Mom's Interview

Note: over the next week or so, I will be publishing short interviews with Mom, Dad, Jesse and Aaron. Mom received the most votes in last month's poll, so I'll post her interview first.

What made you decide to switch to a Charismatic church after growing up in a Mennonite church?

When I was senior in high school, I became very interested in following Jesus in a deliberate way, rather than as an expected social convention. I was very different in my senior year than I had been until that time. I started going to concerts at Under the Sun Ministries in Archbold, Ohio, which was an outgrowth of the Jesus movement of the 70s. I would drive underclassmen to these concerts, using up many gallons of my dad's gasoline.  I don't remember him complaining about it either!

My good friends from before didn't understand this change, and I don't fault them for that, as I didn't know how to explain it, and I don't know that I tried to. I didn't "unfriend" them, but I didn't hang out with them as much either.

I also started putting Bible verses on the outside of locker several times a week. Often they would disappear, and I would just put up a new one the next day. I wasn't too bothered by where they disappeared to, but later I found out that some other people were upset about this for me. They thought it was mean that people would take those off my locker.

It was into this season in my life that my future husband entered the picture. He was involved in a start up church, Living Word Fellowship, and he was totally into church stuff, so it seemed natural to me that I would go to the new church with him.

I had no idea at the time how much of an impact this made on my relatives, especially my mom's family. I was the first person to leave the Mennonite Church in this large family, and I was the oldest grandchild in my generation. I think some of them feared that I would lead some others in my generation away from the Mennonite ways. I, of course, did not even think nor worry about this. I had the same "live and let live" attitude about this as I had about my locker signs. It just was outside my realm of concern. Later I found out that my father was bothered by people's criticism of my decision, and he defended me to them sometimes.

I did not choose to leave the Mennonite Church, so much as I chose to follow Jesus the best I knew how. In fact, to this day, I have never asked Lockport Mennonite Church to remove me from their membership, and I still feel like a part of them, culturally.


Did Dad ever make a spiritual decision for the family with which you strongly disagreed at the time?

I don't think we ever disagreed on a spiritual decision. We did disagree on some financial decisions.  I have always been more financially conservative than him. One time we bought a house when I preferred not to, as I was fearful of taking on a home loan, when our rent was only $90 a month for the house in Archbold on Wilson Street. But he was convinced that we should buy a house, so we did, and he knew that while I disagreed, I also had told him that we have to make a decision one way or the other, so I would go with his preference on it. The other time this happened was with the purchase of a used car, and again I was uneasy with taking out a car loan, but I went with his decision on it.

We have been very lucky in that we have changed on fairly parallel paths spiritually over the years. We don't agree completely on some of these things even today, but we have traveled from fundamentalist charismatic all the way to liberal, cultural Mennonite with a strong flavor of universalism or even agnosticism, without any conflict over it in our marriage.  That is amazing, and it is certainly not due to anything that we can claim as our own genius!



To what extent did you pay attention to what your kids were doing during church? Did you ever notice (or later realize that you failed to notice ;) ) us getting into mischief?

I tried to keep you quiet during the services. As little kids, I didn't care if you played with toys or ate snacks or colored, as long as you were quiet. Later on, if you wanted to sit in the back with your friends, that was good too, as long as you were quiet and respectful, not disrupting anything. I was aware that you all enjoyed breaking some of the rules, regarding little things like singing along with the songs or paying attention to the sermon, but I didn't worry about it. I believed from an early age that the more I demanded from my kids, the more they would do the opposite. It's just human nature. So I tried to give you all as much freedom as I could, within the realm of still being pastor's kids, seeing as I couldn't change that identity for you.

And yes, I was aware that some of the boys had their eye on Lydia, and that perhaps they were sneaking a kiss now and then. But it didn't bother me.  :D