| Next |
What is today the Ohio and Eastern Mennonite Conference is the result of a union of the churches of two conferences, the Ohio Mennonite and the Eastern Amish Mennonite Conference. The Ohio Mennonite Conference, as noted, dates from about 1834, some thirty years after Mennonites first began to settle permanently in Ohio. The Eastern Amish Mennonite Conference, as noted, was organized in 1893, though the Amish churches of Ohio had earlier ties, formal and informal, with sister congregations in the state and bevond.
That the Mennonite and Amish conferences in Ohio should unite was in one sense part of a trend.' In 1916 these two branches of the historic streams of Anabaptist-Mennonite life in America were united in the Indiana-Michigan District. Here the occasion was one of "general rejoicing that after centuries of separation we are again made one in Christ Jesus." In 1920-21 the same groups in Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Missouri, and the Pacific Coast merged to form a body of 7,500 members.'
A number of preparatory influences were at work for some years and decades before the "merger" (as the union of these two conferences was called) was finally completed in the late 1920's. As early as 1892 the Herald of Truth carried in its November 1 issue an article on "Evangelism in Ohio" which encouraged these two bodies to cooperate with each other in ministering to needy congregations and so save expense and overlapping. The same periodical in its April 1, 1896, issue contains a report by Lydia M. Yoder on the evangelistic preaching of J. P. Smucker of Goshen, Indiana.
In it she makes this plea:
Dear readers, let us, both Amish and Mennonites, work for more peace. Let
196
| Next |