AMISH AUCTION FLASH MOB

MENNONITES LEAVING THE CHACO

 

For a long time, I have been aware of the Mennonites who migrated to Mexico to live and farm in The Chaco and elsewhere.  A nice summary is here.  Locations shown below.

Mennonite/Anabaptists have a long history of migration, generally to avoid conflict and religious persecution, but also to find new land for farming and family living.  The New York Times recently had a lengthy article about the Mennonites in Mexico, and of the conflicts there, and once again, looking to move on after many decades in Mexico.

Read the article given in the link, most of which is copied below:

 RIVA PALACIO, Mexico — On the edge of a high plain fringed by craggy sandstone hills, Johan Friesen’s small farm is a testament to the rural providence of his Mennonite people.

Neat fields of onion, soybean and yellow corn stretch behind his concrete and adobe house. In the farmyard, a few dozen cows stand in a corral, ready for milking, and a canary-colored reaper awaits repair. But beneath this valley of orderly farms in the center of Chihuahua State, the picture is less than serene, officials and farmers say.

Underground reservoirs have been drained by thirsty crops, like corn, that are the mainstay of the Mennonites’ success, they say. Competition for groundwater — which officials have warned could run out in 20 years — has strained relations between the pacifist, Low German-speaking Mennonites and other farmers and, on occasion, incited violence.

In Chihuahua, nearly a century after the Anabaptist Mennonites migrated from Canada and transformed this valley into a lush carpet of crops, hundreds are trading the land they call home for one where land is cheaper and water is more plentiful.

“People say the water is going to run out,” said Mr. Friesen, 44, who in the spring will join 25 Mennonite families who have begun a new colony in central Argentina. “Without water you can’t grow anything.”

Santa Rita, in Mexico’s Mennonite heartland, is a colony of one-story, pitched-roofed homes, clipped lawns and straight roads — a world away from a typical Mexican village.

On a recent Saturday, perhaps the loudest noise was that of a lawn mower, steered by a young woman wearing a long dress and a straw hat.

For all their good husbandry, though, Mennonite farmers have been prodigal consumers of groundwater, experts said.

“Water has been a source of wealth in Chihuahua, and while that wealth lasts, people are not thinking about how much they are using,” said Arturo Puente González, an agricultural economist.

Still, it was “very unfair” to blame the region’s water problems on the Mennonites, said Kamel Athié Flores, the head of the Chihuahua branch of the National Water Commission, known as Conagua, which regulates supply. He pointed to city dwellers and big non-Mennonite farms that produce apples and pecans — also thirsty crops.

Cornelius Banman, a farmer from the Manitoba colony, about 50 miles south of Santa Rita, said nobody complained about the pecan farmers because they were of Mexican descent and, unlike Mennonites, who do not vote, had political clout.

 “They look on us as foreigners,” he said.

The Mennonites live apart in their colonies and rarely marry outside, though they pay workers above-average wages. The most conservative eschew electricity and other devices that would link them to the outside world.

Others use WhatsApp, a messaging application, and research land prices on the Internet, but they discourage distractions like Facebook.

The women speak little Spanish, and children are raised for a “wholesome” rural life, attending Mennonite schools until eighth grade.

The Mennonites began digging wells for irrigation in the 1980s, said Víctor Quintana Silveyra, a sociologist and politician in Chihuahua City who has studied local water use. As their population grew — they estimate their number at 60,000 — they used credit from Mennonite banks to buy land in the desert and to install irrigation systems. Since 2000, irrigated land in Chihuahua has doubled, to about 1.3 million acres, and farmers are pumping water at an “exploitative” rate, Mr. Quintana said.

Farmers said wells had to be dug three times deeper today than they were 20 years ago, a process some cannot afford. To slow extraction, the government in 2013 ruled that all new wells require a permit.

“I can see a point, in my lifetime, when the water here is finished,” said Luís Armando Portillo, a farmer who is the president of the Technical Committee of Groundwater in Ciudad Cuauhtémoc.

A group of activists known as El Barzón has campaigned to shut down illegal wells and break dams on Mennonite land. Joaquín Solorio, a Barzón activist whose parents had to sell their cattle after their well, next to a Mennonite farm, dried up, said the group had lodged complaints about illegal water use. “It’s not just Mennonites,” he said.

Defending water rights can be deadly in Chihuahua, where links between organized crime, mining and farming are murky. Alberto Almeida Fernández, a former politician who protested against illegal wells and against a Canadian mining project, died after he was shot in February. Two other activists, Mr. Solorio’s brother and sister-in-law, were killed in 2012. The police have yet to solve the crimes, and members of Barzón — three of whom have state police escorts — discard a Mennonite connection. But the deaths have added to tensions.

“You think about buying land, and then you think, ‘I don’t want problems,’ ” said Johan Rempel, a leader of the Manitoba colony who is looking for land overseas for about 100 families.

In some ways, the Mennonites’ migration is another turn of history. Those who moved to Mexico from Canada had fled persecution in Russia. Over the years, some settled in other parts of Mexico, and conservative groups broke from the Mexican colonies and moved to Bolivia, Paraguay and Belize.

But with younger farmers facing new pressures — difficulty getting permits for wells, and soaring costs for irrigated land — some predict that they will look to find land elsewhere.

About 50 of the 300 families in Mr. Friesen’s colony, Santa Rita, will move to San Luis Province in Argentina, said Abraham Wiebe Klassen, the head of the colony. Other colonies have looked at land in Russia and Colombia.

The perception that Mennonites are more attached to their culture than to their country irks other farmers.

“Their world is everywhere,” Mr. Portillo said. “They arrive, they work the earth and when they need more, they move on.”

“This is my land,” he added. “My dead lie here. I won’t leave.”

Abraham Wiebe Wiebe, who was preparing to leave for Argentina with his wife and children, disagreed. “I’m 100 percent Mexican,” he said.

Sitting in his kitchen as his wife rolled out cookies, Mr. Wiebe, 49, said he had “lost a lot of sleep” over leaving. “But our children have no future here,” he said.

 Several Mennonite farmers said they were skeptical that Chihuahua would run dry. Water was God-given, one farmer said, and only God could take it away.

 

“Doesn’t water go in a cycle?” Mr. Wiebe asked. “You pull it from the ground, and then it rains from the sky.”

Others are less sanguine. Nicolas Wall, a Mennonite who farms 700 acres of corn with his brother, worries that there will not be enough water for his children to farm.

“I think there’ll be an end to it sometime,” Mr. Wall said. “But when?”

The real problem lies with the government, farmers and experts said. The water commission is a “den of corruption,” Mr. Klassen said, a place where officials take years to process paperwork and sell well permits for thousands of dollars.

Mr. Athié did not deny corruption, but said the problem was “older than Christ.”

Mr. Puente said Mexico needed to start a national conversation. People are turning to other energy sources, he said, adding: “But there is no alternative to water. Water is water.”

Mr. Friesen will trade such worries for the challenge of starting a new life on the 250 acres he bought in Argentina. Those already there have built some houses and bought cattle, he said. Three babies have been born.

Hard as it would be to leave “the homeland,” Mr. Friesen said, his five children would “put down roots” in a new place. Standing in the dairy barn as his wife, Gertruda, milked cows, he smiled.

“We’re going to create exactly the same world there that we built here,” he said.

MENNOLINK SUNSET

 

The news was not surprising:

With MennoLink activity slowing to a crawl over the past several years, I have decided it is time to acknowledge that it has served its purpose and end the service.

I plan to turn the lights out on MennoLink at the end of December this year.  Until then, you have time to wrap up any loose ends you may have with topics that are unique to this forum. If there are people you connect with mainly on MennoLink, this is a time to find alternate ways to stay in touch.

The MennoLink bookstore is also closing. We are motivated to reduce our inventory as much as possible over the next several months. Visit

https://www.mennolink.org/books/

and order online or make Laura an offer by calling 507 427 3105. If it is in inventory, she is likely to accept any reasonable offer (usually there is only one copy of each title in inventory).

Jon Harder

Mountain Lake

When MennoLink was born, it was cutting edge regarding electronic discussions.  It grew and grew, with a variety of subcategories of discussion groups with hundreds of subscribers and many regular participants.  A couple of notables were Charlie Kraybill and Ross Bender, with Barry King as the conservative foil to the more liberal contributors.  As Jon Harder notes, the activity has slowed to a crawl, with presumably folks spending more time at other venues such as FaceBook or their own blogs.  However, I have not found any other forum where there is such a wide and deep discussion as there was at MennoLink.  I will miss it.

MH 118 NEE 606

This is fairly parochial, but most Mennonites and fellow-travelers will be able to decipher the code of this post's title.  MH = Mennonite Hymnal, 118 = "Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow" in the Blue MH, and 606 is the same hymn in the older Red MH.  As noted in this interesting article, "In the 1969 volume The Mennonite Hymnal, number 606 is a four-part choral setting of the doxology ("Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow") that has become wildly popular among North American Mennonites."  It is not the traditional doxology, but rather a juiced-up version that is sometimes know as the Mennonite "Anthem".  I have included two versions below - the first one is sung in a quicker tempo, which I prefer.  The second is not so much for the song, but for the director, our friend Arlin Buller - note how Arlin really gets in to leading the group at the Rocky Mountain Relief Sale in Rock Ford, Colorado.

HOLY SPIRIT COME WITH POWER

At our father's memorial service, music was the major component.  As previously noted, Ed's most favorite hymn was Children of the Heavenly Father, and naturally we had the congregation sing that song.  Then mother Mary, sister Kay and I each chose a favorite hymn for the service, and mine was Number 26 in the Hymnal:  A Worship Book, Holy Spirit Come With Power. In the video below, the song does not start for a bit, but the intro is worthwhile - Tim is one of the guitar instructors at the Colorado Roots Music Camp, written about here. 
As I have written before, I am a tune person more that a lyric person, so this is among my favorites for the music more so than the words, but the words follow the video.  Another interesting tidbit about the song it is unusual in that Mennonites generally do not sing about the Holy Spirit. :-)

 Holy Spirit, come with power,
breathe into our aching night.
We expect you this glad hour,
waiting for your strength and light.
We are fearful, we are ailing,
we are weak and selfish too.
Break upon your congregation,
give us vigor, life anew.


Holy Spirit, come with fire,
burn us with your presence new.
Let us as one mighty choir
sing our hymn of praise to you.
Burn away our wasted sadness
and enflame us with your love.
Burst upon your congregation,
give us gladness from above.


Holy Spirit, bring your message,
burn and breathe each word anew
deep into our tired living
till we strive your work to do.
Teach us love and trusting kindness,
lend our hands to those who hurt.
Breathe upon your congregation
and inspire us with your word.

GARRISON KEILLOR AT GOSHEN COLLEGE

A Prairie Home Companion radio show recently did a live broadcast from Sauder Music Hall at Goshen College.  Go to the link here to listen to the entire broadcast or listen to or view select segments of the show.  We were driving down the highway and received a text from our niece that the show was in progress.  We listened to the remainder, but we are glad that the whole thing is available - lots of good music!!

Keillor Leading Congregational Singing

eTOWN - OVER THE RHINE & MAX GOMEZ

One of Boulder's gems is eTown.  You can read all about eTown at their "new and improved website" http://www.etown.org/

"eTown is a place where music brings us all together and we work (and play) together to make things better.  eTown is also an independent radio program that seamlessly blends great live music from top musicians with conversation about the health and welfare of our communities. eTown has been on the air from coast to coast for more than two decades. The shows are recorded in front of a live audience, usually in eTown’s own solar powered theater, eTown Hall, in downtown Boulder, Colorado."

 

 eTown Hall on Spruce Street, about 12 blocks from our place

The eTown Venue - An Intimate 200 Seat Hall - Former Church!

Downstairs at the eTown Hall - A Nice Gathering Place

eTown Founders & Hosts - Nick and Helen Forster

" As eTown’s host, Nick nimbly walks the line between musician and radio journalist/host, playing guitar, mandolin or lap steel with world-class musical guests then switching gears to engage those artists in conversation live on stage.  As eTown’s co-host, Helen lends her golden-toned voice to both the spoken word and the musical portions of the show."

Last Monday evening, we spent a very pleasant two hours at eTown Hall with the Forsters and guests Over the Rhine and Max Gomez.  

 Linford Detweiler & Karin Bergquist

You can read a lot on line about Over the Rhine, their 20+ albums, tours, etc., but one interesting tidbit is the Ohio-Menno background of Linford.  One of the songs they sang made reference to Holmes County, which is where Rhonda was born.  The opening verse:

My father’s body lies beneath the snow
High on a hill in Holmes County, Ohio
From there you can look out across the fields
A farmer guides his horses home as day to darkness bends
And finally yields

Only after the concert did we learn that our daughter is an Over the Rhine fan - here is one of her favorite songs:

A Session With Over The Rhine

The second guest performer was Max Gomez from Taos, and we very much enjoyed his music and his wry sense of humor. 

The 2-hour event will be edited down to a one hour program for radio that should be broadcast around mid-December - I highly recommend that you try to catch it on your local NPR station - the finale, with Over the Rhine, Max Gomez, the eChievement award winner, 15 year old Corinne Hindes, on flute, Nick and Helen, and the eTown House Band is particularly memorable.

VINCENT HARDING

 

Vincent Harding at Goshen College

 

DENVER -- In March of 1967, taking note of anti-war protests at his alma mater, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sent a telegram care of Vincent Harding to the "men of conscience" at Morehouse commending their courage and calling them his inspiration.

Days later in New York, King delivered one of his most stinging criticisms of American involvement in Vietnam. Harding, at the time an adviser to Morehouse students as well as to King, is credited with writing that speech. Harding, 82, died Monday at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, according to Denver's Iliff School of Theology, where Harding taught for many years.

In Denver, Harding's home since coming to Iliff in 1981, he was remembered for his commitment to justice and peace, and for his modesty. Former Denver City Council president Elbra Wedgeworth said he never spoke much of his ties to King or other prominent civil rights leaders.

"He was just a real old school gentleman who experienced a lot, but never let it make him bitter," Wedgeworth said. "He just used those experiences to help other people."

Harding and his first wife, Rosemarie Freeney Harding, who died in 2004, met King when they traveled from Chicago to Atlanta to continue the civil rights work they had begun in the Mennonite church. Harding became an adviser and friend to both King and Coretta Scott King. He later served as the first director of what is now known as the King Center in Atlanta.

"He was a great voice for human and social progress, very much in keeping with Dr. King's and Mrs. King's advocacy for social and civil rights," Steve Klein, spokesman for the center, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. He said Harding should be remembered as a "cutting edge" historian of the civil rights movement.

In a New York Times review of Harding's 1981 book, "There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America," historian Eric Foner wrote that it was "more than a history of black protest: It is also a personal testament of hope and a brief for a view of the black experience as a saga of resistance." Harding wrote several books.

Howard Zehr, who heads the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice at Virginia's Eastern Mennonite University, remembers Harding as a visitor to his home. Zehr's father was, like Harding, a Mennonite pastor. Hearing the two — one black, one white — in conversation helped shape the younger Zehr's thinking. In 1966, Zehr became the first white student to graduate from Morehouse.

For many years, Zehr said in a telephone interview Wednesday, "I could sort of see Vincent on my shoulder, keeping me committed. He had a quiet way of doing that."

Harding had been visiting the East Coast, including speaking at Eastern Mennonite University, when he died.

In 2012, Vicki Crawford, director of the Office of the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection, brought Harding back to Atlanta as a visiting professor. In the 1960s, Harding had taught at Spelman, the women's college near Morehouse. Crawford said she was struck by the rapport Harding had with students.

"He was an incredible listener," Crawford said. "His classes would be very quiet, punctuated by long periods of silence, reflective silence."

The New York-born Harding taught at Denver's Iliff until his retirement in 2004, and his legacy there includes a research center on social change that he and Rosemarie Freeney Harding founded in 1997.

Iliff president Thomas Wolfe said he had asked Harding to deliver the commencement address scheduled for June 4. Instead of a traditional speech, Harding suggested the kind of Socratic discussion he favored in class. Three Iliff students had been recruited to take part.

"Vincent was saying, 'This is how we pass the mantle from teacher to student, so the student becomes the teacher,'" Wolfe said.

Instead of finding a replacement speaker, Wolfe said the three students would share their memories of Harding.

Harding is survived by his second wife, Aljosie Aldrich Harding; daughter, Rachel Harding; and son, Jonathan Harding. Funeral plans were not yet set.

DES -  For more information on Vincent including audio and video, please visit here.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/05/21/4129635/vincent-harding-activist-king.html#storylink=cpy

KEILLOR AT GOSHEN COLLEGE

I once saw Garrison Keillor in concert at Pepperdine - it was very good, but I thought then that given his affinity for singing, he would enjoy an evening at Goshen College.  Well it happened this fall, and here is what he had to say:

“I think I maybe did the best show of my life Tuesday night and all thanks to the audience, a thousand Mennonites and their neighbors in a small town in Indiana. It was mostly impromptu, fast-paced, jumpy, with a big complicated pontoon-boat story in the middle, and at the beginning and end we sang. They sang beautiful four- and six-part harmony in a fine acoustic hall and I sang a modest bass, no arm waving, no coaxing, and the sound of this impromptu choir made everyone intensely happy. I steered them directly from one verse of a song to a chorus of another, no pausing, and when I did pause once, trying to figure out where to go next, they did not applaud. Marvellous. Because it was not a show. It was for real. Mennonites are quiet, peace-loving, kind-hearted people, salt of the earth, If I knew a church where people sang like that, I’d be there every Sunday, sitting right smack in the middle. Thank you, Goshen College.”

A couple of more lines from the evening:

 “Women look down on men. Women have always looked down on men because men fart so much. So much more than women because women don’t keep their mouths closed long enough to keep the pressure built up.”

But possibly the funniest impromptu moment occurred when a cell phone could be heard ringing from the seats. How did Keillor react?

“Tell them I’m almost done.” 

JOHN HOWARD YODER

I recently noted this article about JHY in the New York Times.  When I was in school, Yoder was on campus at Goshen College because the seminary was still in Goshen.  I remember him as usually looking disheveled and seemingly in another world.  As the article notes, his scholarship is both embraced and criticized, and continues to be analyzed long after his death, but his behavioral misdeeds make understanding his work and the church's response even more complex.  The article link is here.

A Theologian’s Influence, and Stained Past, Live On

By MARK OPPENHEIMER

Can a bad person be a good theologian? 

All of us fall short of our ideals, of course. But there is a common-sense expectation that religious professionals should try to behave as they counsel others to behave. They may not be perfect, but they should not be louts or jerks.

By that standard, few have failed as egregiously as John Howard Yoder, America’s most influential pacifist theologian. In his teaching at Notre Dame and elsewhere, and in books like “The Politics of Jesus,” published in 1972, Mr. Yoder, a Mennonite Christian, helped thousands formulate their opposition to violence. Yet, as he admitted before his death in 1997, he groped many women or pressured them to have physical contact, although never sexual intercourse.

Mr. Yoder’s scholarly pre-eminence keeps growing, and with it the ambivalence that Mennonites and other Christians feel toward him. In August, Ervin Stutzman, executive director of Mennonite Church USA, which has about 100,000 members, announced the formation of a “discernment group” to guide a process to “contribute to healing for victims” of Mr. Yoder’s abuse. 

In 1992, after eight women pressured the church to take action, Mr. Yoder’s ministerial credentials were suspended and he was ordered into church-supervised rehabilitation. It soon emerged that Mr. Yoder’s 1984 departure from what is now called Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, in Elkhart, Ind., had also been precipitated by allegations against him. He left for Notre Dame, where administrators were not told what had happened at his last job. 

But Mr. Yoder emerged as a hero of repentance. His accusers never spoke publicly, and their anonymity made it easier for some to wish away their allegations. And in December 1997, after about 30 meetings for supervision and counseling, Mr. Yoder and his wife were welcomed back to worship at Prairie Street Mennonite Church in Elkhart. To cap a perfect narrative of redemption, he died at 70 at the end of that month

.

Without denying the wrongness of his acts, his supporters continued to celebrate Mr. Yoder and the Mennonite leaders who had rehabilitated him.

“How John’s community responded to his inappropriate relations with women” was “a testimony to a community that has learned over time that the work of peace is slow, painful, and hard,” wrote Stanley Hauerwas, a retired Duke University professor and Yoder’s heir as the leading pacifist theologian, in his 2010 memoir. 

Mr. Yoder’s obituary in The New York Times did not mention his sexual misdeeds. None of his victims received monetary settlements. Mr. Yoder apologized, sort of, with a statement that “he was sorry that we had misunderstood his intentions, as he never meant to hurt us,” according to Carolyn Holderread Heggen, one of the eight complainants. 

Ted Koontz, a professor at Mr. Yoder’s old seminary and a member of the church’s discernment group, said the church needed to take stock of what was — or was not — done for Mr. Yoder’s victims.

“There are a lot of different opinions about what was done and wasn’t done to hold him accountable,” Professor Koontz said. 

The committee will probably conclude its work, he added, in time for the Mennonite Church USA’s 2015 convention in Kansas City, Mo., where there may be a ceremony “of confession, repentance, reconciliation.” 

Of course, reconciliation was what the four-year process in the 1990s was supposed to achieve. It obviously failed. And Mr. Yoder remains inescapable for Mennonites, his work read and referenced often and everywhere. 

“Physically he died, but his work and his theological writings live on,” said Linda Gehman Peachey, a freelance writer in Lancaster, Pa., who is also part of the six-member group. “For those who have known this other side — his behavior, particularly toward women — that is really painful.” 

Mr. Yoder’s memory also presents a theological quandary. Mennonites tend to consider behavior more important than belief. For them, to study a man’s writings while ignoring his life is especially un-Mennonite. 

Professor Koontz regularly tells his students reading Mr. Yoder that “his behavior is one thing we ought to take into account when we read his work.” Ms. Peachey noted that Mr. Yoder wrote a good deal about suffering as a Christian virtue, but “if you know this part of the story” — how he made women suffer — “you tend to read it with a different eye.” 

Mr. Yoder seemed very attentive to the notion that theology should align with behavior. It turns out that in unpublished papers, he formulated a bizarre justification of extramarital sexual contact. 

In his memoir, Professor Hauerwas alludes to what Tom Price, a reporter for the newspaper The Elkhart Truth, described in a five-part 1992 series as Mr. Yoder’s defense of “nongenital affective relationships.” Mr. Yoder said that touching a woman could be an act of “familial” love, in which a man helped to heal a traumatized “sister.” 

Mr. Price quoted from “What Is Adultery of the Heart?” a 1975 essay in which Mr. Yoder wrote that a “bodily” embrace “can celebrate and reinforce familial security,” rather than “provoking guilt-producing erotic reactions.”

Ms. Heggen, called Tina in the newspaper articles, told Mr. Price that Mr. Yoder had a grandiose explanation for his advances, which he tried out on multiple women. 

“We are on the cutting edge,” Mr. Yoder would say, according to Ms. Heggen. “We are developing new models for the church. We are part of this grand, noble experiment. The Christian church will be indebted to us for years to come.” 

On Wednesday, Ms. Heggen, agreeing to be identified as a victim for the first time, recalled driving Mr. Yoder to the Albuquerque airport in 1982. He asked her to get out for “a proper goodbye,” Ms. Heggen said. “Then he pulled me into his belly and held me tight for a painfully long time. I realized I couldn’t escape his clutch.”

In 1992, Ms. Heggen, who now lives in Oregon, published a book about sexual abuse. Traveling the world, lecturing about her book, she said she met “significantly” more than 50 women who said that Mr. Yoder had touched them or made advances. 

“Women inevitably come up after these events and tell you their story,” Ms. Heggen said. “The scenario was so familiar to me, and I would interrupt them and say, ‘Are you talking about John Howard Yoder?’ They would say, ‘How did you know?’ ” 

After his advance toward her, Mr. Yoder mailed Ms. Heggen an essay in which he advocated physical contact, including nudity, between unmarried people, so long as “there wasn’t lust.” 

Ms. Heggen had a theory of what Mr. Yoder might have been thinking. “ ‘I have created this great peace theology,’ ” she began, trying to put his thoughts into words. “ ‘And you and I are developing a new Christian theology of sexuality.’ ”

 

MADOFF OF THE AMISH

Broken Trust in Amish Country



By DIANA B. HENRIQUES





SUGARCREEK, Ohio


THIS village is as sweet as its name. Main Street climbs gently from a tidy railroad crossing, past a few gift shops to the simple brick First Mennonite Church.


Beyond the hamlet lie the farms and buggy-traveled lanes of the eastern Ohio Amish country, one of the largest clusters of Amish and Mennonite settlements in the nation. Craft markets, furniture shops and restaurants dot the county roads. Those businesses carry the names — Yoder, Miller, Troyer, Beachy — that fill entire chapters of the slim local telephone book.


This postcard from a gentler and simpler America is about as unlikely a place imaginable for the news that broke in September: one of Sugarcreek’s own, a prominent member of what some people here call the Plain Community, was under arrest, accused by federal prosecutors of running a Ponzi scheme that betrayed his neighbors’ trust and wiped out more than $16 million of their savings.


The news media made the obvious comparisons.


The elderly defendant, Monroe L. Beachy, had been a respected financial figure in his community for decades — just like Bernard L. Madoff, the master swindler.


As in the Madoff case, Mr. Beachy’s seemingly successful investment firm employed several members of his family. He, too, first attracted clients who shared his religious faith. And he, too, was accused of defrauding charities, congregations, even his own relatives. Predictably, headlines have branded Mr. Beachy “the Amish Bernie Madoff,” although he is presumed innocent as he heads to trial next month.


But the most intriguing aspect of Monroe Beachy’s story is how different it seems from Bernie Madoff’s — and from almost every other story with a “Ponzi scheme” headline over the years.


While victims of Mr. Madoff’s fraud, like most Ponzi victims, condemned their accused betrayer in court as a monster, many of Mr. Beachy’s investors have said in court that it is more important to forgive him than to recover their money.


While the Madoff case and others like it have inevitably created conflict between longtime investors fighting to keep their fictional profits and more recent investors trying to recover lost principal, some Beachy investors urged that their own share of his estate should be given to those in greater need.


And while Mr. Madoff’s wife and sons instantly became social pariahs in Manhattan, Mr. Beachy’s wife and children remain at his farmstead here, living peacefully with their neighbors.


But like the Madoff case, the Beachy case has left an indelible mark on the nation’s bankruptcy record.


It became the forum for a rare bankruptcy court battle over religious freedom, with Mr. Beachy’s Amish and Mennonite creditors insisting that the court’s way of dealing with his downfall could not be squared with their faith or with his.


“Monroe Beachy in his time of distress breached the trust of his fellow Amish and Mennonites” by entering an “environment of coercion and self-protection in the bankruptcy court,” a group of church elders told the judge, urging him to put the case into the hands of the church where it belonged.


That would accomplish three worthy goals, they said. It would allow a less expensive, more advantageous financial workout “based on Christian principles of love and care for the poor and needy.” It would create a setting in which “Biblical forgiveness and restoration can be found between Monroe Beachy” and those he is accused of betraying. And it would repair “the tarnished testimony and integrity of the Plain Community.”


The Beachy name is not only common in Sugarcreek but also notable in the history of the Plain Community, which encompasses a number of Amish and Mennonite sects. One is known as the Beachy Amish, a splinter sect formed in the late 1920s and named for a founding bishop, Moses M. Beachy.


Monroe Beachy, in his late 70s, is married and has five adult children, three sons and two daughters, all living in the Sugarcreek area. He and his wife, Alma, and their daughters live in a tidy home on a 60-acre farm near the muddy verge of Township Road 162, barely wide enough for two cars to pass. The two-story house next door, which he built for his family in 1988, is now a son’s home. Monroe Beachy does not drive a car; his only vehicle is a horse-drawn buggy, valued at $3,300, including the horse.


Under oath at a creditor meeting in August 2010, he described his background. He has an eighth-grade education, he said, and attended a few high school classes. As an adult, he took some tax-preparation courses with H & R Block. With an associate, he formed an informal partnership, A & M Investments, in the mid-1980s to operate an H & R Block franchise, but the partnership was dissolved in 2000 and the franchise was sold. Thereafter, Mr. Beachy retained sole control of A & M Investments but also set up his own business, Payrolls & More, which processed paychecks for small businesses.


He was clearly a trusted community figure. He served for 15 years as treasurer of the Amish Helping Fund, a nonprofit that collects money from the Plain Community and uses it to provide mortgagesfor the purchase of farms and homes in that community. He kept the group’s records in a separate fireproof file box at his modest office at 122 West Main Street, across from the First Mennonite Church.


His A & M Investments eventually took in about $33 million, paying investors a fixed return that was better than they could get at the bank. He kept a share of their interest earnings as his fee. He assured those who asked that he invested in only very low-risk government bonds, regulators said in court filings.


In a modest way, Mr. Beachy helped the local economy, making undocumented loans on a handshake to the owners of a bakery and a popular noodle company, who paid him back when they could. He invested cash for dozens of businesses — a general store, several furniture makers, two concrete companies, an electric supply company and at least one large Amish-style restaurant.


Word spread about his safe, steady returns. Parents encouraged their children to practice thrift by opening A & M accounts, too. By spring 2010, he was mailing his simple one-page, seven-line statements to almost 2,700 investors, largely Amish and Mennonite, in more than two dozen states from Alaska to Arkansas.


THEN, on June 30, 2010, it all came crashing down.


That day, Mr. Beachy abruptly filed for bankruptcy, declaring liabilities of $33.2 million and assets of just $17.9 million. Two of the region’s small newspapers reported that there was a note on the door of A & M’s darkened office: “Due to an investigation A & M Investments is closed.”


One of the papers, followed more closely by the Amish community, reported receiving a statement in which Mr. Beachy disclosed the bankruptcy filing and said: “I deeply regret the concerns caused in our community and the shortfall in A & M’s investments. I took this action to ensure that account holders are treated as fairly as possible.”


The first creditor meeting was held that August, in the banquet hall of the Carlisle Inn in nearby Walnut Creek, one of the few places within reach that could accommodate the estimated 600 people who attended.


Under questioning by the bankruptcy trustee, Mr. Beachy explained that some “bad investments were made” and had gone sour, wiping out roughly half of his investors’ savings. He said these losses were in dot-com stocks and other stocks related to the Internet.


What about his assurances that he invested only in safe government bonds? “If we misled anyone, we did not do it on purpose,” he told one investor who questioned him. He said he had relied on recommendations from several advisers, including a broker in New York named Paul Chironis, and had failed to cut losses and seek advice many years ago, when the losses occurred.


The court-appointed bankruptcy trustee, Anne Piero Silagy, pressed Mr. Beachy about when he had decided to file for bankruptcy.


“When the subpoena was issued,” he said.


When the trustee opened the floor to questions, a man named Ryan Miller asked Mr. Beachy the obvious follow-up question: What subpoena?


“A subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission.”


Mr. Miller persisted. “For what?”


“To examine the bank accounts,” Mr. Beachy said.


Lawyers with the Chicago office of the S.E.C. would not disclose what drew their attention to Mr. Beachy or why they served him with the subpoena that prompted his hasty bankruptcy filing. But by September 2010, the government’s concerns were emerging in court filings.


Daniel M. McDermott, the Justice Department’s United States Trustee for the northern Ohio region, asserted in one document that Mr. Beachy had been insolvent at least since December 2001 and probably as early as 1998, when his handwritten ledger showed his portfolio’s market value as $23.6 million, while investors were owed $26.6 million. Mr. Beachy hid these losses from his clients and continued to accept new cash, Mr. McDermott said.


Moreover, the ledgers for two entire years — from January 1999 to December 2000, a period that included the bursting of the dot-com bubble — were missing, without explanation, according to Mr. McDermott. Investigators believed A & M Investments had been a Ponzi scheme, he reported.


The portrait of Mr. Beachy’s financial career sketched out in a civil lawsuit filed by the S.E.C. last February contrasted sharply with the homespun biography he gave creditors six months earlier.


In July 1987, according to regulators, Mr. Beachy had passed the qualifying exam for a Series 6 securities license from Finra, the securities industry’s self-regulatory group. The license entitled him to sell mutual funds and variable annuities. Finra’s records show he was licensed through H. D. Vest Investment Services of Irvine, Tex., a national network of independent brokers and tax advisers that was acquired by Wells Fargo in 2001 and sold by the bank last year.


In 1998, according to court records, Mr. Beachy was among a handful of investors who paid $1.8 million to become preferred shareholders in W. J. Nolan & Company, a tiny brokerage firm in New York City. At the time, the firm was already in serious trouble with its regulators, and in October 2001 it closed its doors.


The preferred shareholders sued in state court in New York to recover their investment. In response, the firm sued two of its former brokers, contending that they had been responsible for misleading the preferred shareholders. One of those brokers was Mr. Chironis, the broker Mr. Beachy said had advised him in his disastrous foray into technology stocks.


In a telephone interview last week, Mr. Chironis denied that he had misled the preferred shareholders and said he did not feel that he had any responsibility for the losses Mr. Beachy incurred on those shares, or on any other investment he made over the years. “He was always in control of his own accounts,” Mr. Chironis said.


The W. J. Nolan litigation was settled out of court in 2004, the same year Mr. Beachy terminated his Series 6 registration with Finra. But Mr. Beachy did not terminate his relationship with Mr. Chironis, according to regulators. Mr. Beachy said at the creditor meeting in 2010 that not breaking his ties to the broker was “another mistake” he regretted.


In April 2010, less than three months before Mr. Beachy received the subpoena, the S.E.C. filed an administrative case accusing Mr. Chironis of defrauding the Sisters of Charity, an order of mostly elderly nuns in the Bronx. In January 2011, he was barred from the securities industry after he settled the S.E.C. case without admitting any wrongdoing and agreed to pay $350,000 to the nuns. Regulators would not say if their interest in Mr. Beachy grew out of the Chironis case.


Mr. Chironis said his dealings with Mr. Beachy went back more than a decade. But the assets Mr. Beachy still owned when he went bankrupt were certainly riskier than the plain-vanilla bonds his clients thought he was buying.


He had invested in various brand-name mutual funds, including one of the T. Rowe Price Spectrum funds, as well as the Pioneer Fund and Fidelity Magellan. He had $1.4 million in one high-yield mutual fund — also known as a junk bond fund — and smaller investments in other high-yield funds. And he had $350,000 in a margin account at the New York firm through which he dealt with Mr. Chironis.


Those holdings were at odds with Mr. Beachy’s assurances to creditors that he had turned away from riskier investments after his dot-com losses and had never traded on margin.


More than a dozen churches, church building funds, fellowships and ministries lost money in Mr. Beachy’s downfall. One family’s losses included the emergency savings relied upon by its daughter and son-in-law, serving as missionaries in Central America.


Many A & M accounts were small by Wall Street standards, but were crucial in a community whose citizens may have religious scruples against drawing Social Security benefits. The anxiety and confusion of many elderly investors is evident in the handwritten notes in the bankruptcy court docket.


“Greetings in the Name of Jesus!” one 76-year-old widow in the Miller clan wrote. “I had [$]4,327.80 in A & M Investments with Monroe Beachy. And I would like to tell you that I need it very badly.” She described her current ailments, osteoarthritis and diabetes, and concluded: “I hope and pray you can send me my money back. I need it. Thank you kindly.”


WITHIN weeks of Mr. Beachy’s bankruptcy, religious leaders were working on a proposal to handle the settlement of claims outside the court process, using the cash remaining in the estate, as well as donations from Amish and Mennonite communities nationwide.


In a document submitted to the court, the ad hoc committee organizing the effort explained the Plain Community’s feelings about the bankruptcy. “Bankruptcy is morally abhorrent and is not consistent with the values we hold,” the committee said. “It is a dishonorable discharge of debts.”


One passage in the document called for Mr. Beachy’s clients to seek reconciliation with him. Forgiving a brother does not require shielding him from his fate, it said. But extending charity “to those harmed, and to those that have done the harm is our testimony to the world of love and forgiveness.”


Wayne H. Wengerd, the committee chairman, said last week that he had known the effort “was a long shot — but it was important to provide a testimony to the world and to our own people about what we stand for.” He added: “We were willing to sacrifice to live out those teachings. The teachings are more important than money.”


The committee also sent out a letter of apology from Mr. Beachy:


“Hello: At A & M Investments our aim was to provide a decent rate of interest and for a number of years it worked. However some investments in stocks and bonds should not have been made and when they went bad I should have asked for advice from other people and the church. Instead I kept this to myself and went on hoping to recover at least some of the loss. But then we were forced to shut down at a low point in the economy and the loss is large. I am really sorry for this.”


He concluded: “I have made a confession to God and the church and feel I have been forgiven. I hope you can forgive me too.”


For the Amish plan to be put into action, the bankruptcy court would have had to dismiss Mr. Beachy’s case and turn back the clock to the moment before his filing. Only then could his dealings with creditors follow a different path.


The committee’s vigorous campaign to have the Beachy case dismissed, based on the First Amendment’s religious freedom protections and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, won wide support. More than 2,300 creditors filed form letters with the court endorsing the plan.


THERE may have been some practical reasons for that. The public’s fascination with the charm of the Amish is the bedrock of the tourist economy here, and the Sugarcreek scandal was an ugly scar on that landscape. A solution emphasizing fundamental Amish values might well neutralize any damage that the Beachy case inflicted on the Amish image.


But the campaign’s intensity left some non-Amish creditors feeling uncomfortable. One grandmother recalled attending a meeting at which supporters insisted on a “standing vote,” not a secret ballot. She opposed the plan, she said, but she remained seated because she felt intimidated at having her position exposed publicly.


No such qualms afflicted the S.E.C. legal staff, the United States Trustee’s office and the bankruptcy trustee. In court, they all stood firmly against the alternative plan. It would lack judicial oversight and protections against mismanagement or unequal treatment, they argued. And it could well be unconstitutionally unfair to a small minority of non-Amish creditors, who would be steered out of court and into a religious forum tacitly endorsed by the government.


Last March, Federal Bankruptcy Judge Russ Kendig in Canton, in the federal courthouse closest to Sugarcreek, ruled that “delegating insolvency proceedings to a religious body” would be unconstitutional.


Given the high constitutional hurdle, the judge said, Mr. Beachy simply had not “met his burden” for showing why his case should be dismissed after it had started moving through the court. Once “the rock begins to roll,” he concluded, something much stronger than a change of mind is required to stop it.


No part of this story contrasts as sharply with the real Bernie Madoff case as what happened next.


In the Madoff bankruptcy, virtually every adverse ruling has been appealed by the losing side, as have disputed decisions in countless other high-profile bankruptcy cases. But when the Amish leaders lost their passionate plea, rooted in their deeply held religious beliefs, they simply sent the judge a letter.


“We are agreed among ourselves to accept your ruling as the will of Almighty God in this matter,” they wrote, after thanking him for considering their point of view so carefully. “If there is anything which we can do as members of the Amish-Mennonite community to facilitate the bankruptcy process and help bring it to a speedy conclusion please do not hesitate to contact any member” of the committee.


On Sept. 15, 2011, more than a year after Monroe Beachy closed his office and made his fateful trip to bankruptcy court, federal prosecutors held a press conference in Cleveland to announce that he had been indicted on mail fraud charges arising from a “scheme to defraud” that they said dated back to 1990.


He is scheduled to go to trial next month in Youngstown. If convicted, he faces a possible jail term of up to 20 years. His court-appointed defender, a prominent Youngstown criminal defense lawyer, J. Gerald Ingram, did not respond to messages seeking comment on the case.


The bankruptcy case in Canton, meanwhile, is moving forward. The trustee, Ms. Silagy, is optimistic that up to 50 cents on the dollar ultimately can be returned to investors, according to her lawyer, Bruce R. Schrader. Some creditors have filed letters with the court expressing frustration with the delay, but he said that only about 400 creditor claims, out of 2,600, have not been pursued in court.


The criminal trial, scheduled to open on March 19, will no doubt generate new headlines in Sugarcreek — which would much rather tell the world the sort of news it had last month: the village will soon install one of the world’s largest cuckoo clocks.


Mayor Clayton Weller of Sugarcreek says he hopes the trial will not cause renewed rancor. “I personally feel that the people are accepting what has happened,” he said. “They are understanding, and most of them are forgiving.”


But as the church fathers see it, something of lasting importance was tried in Sugarcreek.


“A hundred years from now, what will be the difference about how much money we had here?” asked Emery E. Miller, a village resident and a proponent of the alternative plan, at the first creditors meeting. “But a hundred years from now, there will be a difference in how we responded to this from our moral being, from a moral level — the choices we made to forgive or not to forgive.”

MENNOMEX

 

While doing a little web-searching to learn more about Amish author David Kline, I came across The Amish Cook website and this wonderful picture of a restaurant in Aylmer, Ontario.  Kevin Williams writes:  

I have visited so many Amish and Mennonite food businesses through the years: bakeries, bulk food stores, candy-makers…but the above photo captures one of my favorite Amish country businesses: Menno-Mex on the eastern edge of Aylmer.  Aylmer is a tiny town but a bubbling cultural cauldron of plain…there is a large contingent of Russian-Mennonites with their European features and distinctive dress, an equally sizable community of traditional Old Order Amish, and still a bunch of Mexican Mennonites who have returned from south of the Rio Grande to live. It’s a community coursing with a “plain diversity” unseen elsewhere. Many of the Mexican Mennonites, fair-featured as they are, still crave the staples they grew up on.  It’s this group of returnees that was the inspiration behind Menno-Mex a store that sells typical plain food and wares alongside jalapenos, tamales, and Mazapan chocolates.  Truly a unique – and as the photo shows – colorful store to visit. 

SIGH, my one regret is not getting a recipe for caramel-walnut pie t from an Amish man in Aylmer.  He had offered to run inside to get it from his wife, but being in kind of a hurry I passed up on that…bet it was good!

More on David Kline later.....

JAMES MILLER - GOSHEN COLLEGE BIOLOGY PROFESSOR

REMEMBERING DR. JAMES MILLER
		Dear alumni, We in the Biological Sciences Department are grieving as we come to terms with the death of long-time Professor of Biology Dr. Jim Miller who was tragically killed on Sunday morning, October 9th. It has been a dark week, filled with uncertainty and confusion. But there is light. We have received strength through emails, phone calls, and offers of help. Students and faculty are caring for one another in genuine and tender ways. This tragedy has shown us the deep impact one life can have. In order to offer encouragement to current students and Dr. Miller's family, we extend a special invitation to email your memories and stories of having Dr. Miller as a professor. We will post your memories on Dr. Miller's bulletin board across from his office. Later they will be given to Jim's wife Linda. This week the halls of biology have felt like hallowed space - yet we realize anew that Jim had been working tirelessly to bring hope, wholeness, even holiness to his daily interactions with his many students - a hallowed space 30 years in the making. Prayerfully, Ryan Sensenig, Jody Saylor, & Andy Ammons Department of Biological Sciences

Dealing with Jim Miller’s death

Author: Sara Alvarez • Oct 26th, 2011 

Time and community will heal the wounds inflicted on the Goshen College community after Jim Miller’s death on Oct. 9. But the sadness and new awareness of safety will not disappear quickly.

When Miller, a biology professor, was murdered in his home close to the campus, not only did students and faculty lose a member of their community, they were also made aware of their own vulnerability.

“On the same day that we heard about Jim’s death, we decided we needed to get a dog,” said Niles Graber-Miller, a sophomore whose father, Keith Graber-Miller, is a professor. “It seemed so random, and it was directed to someone who was too familiar, too close … A dog is an effective way of keeping people away and is a non-lethal alternative.”

Lizzy Diaz, a senior in one of Miller’s classes this semester, said that she tries not to be scared for her safety but can’t help worrying sometimes.  “I have had moments when I am at the computer lab really late, and then I have to walk back to my apartment by myself and I feel fear,” said Diaz. “I keep telling myself, I will not let this scare me, [but] it is hard to imagine that this happened so close to campus … in what I thought was a “safe” neighborhood.”

Bob Yoder, the campus pastor, noted that the effects of Miller’s murder extend beyond the campus and into the Goshen community.  “I’ve noticed a lot more lights on in the street, and we’re paying much more attention that our doors are locked,” said Yoder.

However, some students say that they don’t feel like the murder has made them less safe. Ted Maust, a senior, said that even though he lives off-campus, he doesn’t feel like his safety has been compromised.
“[The murder] doesn’t seem systematic, it seems more random,” said Maust.

While many students have fallen back into the routine of school, Miller’s name and the murder are topics of discussion that arise between friends and with people outside of the campus.  “I think the broader community is still conscious of it all, so it keeps the campus conscious as well and puts it on the table for discussion,” said Maust.

To make sure that Goshen takes time to remember Miller, Yoder has tried to be attentive to the spiritual needs of the grieving campus. A formal memorial service is being planned for November 7 and a group of faculty and students will put together the memorial which will celebrate Miller’s life on campus.  The strongest emotions felt by the Goshen College community are from those who knew Miller best. Miller was a professor at the college for 31 years and taught higher-level biology classes. He taught two classes and mentored 10 students in research this semester.

Ryan Sensenig, the biology department chair, said that faculty and students are aware of each other’s grief and try to help one another along in the mourning process.  “The differences between professors and students dissolved as we tried to navigate something that wasn’t on the syllabus,” said Sensenig.  When Miller’s students gathered for class for the first time after his absence, Sensenig said they spent most of the class telling jokes–something that Miller integrated into every lesson.  At another point in a class, students were given photocopies of Miller’s notes to study with.  “There were jokes in the margins, whiteout marks and hand-written additions to the notes,” said Sensenig. “I think the students enjoyed the tangible representation of his repertoire of teaching.”

A key to the healing process has been to let each person decide how they want to mourn. For example, the students researching with Miller were given the option of having a new faculty mentor who would help them continue with their research or leaving it on hold until a later date.  “We’re trying to be as transparent and open and honest with the each other as possible,” said Sensenig. “We’re working with the students to give feedback.”

For Sensenig, the support offered from outside Goshen College campus has been helpful. Alumni and colleagues have emailed their sympathy and offered to help the college in different ways.  “I’ve received emails from all over and offers by professionals to Skype-in lessons for his classes,” said Sensenig.  To cover Miller’s two classes, the college has hired Rich Manalis, a close colleague of Miller’s and a former professor, and Douglas Swartzendruber, a biology alumnus from Colo. who is also a former professor. Manalis will cover the physiology research lab and Swartzendruber will teach Human Pathophysiology. “The two candidates are closely connected to the college and voluntarily offered assistance,” said Sensenig.

“The community at the college, which includes alumni, is connected to each other and those things help us to heal and realize the connection that we have with others,” said Sensenig.  This network of connections embraces those most affected by the loss and helps them to pick up the pieces. For one student who was working with Miller to prepare for an upcoming medical school interview, Sensenig said that a retired medical doctor volunteered to work with her and prepare her for the experience.

All the help offered by the community has helped the science department deal logistically with the loss, and allowed the department to focus more energy on grieving Miller’s death.

“I think that the thing that has most helped me in coping is talking with others who share my pain,” said Diaz. “So many emotions have taken over me and I still have trouble dealing with it. But talking about it, it makes it real. Only by accepting what happened can I begin to cope. It’s a process and it’s going to take time.”