Our neo-Amish story

Nathan Brown

A few years ago, while travelling in the United States, friends took us to visit Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. One of the pockets of Amish communities scattered across the US, Lancaster County is famous for its horsedrawn vehicles and farm machinery, picturesque red barns and cornfields, their covered bridges and small, simple churches, quaint handicrafts, home cooking, clothing from a past century, hats, bonnets and beards.

I was reminded of this experience recently while reading the book Jesus for President. Writers Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw suggest "it's easy to imagine the questions of young Amish children growing up: ‘Mom, why can't we have an Xbox?' ‘Dad, why do we dress like this?' ‘Why don't we have cars?' And you can almost hear the parents explain, ‘Other children may do those things, but you are special. You are different: you are Amish. You have a different story and live in a different way from other people in this world.'"

In turn, this imagined conversation reminds us of the prompts offered to the Israelites at the time of their escape from Egypt. Moses instructed them to remember God's actions on their behalf through the Passover, and he suggested a similar question-and-answer sequence, still used by Jewish families to remember their salvation and their set-apartness: "And in the future, your children will ask you, ‘What does all this mean?' Then you will tell them, ‘With mighty power the Lord brought us out of Egypt from our slavery . . . .' Again I say, this ceremony will be like a mark branded on your hands or your forehead. It is a visible reminder that it was the Lord who brought you out of Egypt with great power" (Exodus 13:14-16*).

Claiborne and Haw go on to suggest we should find ways in our lives to remember the specialness of the story of which we are a part, offering the label "neo-Amish" as a way of thinking about who and what we are. Of course, this is not about adopting horsedrawn vehicles, vintage clothing and a religious devotion to facial hair but a determined attitude of faithfulness, living life by different priorities and refusing to just go along with the world around us.

Paul put it like this: "Don't copy the behaviour and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think" (Romans 12:2). Many of us would like this to mean we are given a prescription for our lives, perhaps a life map or a list of solid black-and-white options but life is rarely so simple. While there are things we will and won't do when we recognise our place in this neo-Amish story-focusing on what we do-it has a more immediate impact on how we do what we do.

Rather than assuming we should all be missionaries in exotic locations or-with the literalness of the Amish-adopt a period of some time in the past after which we style our lives, we find ways in which we live by a different story, even in our day-to-day lives. Whatever it is we have before us to do-and no matter how possibly ordinary-we find ways to do it out of the ordinary and beyond the expected. Sometimes in big ways and sometimes in seemingly infinitesimally small ways, we are committed to changing the world.

In this way, our lives become less about ourselves and our individual stories. In the words of Messrs Claiborne and Haw, "the peculiarity of the church [this ‘neo-Amishness'] is not for its own sake but for the sake of the whole creation, for the cities and neighbourhoods in which we find ourselves."

So as we face the larger and smaller decisions of our lives, ordering our priorities, meeting the opportunities and challenges that come, experiencing the joys, tragedies and ordinariness, we need to remember the story of which we are part. Our faithfulness begins with acknowledging what has been and our sense of identity as people who-as an Amish mother might put it-"have a different story and live in a different way from other people in this world."

*All Bible quotations are from the New Living Translation.

This has been an editorial from Record, January 24, 2009