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I Wish I’d Been There: An Amish Ministers’ Meeting, Noble, Iowa, 1874
A few miles north of Noble, Iowa in Washington County, Iowa a large, red, bank-type barn stands along a gravel road. It is an exciting place to visit with its brick-lined floors below – where cattle come for water, and the large open area above which large amounts of hay are stored. Yes, to visit there now is intriguing but I really wish I’d have been there May 24-27, 1874.
Why, what was happening? More than a thousand Amish men and women were attending an Amish Conference (Dienerversammlung). The purpose of the meeting was to bring unity to the Amish churches of America. Sunday, May 24 the conference began with admonition, prayer, and a sermon followed by "witness by two ministers." The afternoon service followed much the same pattern.
Monday, May 25 the rules of the order of the ninth ministers’ meeting were read and accepted. There had been some disagreement about the rules and what was happening in some of the area churches. In the middle of some of these discussions was Benjamin Eicher, bishop of an Amish church which he had begun in 1862. At some point during these meetings, Bishop John K. Yoder from Ohio confronted Eicher because Eicher was wearing buttons on his coat rather than hooks and eyes. Yoder told him that a minister should wear clothing that would show people he was a minister, not a banker.
When reporting this meeting in the Mount Pleasant Free Press, the editor described the Amish, their dress and lifestyle in some detail. Then he told about Benjamin Eicher who was "rebelling against the custom of hooks and eyes." The editor called Eicher a man of broad and liberal views and "I believe not only willing but anxious that his church should keep up with that spirit of improvement which so strongly characterizes this present age." No official action was recorded. But after this meeting Eicher took his church to be an independent church (Eicher Emmanuel Mennonite Church) and in 1893 it became part of the General Conference Mennonites.
While Eicher believed strongly enough that he was willing to make this change, many of the leaders still wanted to work at keeping unity. The church was at a definite turning point.
I wonder how I would have reported those meetings in the Mount Pleasant Iowa Free Press if I had been there? I wonder if some of the women present had ideas about how to deal with these issues, but were not allowed to voice them? I wonder if there are lessons from these stories to be learned in our churches today?
Resources: Proceedings of the Amish Ministers’ Meetings 1862-1878 by Paton Yoder and Steven R. Estes; Mennonite Historical Bulletin, December 1942; Mennonites in Iowa by Melvin Gingerich
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Lois Gugel is a retired teacher who now works part time as the archivist for the Mennonite Historical Society of Iowa in Kalona.
Mennonite Historical Bulletin, April 2001