­iza­tion among Men­non­ites, an unof­fi­cial aban­don­ment of the dis­tinc­tives cod­i­fied in their books of dis­ci­plines. Many churches split and the Vineland Church was formed by those mem­bers of Norma who wanted to main­tain the discipline.

This prob­a­bly explains the strong focus on the rules of the discipline. For those want­ing more of the his­to­ries, I com­mend Stephen Scott’s excel­lent “An Intro­duc­tion to Old Order and Con­ser­v­a­tive Men­non­ite Groups” along with any­thing else Stephen Scott has writ­ten. The Vineland con­gre­ga­tion is part of the East­ern Penn­syl­va­nia Men­non­ite Church con­fer­ence, pro­filed on pages 173–176. A lot of the Men­non­ite issues and splits are echoed among Friends and we’d do well to under­stand these cousins of ours.

The result is a church that’s big on group prac­tice: the dress, the lifestyle. M. told me that they don’t believe in the­ol­ogy but in Bib­li­cism. He explained that they don’t think the Bible con­tains the word of God but instead that it is the Word of God and he paused to let the dis­tinc­tion sink in. The Bible is not to be inter­preted but read and fol­lowed, with spe­cial atten­tion given the gospels and the let­ters of Paul.

So no, I’m not going to go Con­ser­v­a­tive Men­non­ite on you all. I have a TV. My pro­fes­sion is web design (they’re not into the inter­net, natch). I’m mar­ried to a pracitic­ing Catholic (I don’t know how they would bend on that) and at this point my brain is wired in a curi­ous, out­ward way that wouldn’t fit into the nor­ma­tive struc­tures of a group like this. Doctrinally-speaking, I’m a Friend in that I think the Word of God is the Inward Christ’s direct spirit and that the Bible needs to be read in that Light. There’s a lot of peo­ple who wouldn’t fit for var­i­ous rea­sons, peo­ple who I would want in my church (they main­tain a hard line against remar­riage after divorce and I didn’t even ask about gay issues). But I have to admit that the process and struc­ture puts together a really great com­mu­nity of peo­ple. They’re hard-working, kind, charitable and not nearly as judg­men­tal as you might imagine–in prac­tice, less judg­men­tal than a lot of pro­gres­sive reli­gious peo­ple I know. Non-resistance is one of the pil­lars of their prac­tice and they were gen­uinely inter­ested in Julie’s Catholic church and my expe­ri­ences among Friends and we talked a fair bit about Islam.

Nor­mally I’d give a big thanks to the church and M & J here, except I know they won’t read this. I am grate­ful to their kind­ness in shar­ing their church, beliefs and fam­ily meal with us.