“I find in life that when I see someone who seems so different from me, when I get to know them, we have a lot in common.”
These are the words of Dave Stobbe, a resident of the Pembina Valley and a retired educator. He’s referencing a small Midwestern American town in Indiana named Shipshewana.
At first glance, the town might not seem to have any immediate connections to Southern Manitoba, but the culture of the area shares a parallel with the Pembina Valley — Anabaptist roots. This foundation has resulted in some similarities between the regions.
Unfamiliar on the outside
Shipshewana is a scene from another world. Stobbe says that when he goes into town, the sights and clip-clop sounds of horses and buggies welcome him. He also encounters traditional dress, hand-made items, and a different lifestyle.
While at first, it’s something of a marvel, Stobbe says that after a while, one engages a bit more personally.
“You meet people. They're very sociable, so I've made good friends,” he says. “I've been to Amish homes. I've been to Amish church, I went to an Amish wedding. I don't think I could live their lifestyle, but I have come to respect it.”
The impulse to be critical
Even as Stobbe gets to know the Amish community and builds bonds with it, in comparison to his Mennonite roots, there is also the natural inclination to be a bit “critical” about some of the nuances of a lifestyle that seems different, at first.
“[Of their lives, you think,] ‘How can they do that? They say they don't use electricity, but how do they handle that?’ he says. "Some of the buggies have solar panels on the top. Safety at night is a big thing . . . . They've had terribly tragic buggy vehicle accidents.”
This is where the contradictions begin to surface for Stobbe. The Amish community rejects electricity, but uses other technologies for light, and it also rejects technology, and yet some of Stobbe’s friends in Shipshewana have flip cell phones. What does one make of these discrepancies?
Ideologies based on faith
For Stobbe, the first step is understanding the importance of faith to the Amish.
“There's a lot of puzzling things and how they make decisions, but by rubbing shoulders, . . . I've just got to appreciate that there is a logic behind it, and for them, it's very much faith-based,” he says. “They have a pretty conservative biblical orthodoxy. They take their faith very, very seriously and so, unlike you and I, when I go to get a new cell phone, I hardly think about church, but they will have some agreements [about them] in their church . . . . They agree that they will follow the church's rules or teaching.”
This understanding sheds some light on the “contradictions” that Stobbe sees. While having a cell phone is not really in accordance with the church’s teachings, religious leaders allow some people to have a simplified version — like a flip phone — if they need it for business purposes.
“But don't take it in the house, no internet,” says Stobbe. “Most of my friends have these flip phones.”
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Another example of how faith affects the line between idea and praxis is the Amish people’s complicated relationship with electricity. Many people assume the group is against it, but it’s not that simple.
“They're not against electricity. Their thing is that the world will come in and distract us from our faith. Recent statistics [show that] close to 80% of kids stay Amish. That's not true of any church in town, I don’t think. It’s because [Amish] kids are allowed free time when they're teens and then they make their decisions,” he says. “They're not against electricity, but why would you want TV or Internet? I mean, you and I change our wardrobe every 5 or 10 years [and] the Amish are still dressing the same as 500 years ago when they came from Europe.”
In these terms, what seems like contradiction on the part of the Amish people is really a reckoning borne out of an attempt to practice one’s faith in a world that increasingly seems to run contrary to it —something that many people in the Pembina Valley can sympathize with.
It’s here that a kinship between Mennonites and the Amish begins to surface.
For Stobbe, while fascination with the Amish has something to do with a “rubber neck” response of seeing a way of living that is somewhat alien to most people, especially between Mennonites and the Amish, there is also something kindred that goes beyond shared heritage.
“I suspect we recognize something in ourselves where we sort of look at a simpler life and all of that,” says Stobbe.
Some of the ideals the Amish hold can be recognized in the Pembina Valley’s Mennonite community, too.
“They’re very much people of peace — the whole business about forgiveness,” he says. “I could tell you stories that bring a tear to your eye about how they offer forgiveness in situations. Their theology [is that] as God forgave them, so they should forgive others, and so they live in a church community, and their whole life, I think, relates to that church community.”
Stobbe says the church community takes shape in groups of 30–40 families that come together once every two weeks alternating meeting locations. As with many churches (including Mennonite ones), the event is as social as it is religious.
“You have your 5,6,7 kids [and] they want to meet other people and get married off, and so mixing is a very sort of planned way that they do that,” says Stobbe.
A chance entry into a different world
To go back to the beginning, how did Stobbe establish this unique arrangement with the people of Shipshewana? In short, he stumbled on it. His daughter’s spouse got a scholarship to a university in Indiana, which led the family to the region. Stobbe says he went to visit his grandchildren when he found the scenic and culturally unique area.
“I [found] this pretty little town,” he says. “In it, I [saw] a large red barn called Menno-Hof. I [went] inside and took their tour. They tell the story of Anabaptists — Hutterites, Mennonites, and Amish.”
Stobbe was immediately taken by the Menno-Hof educational centre, which is run by volunteers. Before long, he decided to become one himself.
“I've been back there seven times where I volunteer for a month, and I'm probably going to go back next fall,” he says, adding that he relishes the opportunity to choose how he spends his time during his retirement.
“I know my Mennonite history pretty well, and . . . I'm a people person, so I just do tours as a volunteer in this large museum,” he says.
Stobbe says the Menno-Hof educational centre is a multimedia tour in which visitors tend to become immersed.
“If you hurry, it's an hour and a half, but a lot of people will stay half a day or a day because there's so much to take in as we figure out some of this seeming contradiction of being Amish, being Mennonite, being Hutterite,” he says. “People are just curious.”
Not separate, separate from distractions
Ultimately, through Stobbe’s tenure as a tour guide in Shipshewana and his friendships with the Amish community there, his perspective of the Amish people has gone beyond stereotypes.
“They want to be separate from the polluting aspects of the world, which would compromise their faith, their path to heaven, and their children’s path,” he says. “But in other ways, they’re quite involved.”
Back in the Pembina Valley, Stobbe shared his experience and reflections about Shipshewana with the community at Morden Access Centre on November 20th.
Although the presentation was primarily an exploration of Amish identity, because of parallels between the Amish and Mennonites, it was just as much an exploration of local Mennonite identity. In a changing world, both groups have the task of negotiating their identities in it.
With files from Ty Hildebrand