238 / Development of Church Life in the Older Congregations

In 1945 the Allen County churches opened a private elementary school which was administered by the Pike, Salem, and Jefferson churches. The school, known as the Elida Mennonite Christian Day School, began in an abandoned country school but in 1951 began to occupy a new building of its own, one erected by the Pike congregation, the Salem congregation having withdrawn its support. Lloy Kniss, a former missionary to India, and Mabel Berkshire of Masontown, Pennsylvania, were the first teachers. In 1964 the school had an enrollment of sixty-three and included eight grades. 22

For many years J. B. Smith (1870-1951) lived in the community of the Allen County churches. Smith was a diligent Bible scholar and served on the faculty of Hesston College, Hesston, Kansas, and for five years was president of Eastern Mennonite School at Harrisonburg, Virginia. He was a student of New Testament Greek, and during his lifetime he compiled a Greek-English Concordance to the New Testament. The Concordance is a tabular and statistical work based on the King James Version with an introduction by Professor Bruce M. Metzger of Princeton Theological Seminary. The work was published posthumously by the Herald Press at Scottdale, Pennsylvania, in 1955.

The Allen County churches were always closely associated with the Blanchard Church in Putnam County. In 1906 Albert J. Steiner was ordained by Bishop John M. Shenk to serve this congregation. During his two years of service he introduced revival meetings and Bible conferences. In 1908 Steiner removed to Mahoning County. Henry Smith of Allen County replaced him for two years and after that the Blanchard congregation was once more without a resident pastor.

In 1918 the name of the congregation was changed to Mt. Pleasant with Bishop A. I. Yoder of West Liberty, Ohio, preaching a dedicatory sermon. In the following years pastors from Allen County again supplied the pulpit. For various reasons the community experienced a steady decline and by 1933 had lost most of its resident members.

Allen County churches provided leadership not only in the nineteenth century but also in the twentieth century. A total of thirty ministers and deacons, all "native" members of the Pike congregation, have been ordained in recent decades and at this writing are all living.23