Harps and Amish Tourism Led Us to the Anabaptists - Jeff and Deanna Swanson

At what point do the Anabaptists come into the picture here? Like, where did you hear about—most people, I mean, you know, Amish or Mennonites, whatever, you know, it's easy—I guess you could, you can bump into that different places, but where did that enter the story?

I think at first all we knew were Amish. Like, you know, you'd seen pictures of them or books or something. And obviously it was a cultural thing. Yeah. And I think we, like, I don't know, looked at, looked at it one time, like, not, not because of—we never thought we would ever be anything like this. Um, we just—and it was like, oh, they speak German. Well, we're out there, you know? And, um, you know, how could anybody ever go be a part of that? You have to learn a whole different language or whatever. And then it was like, oh, they drive horse and buggies and, and Jeff's allergic to horses, so we can't eat. So this was not going to be much of an option.

Okay. Yeah. And I, and I'm like, I can't live without air conditioning. Um, but just out of kind of just out of curiosity. And honestly, it was like a vacation thing. Like, um, it's—we had young children. There was nothing offensive. You know, you could, like, whatever, go and, and, um, I think we went down to Goshen to go to—we had an antique mall. To be fair to our people, I mean, we just did go down to Goshen, Indiana, to look at the Amish. That—yeah. We get so frustrated now in Lancaster County when these people drive so slow and they want to look at the Amish. And we've seen comments on social media about how somebody saw an Amish person's laundry and, you know, how mystical that is.

And so it really was us. And we love the Anabaptists and what it stands for, but we were totally those people that would go down to Indiana to look at Amish. Kind of that almost like intrigued touristy type. Yeah. Or, or, um, as a curiosity maybe. Yeah. But I do think there was an attraction to something that was, to us, looked more biblical. Um, not as, you know, that they were doing things that we weren't. Why did they do them? And, you know, what was the reasoning behind all of that? And again, not necessarily we were just searching. It was just like, well, what is this and what is this? And feeling a little bit pushed out.

Maybe we don't fit as well here anymore. Well, where would we fit? You know, just kind of looking around a little bit. Mm-hmm. Again, kind of that journey of trying to find a, a place, you know, a place to plug into perhaps.

Not yet. Not yet. You have to tell them about the, the homeschool show. Um, a big part of our journey was we were homeschooling. Okay. And so through that, we came into contact with a lot of wonderful people. And so one of the band groups I was teaching, we had a homeschool band with like a thousand people in it. And we were performing at a homeschool convention thing. And so I was there and I would always go look at the books and all that because I was homeschooling. But there was a family there and they were selling harps and I played harps some in college, but I did not own a big harp. So they had these smaller harps and I was like, oh, well maybe I could get one of those or whatever.

So I picked up a little pamphlet thing and honestly, I stuck it in a drawer for five years. It was seriously, it was just sitting there for five years. Okay. And again, we did this whole long process. So I think it was five years later, Jeff had decided that he, he was working at a school, spending a lot of hours. I was homeschooling five children. He was working 70, 80 hours a week. And we were like, this is not, this isn't, you know, this is, we have two different lifestyles and we didn't want our family to be like that. We wanted to be closer. And so he resigned from his teaching position and we moved to be the family.

We moved out of state just to be with our family and kind of regroup. And so when we were going through that process is when I decided, I'm going to order a harp. So I pulled the thing out of the drawer after five years and I ordered a harp. So we moved down there and at that point, we were just visiting any kind of a church that we thought might work. We tried everything. I mean, we were. We were pretty convinced that it was in North Carolina. That's where I was born. And we had always wanted to live there. And, um, we were sure we were going to find a just this awesome Bible Belt, Southern Baptist Church with the children's ministries and, and, and great music.

And so, uh, just to interject that, we were sure we were going to be able to be plugged in quickly with another church, you know, of that brand. Mm-hmm. That fit a little bit more where we were now with our convictions. Mm-hmm. And so we couldn't. And in the meantime, I called this family to tell them my harp wasn't quite ready yet, but it was almost ready. So I said, oh, hey, when you send it, please send it to this new address because we moved.

And then the, the dad that made the harps whatever said, well, do you have, oh, you moved. Do you have a church down there? And I was like, no, like what on earth would he know about, you know, he's five states away. And he just said, oh, I know of a church. I said, we're looking for something a little bit more conservative. We aren't really sure, but, and I didn't know what they were. I knew they had something on their heads, but I didn't know what they were. We had seen a picture of the family and we were educated enough at this point. We were like, well, they're not Amish.

Mm-hmm. And apparently they're not Mennonite either. And we were just like, so I don't know what they are. Yeah. Anyway, so he said, oh, well, I know of a church. It was about an hour and a half away. Mm-hmm. And so Jeff called the minister and he ended up actually calling back when Jeff was gone. So I had to talk to him. And I think I said something like, um, well, am I supposed to wear something? Because we were by then, we had, we were dressing a little different. And we were, we were again closer to this end of things slowly. And he said, no, he said, you just come as you are. Mm-hmm. And that was really, um, was just what we needed to hear.

Like, just come as you are. We don't expect anything. And that, so that was neat. So we, we went there. We visited. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That would have been our first Anabaptist church.