My People, the Amish: The True Story of an Amish Father and Son Read online

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  How I Became Amish

  Growing up Amish

  School Days

  The Holy Language

  Church Services

  Running

  Baptism and Joining the Amish Church

  Life and Death

  Life out of Control

  The Gift of Eternal Life

  Shunning

  Marriage

  Getting Started

  The Transition

  Family

  God’s Call

  How Do We Reach Out, Lord?

  Former-Amish Church

  MAP Outreach

  Struggles With Authority

  Difficulties and Blessings

  In God’s Eyes

  My Perfect Father

  Questions for David Before Dating Rachel

  Marriage Comments/Questions for David

  Brief Outline of the Conference

  Bible Verses for Further Study and Discussion

  About the Author

  Photos

  he Amish ar not a monolithic people. Some groups are harder to break free from than others. My own journey from the culture was difficult enough. At least I thought so, until I read Joe Keim’s story.

  Joe and Esther Keim emerged from a dark, harsh place, where hard choices had to be made about family, faith, and what was truly important to them. It was a tough road to travel, with a heavy price. Joe Keim recounts the faith and courage that carried them through in their darkest hours. But freedom for themselves was not enough; Joe and Esther Keim turned and reached out to others who were traveling the same path they had walked. Today, they minister to hundreds of young Amish people who are desperate to break free from their own dark, hard places.

  This is a unique story of one man’s astonishing journey from an Amish world unlike any I have ever known.

  Ira Wagler

  Author of Growing Up Amish

  If you’ve ever been curious about the inner workings of Amish life, this book is for you. Joe captivates readers from the first word, keeping them glued to the page and wanting more. An honest, heart-wrenching true-life tale of one man’s struggle to remain Amish. This is a must-read for anyone remotely interested in Amish life and customs.

  J. Spredemann

  Amish fiction author

  Joe Keim’s book mirrored much of my own experience of when I left the Amish church. I could truly feel his frustration with living under the absolute rule of the church and the fear of venturing out into the unknown English world. The devastation of losing all of your family and the only life you have ever known is something that is felt forever.

  I commend his work with Mission to Amish People; I wish I would have had someone who was formerly Amish to help me transition into the modern world.

  Misty Griffin

  Author of Tears of the Silenced

  Joe Keim has given us an honest, intriguing look into the world and choices of the Amish. His descriptions of life before and after are as plain-spoken and true as his presentation of scriptural grace and faith in Christ. I would have expected nothing less from Joe.

  Dandi Daley Mackall

  Author of With Love, Wherever You Are

  www.dandibooks.com

  My People, the Amish

  The True Story of an Amish Father and Son

  Joe Keim

  I would like to first dedicate this book to my sweet wife and our children and grandchildren. You are God’s most precious gift to me on earth. In fear and trembling, I have passed the faith on to you. Don’t drop it. Fan the flames. Pass it on.

  Secondly, I dedicate this book to all the fathers and sons who have worked so hard and diligently at working through relational struggles. God bless you!

  * * * *

  Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:1-2)

  Acknowledgements

  For many years, I dreamed of writing a book about my life, but my fear of not being able to finish kept me from starting. One day I realized now was the time to write. I sat down at my computer and my fingers tapped away on the keyboard. In no time at all, I had typed twenty pages; but then it happened. The computer crashed and twenty pages disappeared into thin air. I threw in the towel and forgot the idea of writing a book.

  After several years, Jeremiah Zeiset from Aneko Press, the publisher of my book, encouraged me to write my story. When I declined, he suggested collaborating with writer Donna Sundblad. So with weekly interviews, My People, the Amish has become a reality.

  Thank you, Jeremiah Zeiset, for your continual encouragement throughout the writing and re-writing and for the many hours you invested in overseeing the entire project. You know how to make things happen!

  Thank you, Donna Sundblad, for the energy and passion you brought out of me. I will forever be grateful for the Friday morning phone conversations as we laughed and cried all the way through my book. Thank you, Sheila Wilkinson, for the many hours you put into editing and proofreading. Thank you, Bob Openshaw, for traveling from California to Pennsylvania to capture the perfect photo for my book cover. I’ve been blessed by your friendship and generosity.

  Abner and Gideon Zook, thank you for your willingness to become the father and son on my cover. Not only were you a perfect representation of me and my beloved father, but you enriched my spiritual life with your strong faith and ability to think outside the box.

  Thank you, Natalia Hawthorne, for all the time you put into making the book cover pop, going out of your way to care about the tiniest details.

  Thanks to my beloved wife, Esther Keim, for the numerous times you helped me brainstorm to get the story right. Thanks to my children, Jonathan and Rachel, son-in-law, David Garwood, and soon to be daughter-in-law, Havilah Justice, for the parts you played in the book. Each one of you brought perfection to My People, the Amish.

  Last, but far from least, I want to thank Jerry and Carol Gess, Shawn and Debbie Strong, Brian and Rene’ Budd for filling that important family void in our lives. Thank you Pastor John Bouquet for being our family shepherd for thirty years. Thanks to my brothers and their wives, William and Jenica Keim, Johnny and Miriam Keim, Perry and Maryann Keim, for all you do to stand with the ministry. Thank you, staff, volunteers, donors, missionaries, board members, and prayer warriors for your priceless partnership and servant hearts. Together, we have become a giant army in the Lord’s work. Thousands of Amish people have given their lives to Jesus Christ because we chose to band together and stay faithful to the end. Soon we will rejoice from the labor of our work.

  Prologue

  I woke up with a start that Sunday morning. Church services would soon begin across the field from our house – the same place where Esther and I had exchanged our wedding vows nine months earlier. As we lay in bed, we talked about our decision and made last-minute plans.

  “Joe, you’re gonna have to let my parents know that we are not attending church today,” she urged.

  Hesitantly, I crawled out of bed and walked over to my in-laws’ part o
f the house and informed them we would not be at the service that morning.

  My father-in-law looked at me and said, “Then I’ll stay home too.”

  That’s not going to work, I thought. People were coming at 9:00 to help us move. “Okay, I’ll go to church,” I said.

  With that, my father-in-law agreed to go. It was like Esther’s parents knew something was up. I put on church clothes and took off walking across the field where others gathered. Esther stayed home to direct our friends in the move.

  When I walked into the barn where the men were, my father-in-law acknowledged me and nodded his head as if to say he was happy with my decision. By 8:40 all the preachers started toward the house. Because Esther’s dad was a preacher, he was in the first group to leave. I watched. At the moment I saw him enter the house, I turned and fled without saying a word to anyone. I ran out the back door, across the field, and into the house where friends were carrying our belongings to the truck.

  They flung pillows and bedding out the upstairs windows to the ground below. Others rushed around, gathered our goods, and loaded the truck. It only took fifteen minutes to load all of our possessions.

  Before we left, I wrote a note to my father-in-law and my parents to explain why we were leaving the Amish. I shook uncontrollably and cried bitterly. When I finished, I looked at the note. It didn’t make sense, so I tore it up. I wrote a second note and then a third. I threw all of them away. With a gripping sorrow in my heart, I knew that anything I wrote wouldn’t make sense to those we were leaving behind. I knew the immense hurt and pain I would bring my dad and mom again. I knew this would be the last time I would leave the Amish and I would never return.

  Chapter 1

  How I Became Amish

  I grew up Amish, with the Jewish name Keim. While that may seem unusual, it’s an example of how God orchestrates – how He arranges the pieces of our lives to create His story, or as we say, our history. For my story, we can trace those puzzle pieces back to the late 1600s when a Jewish man by the name of Johannes Keim boarded a ship and set sail for America. He landed in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1698, penniless and single at the age of twenty-three. He returned to Germany in 1701 and married in 1706. He and his wife returned to America in 1707 and established the first Keim home in Berks County, near Reading, Pennsylvania.

  That Keim family gave birth to the first generation of American Keims. Their son John Keim grew up and had a family of his own. His son, Johannes Peter Keim, fathered three sons, but his wife died when the boys were young. The oldest of these three boys, Nicholas, was born February 2, 1768. After his mother died, his father was unable to care for him and his younger siblings. As a result, the boys were adopted by various neighbors. Young Nicholas worked for an Amish family and learned Amish ways early in life. He became part of an Amish community and the first Amish Keim − my ancestor.

  We are able to trace my family’s Amish roots back to Holmes County, Ohio, where my grandparents, William and Laura Keim, grew up. After they married and had a family, they decided to leave that area because, in my grandfather’s view, the influence of the growing tourism trade left a more liberal Amish lifestyle in its wake. These liberal-minded Amish tended not to excommunicate and shun as much as my grandpa wanted, so he picked up his family of eight children, moved forty miles west to Ashland, Ohio, and bought a 200-acre farm. There they founded the Old Order Amish community that is still present today.

  My father was a young teenager, fresh out of school and ready to be mentored and trained to someday own and operate his own business, which is a very common practice in the Amish culture. I know very little about my father’s growing-up years, other than he was the second oldest child in the family. He seldom talked about his boyhood years, but once he said it was difficult for him to leave his friends and cousins when they moved away from Holmes County.

  In his early twenties, my father was drafted and pressured to join the army headed to Vietnam. Like so many other Amish young men, he refused to fight in the war, so outside authorities arrested him and put him in prison for over a year. While in prison, he was often made fun of and belittled because of his beliefs, making it a difficult and trying time for him. Loneliness haunted him as he felt disconnected from his family and culture. I don’t think Dad ever got over that part of his early years.

  The new community in Ashland, Ohio, grew to several hundred families, and the groomed farmsteads belonged to what many who lived there considered an Old, Old Order, because my family was even more conservative than the Old Order in Holmes County. As the first ones to move to Ashland, they came up with their own list of dos and don’ts, which Amish churches refer to as the Ordinance Letter. These rules were more conservative than their previous list and affected everything from dress code to buggies and even included their farming and houses. For instance, we weren’t allowed to wear short-sleeves or have buttons all the way down the front of our shirts, because that was too worldly. Instead, we could have three buttons and no lay-down collars.

  In Ashland, bigger head coverings were required for women compared to those in Holmes County, where the women might have three or four times the number of pleats, making the head covering appear much fancier. Holmes County coverings were smaller in size and allowed more hair to show in the front. For Ashland men, our hat brims measured three-and-a-half inches, while in Holmes they were an inch smaller. Again, the bigger the brim, the more conservative. And anytime we left the property, we had to wear those hats and bonnets. Holmes County Amish were seen running around without hats and bonnets in town, and for this and similar reasons, my grandparents left Holmes County behind and drew up the much more conservative Ashland Ordinance Letter.

  The Ashland community grew quickly and spread into other counties. Amish seeking a more conservative group made the journey from various parts of the country, vowed to submit to the Ashland Ordinance Letter, and became members of the church. Quite a few hailed from the Holmes County area. They had large families, and as the families expanded, they celebrated weddings, and the number of districts grew.

  Those who live in the Ashland community are proud to be considered even more conservative than the Old Order. Like I said, you can tell how conservative a community is by the style of their hats and bonnets, but even as you drive through an Amish community and see the color of their curtains, you learn a lot about the community. For instance, in Holmes County, curtains hanging in homes vary from white to other light colors. In Ashland, we were only allowed dark blue or black.

  In the year 2000, the thriving Ashland community lost a number of families due to a clash of Amish culture with state hunting regulations. The big issue was hunter orange. The Ashland Amish wouldn’t even allow the orange safety triangles on their buggies, and the law for hunters required them to wear a certain number of inches of orange. The Amish stood their ground, believing bright orange was a worldly color and a stench in God’s nostrils.

  The law of the Amish often clashes with the law of the land, and many times, the law of the Amish wins. In some cases, this can be good, and in others, not so good. The Amish, like their Anabaptist forefathers, have a lot of zeal and determination. Numerous individuals have been fined, put in jail, and forced off their own properties over refusal to buy building permits, install fire alarms, and bring indoor plumbing up to code. The Amish believe that once they agree on a church rule and write it in the Ordinance Letter, it is both recorded on earth and in heaven. They use the conversation that Jesus had with Peter to support this: And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven (Matthew 16:19).

  Deer hunting in Ashland was by far the most exciting thing that happened all year. Many men and boys would team up in groups of ten or more and surround a wooded area. While half the team members started at one end of the wo
ods, shouting and driving the deer through the woods, other team members would stand at the opposite end waiting to shoot the deer when they came through. Not only did we annoy our English neighbors, we also frustrated the game warden, who kept ticketing deer hunters for not wearing hunter orange. One year, the game warden was so upset and frustrated that he drove around the farmlands in Ashland County asking hunters to meet him on a certain day and at a certain time and place. When everyone showed up, he ticketed all of them for not wearing hunter orange. As a result, many Amish left Ashland so they could hunt.

  But that wasn’t the only reason families left. Bickering over little things grew into big issues over the years, which greatly saddened the remaining families and led them to reach beyond themselves for help. They invited wise men from other Amish communities to come and meet with their remaining families.

  The meeting day finally arrived. The muffled clip-clop of horses’ hooves and the hum of steel-rimmed buggy wheels marked the arrival of family after family. They parked their buggies and walked with grim expressions to an open meeting area in the upper part of the barn. The men and women sat on hard wooden benches, facing the wise ones, and slipped off their hats and bonnets. When the meeting came to order, the men asked members of the community to share the problems that brought so much heartache to this once active Amish community.

  One after the other, folks shared from the heart. Some shared in anger, others in frustration and confusion. Finally, the last member had his say. When he took his seat, a hush fell over the gathering. Sparrows and pigeons chirped and cooed as they flew back and forth from one rafter to another, while the people waited for the wise men to get up and tell them where they had failed as a community.