I Was Roman Catholic. Then I Became Amish. — Elizabeth Vendley

So we're kicking against authority, and obviously we are going against stream with all this. And we weren't—we were not bold people. So it was very uncharacteristic, which made us suspect it was God. Like, this isn't our idea. Who would think of joining the Amish? Like, really? No. Uh-uh. You know, it's not like we're like, "Oh, we want to be Amish." We are almost like, "Really?"

Today, it's a privilege to have Elizabeth Bentley on the podcast. And Elizabeth, I'm pretty sure you're the only person I know that was Roman Catholic and ultimately ended up in the Amish. And now you're a Mennonite. And that's quite an interesting story. And I hope I'm going to catch some pieces of that today and maybe some lessons pulled out of that process. So let's just jump right into it. Tell me about your experience as a Catholic. And yeah, what was that? What was that like? Okay. I was born and raised in a typical American middle-class society household.

My mom was Catholic and my dad was an atheist. But in the Catholic Church, if you marry a Catholic, you have to agree to have your children raised Catholic. So my parents did that. My dad didn't go to church, but we went every Sunday. My mom took us, and dad would come sometimes on the big holidays, just because that's what you did.

So Mass was a weekly thing and religion classes during the week once you're in school age. And that is the one thing that I appreciate is that my mom would not have considered herself a devout Catholic. She actually used to make the comment, "I hope I'm a better Christian than I am a Catholic."

Although the Catholic Church has days of obligation or saints' days where you have to go to church, she usually made sure we went on those extra days. Nonetheless, she wasn't a devout, you know, rosary praying type Catholic. And she would take us to church every Sunday. And I always give the Catholic Church credit that they read the Gospel as part, a small part of one of the four Gospels during Mass. You always get a short bit of that. It is the Catholic translation, but it's the Gospel.

So there was always enough for the Holy Spirit to, you know, it was like spoon-feed me until I was old enough to know where the Lord was going to take me with all of that. I was a serious child.

So I paid attention in church. I don't know why. I just really did. And so that was just always the way my brain thought. I considered myself a Christian. I went to the youth group at church. People viewed me as a Christian.

I did have a very controversial class in my Christian high school, or I'm sorry, Catholic high school, that was Catholic Church history. And he taught the real Catholic Church history. And it was controversial because there were some things in the Catholic Church history that weren't always the best. I feel like he's put them in the proper context. This was before the Reformation. That meant reform. We reformed. We, as a church, got better. I knew the truth, for better and for worse, about the Catholic Church. But things just weren't totally clicking.

And I kind of thought that was just spiritual immaturity. I thought, "Well, when I grow up, I'll understand these things. Everybody around me at church gets this. Why am I not getting it? You know, it must be me." And when I met my husband, David, he was my supervisor at a job. We worked in a group home for disabled children. And when I found out he was Catholic, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, that's good." But as we got talking, I found out he had the same, like, that feeling of, "I don't really totally get it.

I'm Catholic, but I really don't totally get it." So we were on the same track. We weren't necessarily spiritual people, but we were kind of on the same track, which to us was a green light, you know, to move forward. So could you dial in on what were some of those things? Do you know specifically, or was it just in general? I do know back then, you know, it was a little bit unclear. I didn't understand the doctrines behind the communion liturgy and the way that they do communion. I didn't quite get it. At the infant baptism, I never did understand that because intellectually I knew what an adult believer's baptism was. You know, growing up in America, I knew what that was.

And it's like, "That makes more sense." You know, right away, logically, that made sense. The nuns covered their head when I was younger, and then they stopped in the, oh, about mid-60s. But most of them kept, kept wearing their veils. Well, I honored those women were my heroes. So a holy woman was wearing a covering. Why weren't the rest of us?

That bugged me as a child. When I would hear that scripture, I was like, "I don't get it because we're not doing it. I must be spiritually immature." And that's usually the answer you kind of get in one phrase or another, you know? I just kind of conform and go along with all the fishes, and that's what we did.

So clearly, you're on a journey. Like, you're searching for something. You're looking for something more. And you're saying at the time, it was more of this general sense that, you know, now in retrospect, it's easy to kind of pinpoint down on some things.

Yeah, start walking us through the journey then. Like, you're looking for something. You're searching for answers. What steps do you start taking in that? Well, I call it holy unrest. That's what we had was holy unrest. There was enough of the Holy Spirit going in us that this just isn't right. But we didn't know what.

And we had been married for about six years. And at that point, we had three children. And we felt that as parents of three children, God certainly would have given us some insight into how to raise them doctrinally. They were getting—our oldest was getting towards school age. How do I teach them a doctrine I don't really believe in? I need to understand this doctrine.

So that unrest led us to the Bible. We both had Bibles, read them on occasion, not a regular thing. David's was a Catholic translation. Mine was a King James. And so we would read them on occasion and talk about it on and off. Then I became ill with a pregnancy where I was stuck on the couch from April until September. And I had three small children. Okay, we're not in an Anabaptist setting. There are no hired girls. There are not extended families. So, I mean, I was on my own with these children in the living room. So I was, you know, reading my Bible. And because, okay, I can make this new daily habit. I've got to sit all day.

I'm going to do this. So I started reading the Bible. We had also been pretty active in kind of homesteading type things, like baking bread, canning, really into canning. So as we went to get our supplies for canning, we would come up against or come across plain people, Old Order Amish and some other, you know, varieties. Back then, it was predominantly in that area, the Old Order Amish. So we'd see them at the sales.

And we began to wonder, see more similarities with ourselves in them than with, say, the women at the playground at school or David's coworkers. Like, we had more in common with these people. And then somebody at the sale had mentioned that they were Christians.

And I thought they were Messianic Jews. So I was like, "Oh." You know, they had asked me. I at that point was wearing just kind of a plain sack dress and a head scarf. And someone asked me if I was some type of Amish or Mennonite. And I said, "No, I'm a Christian." And they're like, "Well, Amish are Christians."

They are. You know, to me, a Christian was the guy throwing tracks out on the subway, you know, and hollering. It's like, "No, that's that." Oh, wow. I mean, you just didn't really have any context for this world. Yeah. And so I said, like, "New Testament Christians?" Yeah, yeah. They're New Testament Christians.

To this day, I don't know, was that an angel or what? So as was our habit, we loved the library. This was back in the day when you didn't have, you know, the internet. So we're going to go look this up at the library. And we happened on a book by John Hostetler called Amish Society.

That book went through the whole Anabaptist movement, the Anabaptist history, and then it takes apart the Amish culture, or in general, the conservative Anabaptist culture, and the reasons why they do things and what scripture is behind it. Well, we love this because what I liked about that book is I kept putting it down to read the Bible.

We checked that book out over and over again because we couldn't get through it. We kept putting it down to go, "Oh, oh yeah. Oh, oh yeah." And we just had one aha moment after the other. And David would come home from work, and I would share this. And this just ended up being a constant conversation.

So this is the journey. And it sounds like there's a lot of pieces. There was a lot of time probably passing, right? Like, this didn't happen overnight. Yeah. Right. So then somewhere in this process, you leave the Catholic Church and end up joining the Amish.

So tell me about that. As a timeline, I can tell you that I remember when I went to the hospital when I first started having my pregnancy complications. That would have been in April of 1989. I wore maternity pants.

When I came home from having that baby in October, to pack sweatpants or something was not like, "That's not right." So I kind of have that in my head as where my convictions about my appearance really came through, that, you know, it was not okay to wear pants anymore, you know?

So that would have been October of '89 that that began. And by the time we had moved into the Amish community would have been 1991. So that just kind of gives you a process, how long the different things took. Obviously, having your fourth child, and he was a handful. He had some medical stomach things, very distracting.

But we were reading, reading, reading, reading. We were readers. And we came across the budget. And so. Oh, this is just so interesting. What a story. Okay. So that we would have probably picked up at the sale that we bought our produce at. I was like, "How in the world would you have got ahold of the budget otherwise?" Okay. Yeah. And someone had also sent us a tract about plain clothing.

I believe it was called "What Shall I Wear?" It was by a man named Lester Beechie, printed by the Amish Brotherhood Publications. And this pamphlet really explained what we were going through with our clothing change because we were close to David's parents. Mine, not as much. But David's parents were close to, and they just did not get this. What are you doing to my grandchildren? Making them wear dresses? Braiding your hair? What? You know, and we felt that this tract really explained that well. So I sent him a letter asking, "Could we get more of these tracts?" By this time, we knew the culture a little bit and found, especially man, a woman, very standoffish.

So I was just very polite and careful. And he sent back this warm letter that was so obviously a born-again Christian, greeting me in the name of the Lord. And he was so excited about what the Lord's doing in our life, and he wants to hear more about this. And I don't know why. I had this connotation the name Lester would be an old man.

I guess, too, because he wrote in the budget, and he was obviously a good writer. So I just was picturing this wizened old man with this long gray beard. So please come and visit us if you're ever in Sugar Creek, Ohio, which at this point, we were in Geauga County, Ohio, so it wasn't just maybe an hour and a half away.

So we did.

We literally stopped in on the person, which is so unlike my husband. He was not a bold person. So when he said he wanted to do this, I'm like, "Okay, lead on." Lester wasn't an old man. He was younger than us.

And he ended up being one of the main vehicles for us actually into the fellowship. We didn't expect it. We were just asking questions. Again, this is a feels like this is a thread. It's just a searching, you know, asking questions. Okay, what about this? And okay, how do we live this out? You know, what do we do with these convictions that we're starting to experience and so forth? Yeah. But then that piece by piece by piece, right, eventually you end up integrating into the Amish. Yeah. Through that process. That's incredible. Yeah. Well, Lester introduced us to someone that was in his fellowship. Lester was what is called New Order Amish. So you have your Old Order Amish, which is horse and buggy German speaking.

New Order Amish is also a buggy church that speaks German. They're a little more inclined to use English if somebody English is present at their church. But their differences aren't really so much in lifestyle. I mean, the two groups know the difference, but, you know, nobody else would really know.

To us, New Order sounded like New Age. We were like, "Oh, big flags. Like, I'm not sure when I do this." Oh, that's funny. Okay. But Lester had a friend whose name was Steve. And Steve had married a New Order Amish girl.

And he had come from the Catholic background. He wanted us to meet Steve. Interesting. Okay. So Steve, of course, did all the studying we did. He had become attracted to this young lady who ended up being a very close dear friend of mine.

He had been attracted and went to her dad. He said, "You're not a Christian?" "No." And he said, "Well, what does that mean?" And he gave Steve—now I'm going off on a bunny trail—he gave Steve a New Testament. He said, "Read this and then come back and see if you understand what being a Christian is." He stayed up that night and read the whole New Testament. This is the kind of guy Steve is. Steve is now a preacher. A Mennonite preacher. So at any rate, so Steve in a conversation that we could really relate to, having come from the world, went through the Anabaptist story, the history, how the Amish came to be. And we were all, you know, aha moment one after another.

Our children, in the meantime, are outside playing for the first time on level ground, playing with children who understood like they did, behaved like they did, played like they did. Not pulling in TV, not hollering, screaming, not—they weren't the best kids around. They were the same.

They weren't those, you know, almost like today we'd say those homeschool children, you know, like they're well-behaved and they're all orderly and your parents must be too strict. You know, that's about how we were treated. Yeah. But our children fit in. We felt relaxed.

And so Steve and Lester kind of went through the doctrinal things with us. And we were just so agreed. We just were having, like I said, one aha moment after another. I believe it was Steve that introduced us to the Martyrs' Mirrors, the very thick book full of stories of the early Anabaptists. That and Berso's book, David Berso's book, Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up? Yeah. Very convicting. That helped us understand why other Protestant churches weren't quite making it in our minds.

He just articulated it like, "Oh, yeah, yeah," you know, which pointed us right back to the Anabaptists. And yeah, everything just kept sending us back to Steve and Lester with questions. When we saw the Martyrs' Mirrors, we were blown away. We were like, "Those that whole thick stack are other Catholics that didn't get it?"

Hmm. Yeah. Drill into that a bit. Yeah. Well, you know, when you're just like, even in our churches, it's just assumed you stay in the church that you're born in. Yeah. And so you grow up Catholic. God, and my husband would even say that. God put us in the Catholic Church. We're born into the Catholic Church for a reason. We will serve Him this way.

Couldn't argue with that. But then when there's this thick book of other people that were born into the Catholic Church, and as soon as they questioned it, they were martyred or harassed or tormented, and they stood for it, and the Anabaptist faith began out of that. It was just an eye-opener for us. Like, we thought we were the only ones who didn't get it, that they were all moving on, going through the liturgy, and they all understood this, you know, and they maybe they did. Maybe that was they did get spiritual satisfaction out of that, but we were not.

And we just personalized it like, "What's wrong with us?" So it was very validating to see, you know, in church history that this happened and we're not quite as off as we thought. It was maybe a bit of a reassurance, like, "Oh, there's something here." Very much so. Very much so. And there we were in Holmes County, like, you know, the Mecca of Anabaptists, you know, and it was like, "This is a solid thing." Even David's parents could see that this was a solid institution. A lot of their faith was in the church. So if the church said it was okay, you know, it was okay. So at least the Amish were kind of an institution for them.

Yeah. Okay. You know, that helped. There was a lot of custom, a lot of tradition. It helped them do that mental shift. But it was very reassuring to us. And at that point, Steve and Lester invited us to attend church.

We asked them the difference between Old Order and New Order because, like I said, this New Age, you know, what is this? It still kind of just cracks me up, but it just kind of shows just to flag it as it goes by, you know, like you guys are coming in with very little context, right? I mean, you're on a journey and you're searching and you have a lot of questions. And now, of course, we can look back and then kind of chuckle and be like, "Oh, that's funny that, you know, you kind of had that idea of what New Order Amish was." Now we all, "Oh, wait, well, that's not what it is." But it kind of just shows like, yeah, there was probably an enormous learning curve, you know?

Yeah. That's part of this whole story. And, you know, as much or as little as you want to get into that. But anyways, to continue on, I just want to grab that as a big thought. Yeah. And there is, there's kind of a thought among seekers, which is kind of the name we give to people that look to join the Amish or get really intensely curious. We call them seekers in general. And there's kind of a trend. We tend to be extremists.

So if a seeker is going to obey the Bible, they're obeying every word. So they begin to view culturally that the most conservative group must be the holiest. I have heard that. Yeah, I've heard that. And so you go in and you go, "Okay, what's the Schwartz and Trubar Amish?" Because everyone will say that those are the most conservative. So I want to check those out, you know? And the Schwartz and Trubar Amish are like, "What?

What? Do you really want to learn German?" What? You know, they don't get it at all. But you go in there with this idea of older is better. So Old Order must be better than New Order. Schwartz and Trubar must be better than Old Order because they're more conservative.

And, you know, it's a myth. There are Christian Schwartz and Trubars. There are Christian Catholics. There are Christian New Order. There are Christian Old Order. You know, it's all, you know, they're humans. They're people. So we had to kind of pull away from that mindset that there was some sort of holiness in pumping your own water and carrying it.

Hmm. I got, yeah. You know, and that, so that probably, I could, obviously my story is not anywhere the same as yours, but I can kind of imagine that happening, right? And also that being a bit of a process to kind of work through as well, right? And we saw people, we, you know, families would then get referred to us. Oh, we, you know, I began to write like for family life and the Pathway papers and Keepers at Home. So our name got around, you know? And so families would show up on our doors, sometimes literally, knock, knock, knock. "Hey, we heard you went from Catholic to Amish."

Yeah, go on in, you know? So we saw a lot of people, and that was almost universally a situation where they would see that they would think that, you know, the most conservative meant the most holy. By that point, we were fully members and living in a healthy Christian environment. And we were like, "No, it's got to be that your focus is on the Lord and living for the Lord."

And if you can do that as a Schwartz and Trubar Amish, go for it. If you can do that as a Catholic, go for it. If you can do that as a Mennonite, go for it. You know, that was our message to these people. Some didn't like that.

I can imagine though, because it's almost like, well, yeah, but just give me the list of things and then this is the real thing. But what you were just describing, that sounds like a lot more work, a lot longer of a journey, a lot more processing through, okay, what is God calling me to do? You know, where should I be? Where do I fit in? What is this? What is the community I should be integrating into? Right?

Wow, this, I'm, again, I can't really imagine the shift that this must have been for you all doing this. So you, you know, go from, it sounds like a fairly nominal environment, Catholic Church, then this whole journey you were just describing, you integrate into the Amish community, you become a member there. You're not Amish anymore. No. And as much or as little as you'd like to share about that part, the next phase of the story of, okay, what brings us up to today?

I mean, it is a longer story. And anytime you're shifting from a church, it's hard. It was hard to leave the Catholic Church.

It was very, we were born, David even had said, "We were born here. We're going to, we'll serve God here." Then all at once he said to me, I mean, I just remember where we were because I was so shocked. And he looked over and said, "You know, I don't think we can obey the Bible anymore and stay Catholic."

Wow. I was blown away because I had laid down leaving the Catholic Church at that point. It was just like, this is, you know, causing upset. I'm leaving it alone. And it's almost like as soon as I handed it over to God, David was like, "I don't think we can obey the Bible and stay Catholic."

Which isn't to say, and I don't want to say that others, you know, can't. I think that's a, yeah, that's an important little, you know, I know many Christian Catholics, okay? But where he was taking us and the journey he was pointing us, David, as the leader of the family, made a shift.

That's a, that's a, I think a really important piece to not miss is like, you had to be honest with what God was telling you and say, "This might be really uncomfortable, but we to follow our, what we think God wants us to do or we believe we're supposed to be doing, we're going to have to make some changes." Right. That's really hard. And the church represents an authority figure.

So it's like, we felt like we were pushing against an authority figure because you have, you are taught in the Catholic tradition, the same as in our tradition, to have respect for the church as an institution, more so in the Catholic setting than in ours. The church is, I mean, you go way back in history, it was actually a government. You know, if you broke a church law, you were breaking civil law. This is a church law. Okay, so that, I mean, it has a pull of authority.

So we're kicking against authority and obviously we are going against stream with all this. And we weren't, we were not bold people. So it was very uncharacteristic, which made us suspect it was God. Like, this isn't our idea. Who would think of joining the Amish? Like, really? No. Uh-uh. You know, it's not like we was like, "Oh, we want to be Amish." We were almost like, "Really? Lord?

Really?" You know. But the way he let the dominoes fall and David's confession at that point of wanting to stick with the Bible as his source, that was huge. And we began to visit the church that Steve and Lester went to. And they went on with, as we showed interest in moving into the community, they made all of those arrangements. And so again, we see God's hand looking back. It was an ideal setup. Where the Lord put us, who he put us with, a beautiful couple.

He was the deacon in the New Order Church. And he really discipled us, he and his wife. And our houses were connected. It was a dotty house, so there was just a door between us. They discipled us. They helped us with the doctrine, with our hearts. And the rest of the church did the, this is, we'll find you a horse. We'll teach you to ride a, drive a buggy. We'll show you how to milk a goat.

We'll show you how to sew a dress. A lot of that stuff, like I said, we're already kind of homesteaders. So that wasn't too terrible of a shift. But it was just like Emmon and Ada just discipled our hearts. Lots of popcorn in their kitchen. Lots of popcorn. Precious memories. And we lived there for five years. We were baptized in that setting.

One thing that I did want to mention that really touched us because when you talk about all of the different churches, you go to a place like Holmes County, which is similar to Lancaster County in that there are so many denominations, or not denominations, flavors of conservative churches.

You just have the whole spectrum to basically choose from for somebody like us who had the freedom to pick. When we asked Lester and Steve what the difference was between the New Order and the Old Order, their answer was so loving, so Christian, and so kind, it blew us away.

It was a church split. It was hard. But they did not say, "Well, the Old Order thus, thus, and that." And we wanted thus, thus, and that. It was so loving that we didn't see that in any other church group that we ever visited since.

Just that real respect and love for where they came from. It wasn't like, you know, we had had it with the following customs and that. It just wasn't like that, which was very touching. And we found that amongst the New Order Amish in general.

So I did, I just wanted to throw that in there. Yeah. That's huge. So the next steps that happened from here, bring us up to present day. Yeah. So we moved after five years, mostly for logistics, moved to a smaller community in Michigan.

Financially, you know, we couldn't really buy a farm in Holmes County and we were kind of small-town people. So we moved up to Michigan. That's where we raised the bulk of our children. That was like 15, probably about 15, 20 years.

And so we went up to Michigan, raised our children there, and then our family ran into a family crisis. But at the same time, the church ran into a church crisis. Which one fed which? We may never know. But we were all in crisis. And the church became very weak and I became very weak. I had some considerable medical, I was medically fragile, very ill. I needed a strong church. And that church was basically, well, basically collapsed.

So I needed to find fellowship elsewhere. And that's where kind of the long journey comes that I ended up coming to Pennsylvania for some healing. And then came back. And came back. Every time I came here, I went to a particular congregation because I had a ride. I was Amish. I had to ride with somebody.

So this is where my friend Linda went. So I went with Linda and her husband to church. That was my ride. So whenever I was in Pennsylvania, I went to the open door Mennonite church. And it clicked. God thing. I mean, like I said, there's dozens of churches even here in Pennsylvania. The way they handled my difficult situation and the way that they nurtured me through that and did not make demands, but were definitely there for me was awesome.

And so when it got to the point where David was no longer interested in a conservative setting, but I was, that's where, this is where I landed and that's where I still am today. It's an outreach of open door, but it's still the same bishop, still the same people.

This is just quite the story. And that's the thing with, as we've had different people on the podcast to tell their stories, it's basically never this perfectly linear straight line. You know, it's like we started here and this was, you know, we needed blah, blah, blah, and we went, took these steps and boom, here it is. It's always a journey. You know, sometimes it feels kind of meandering or, okay, we try this, you know, then we're here. And but it's part of that process of you have questions, you're seeking answers, you're trying to do what you feel God is calling you to do, right? And that's very much the theme that I'm hearing from you.

What would you say to someone who would say they're on the same journey? They're trying to find, where's a church I can plug into? I'm trying to find a community to be a part of and it's not working where I'm at. You know, I need that, whatever the case may be. I mean, every situation is different. And with that too, before you jump into that, I want to also add, you know, it's not like we're trying to encourage people, oh, leave your church and go find something. You know, no, of course not. But there are definitely times where people are on a journey.

And we want to encourage those people. So what would you say to that? What would you tell those people? It's a really good question. We get, with the seekers that come in, almost always say, we'll ask, so do you recommend we do this?

And like, whoa, that's big. We don't want to be responsible for that. The one answer that we gave them is only if God told you to. And we found that in our marriage too. When things got tough, knowing that God ordained this is what got you through. God said so. It's God. You know, we have to push forward because God is steering this boat. So concentrate on your relationship with the Lord and let him put you where you're supposed to go.

That's kind of the big thing for me. I see people in churches that don't have, maybe they have some traditions or customs that they really question, but they decide they're going to stay and build that church up stronger and make it better.

And I admire that, that they can do that. There are other people who are like, you know, I've got some children and some young people and I don't want to raise them in this context. Hey, if that's what the Lord's putting on your heart, you just got to stick close to the Lord.

Stay in the Word. Surround yourself with healthy Christians that you feel are on the track. They're what you want to be. And just keep at the Word and keep asking questions of those people that you respect, that you feel are living the Word.

And let the Lord direct you. That's the only way you can make it because there's going to be bumps, just like in marriage. You know, like, they do what? You know. And that's when you need the Lord's kind of, like, it's like I feel like his hand on my shoulder going, no, I told you to do this. You know, you're, you know, in the ditch on a main street with a horse and buggy and you're in Holmes County and you're thinking, really, Lord? You know. And it's like, no, he said you're supposed to try this.

And that actually literally did happen to us. And up behind us comes this old gray-haired Amish guy and I'm thinking, oh, he's going to want to talk Dutch. We can't talk Dutch. We're going to have to try to explain our name to him. It was the bishop of our congregation.

And he came and got us out of the ditch. God provides.

Yeah. This is quite the story. And I just, I hope from what you've been sharing today that our listeners are hearing this and say, you know, I'm on a journey right now too. And I hope this is an encouragement to them to, you know, faithfulness, I think is a thread that's coming through, perseverance, this stuff didn't, you know, it's not like you woke up one day and boom, had all the answers and everything worked. And, you know, this, you know, it can be years. And there's something encouraging about that. And so as we wrap this episode up, bring all the pieces together and tie the ribbons on this package, is there anything you would like to leave with our audience?

You know, I think what I said about sticking with the scriptures, you know, that is, that's the big thing. You know, the whole Anabaptist movement was on, you know, solely the scriptures. Let's concentrate on the Word of God and make that our building block. Not society, not culture, not all of the other things that are competing. But that became our measuring stick for everything.

And if you're staying in the Word and that is your measuring stick and the Holy Spirit is working in you, the Lord will direct you. It's not trick questions. He's not trying to trick us. You know, and I think that's why the conservative people who think that the most conservative churches would be the holiest is because you can do that with a checklist. Learn to haul water, check. Learn to butcher chickens, check.

You know, learn to use a chainsaw, check, you know. Our carnal minds want to do that. It's not that easy. Give me the to-do list, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I'll just knock that all off and then I'm a right good Amishman. You know, it's so easy. Or Mennonite or whatever. It's very easy for us humans to fall into that. And our lifestyle lends itself to that. There's great things in our lifestyle, but it's the Word.

Base it on the Word. And if the Word is telling you that you're supposed to serve God in that setting, he'll open the doors. You don't have to kick against the pricks. Yeah, I think that's a powerful one to end on and encourage our listeners with that piece. So hopefully through your story, that they've learned some things and said, okay, yeah, I have something to think about, you know. And I just really appreciate you coming on today and telling your story. I don't take something like that lightly. You know, this is a process that you went through and I feel like we have a lot to learn from what you went through. So thank you for sharing today.

You're welcome. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to this episode with Elizabeth. So a number of years ago, we interviewed Samantha about her journey from the Catholic Church into the Anabaptist movement. And you can find that linked in the description down below. We also have several other podcasts that you can follow as well. And you can find all of those linked below as well. We're releasing an entire course taught by Frank Reid as its own YouTube and podcast channel. And I think you'll find that material interesting and helpful. And again, all of that is down below and on our website at anabaptistperspectives.org. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you in the next episode.