I grew up in a Pentecostal culture that was quite wonderful in many ways. The music, a mix of country and folk with all the old standards worked in, was full of energy and emotion. A remarkable number of people in our small congregation were surprisingly accomplished musicians: my aunt on the piano, my good friend on the violin, his father on the flute, my dad with his tenor saxophone, and my mother with her accordion. A strikingly statuesque young woman played her large bass fiddle with dramatic flair, slapping and spinning it. An elderly man who had spent his life as a logger, his fingers still agile, picked his banjo. I played the cornet. There were always impromptu trios and quartets. The preachers were great storytellers. A succession of missionaries on furlough entertained us through each year with heartbreaking stories out of Africa and Brazil. I was never bored. I loved it.
But pastors were in short supply. These preachers were great at the big picture and the great challenges ahead, but they didn’t have any time for ordinary people devoid of drama.
I liked the preachers. They were never dull. Most of them were larger than life. As I entered adolescence, I began to get the feeling that God, except for the time they talked about him on Sunday, was not high on their agenda. They were pretty full of themselves. And by this time I was getting interested in God.
Brother Herman, for instance. (All our preachers were either “brother” or, occasionally, “sister.”) He was much larger than life. And he was never larger than on one Saturday afternoon at a Mennonite wedding. There was a Mennonite community ten miles or so east of our town, nestled against the mountains. One of the young men from our church courted and proposed marriage to one of their girls. The wedding date was set, and all the young people from our congregation were invited to the wedding. Our preacher, Brother Herman, was invited by the bride’s pastor to share in the marriage service. It was late spring. I remember that the lilacs and apple trees were in blossom. The wedding and reception took place on the family farm. A Mennonite feast was spread. After the wedding ceremony we all fell to at the tables of fried chicken and potato salad, coleslaw and deviled eggs. And punch.
Brother Herman remarked on how good the punch was and kept going back for refills. He kept saying that it was the best punch he had ever had, Mennonite punch, and to be sure and give him the recipe.
Meanwhile, the rumor was circulating among the younger set that one of the Mennonite kids had spiked the punch with vodka. We could hardly contain ourselves, watching to see when the effects would take hold, for one of the subtexts in virtually every one of Brother Herman’s sermons was “Liquor has never passed my lips.” We heard it every Sunday. Now we had a ringside seat, watching it happen, watching Mennonite punch in considerable quantities pass his lips. It took about forty minutes for the vodka to make its presence felt. Brother Herman spent the rest of the afternoon under an apple tree, but not quietly—his loud snoring announcing the cancellation of his proud years of teetotalling.
Twenty-seven years later I was speaking at a gathering of Mennonite pastors in Indiana and told that story by way of introducing my first encounter with Mennonites. After my lecture, one of the pastors came up to me and said, “I was at that wedding. I was the kid who spiked the punch.”