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News Articles by Richard Nations/The Pathway

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Shunned by Amish, pastor now pointing them to the Gospel

POLLOCK, Mo. (BP) -- Sam Burkholder was a member of the Old Order Amish Church when he noticed that some of his Christian relatives were different. "I saw they had a peace and joy that the Amish didn't have," Burkholder said. "I knew they had something we were missing." He found that something, the Holy Spirit, on the way to becoming an evangelical Christian and now a bivocational Baptist pastor. Burkholder, 66, serves as a pastor in northern Missouri at Fairview Baptist Church near Pollock and operates a lawnmower repair business in Kirksville. He and his wife Barbara were shunned by the Amish in 1998 after they made their professions of faith. Shunning is an Amish practice in which those who leave the church are considered apostates, with Amish church members forbidden by their church to have any social contact with those being shunned. Four of the Burkholders' eight children and their families are not supposed to have any contact with him. Four of them have accepted Christ and are no longer Amish. Both Sam and Barbara grew up in large families in Amish farming communities, making a living doing farm work and working on tractors. Ironic as it seems, Sam learned to work on tractors in the evening after the farm work was complete, using an Amish (kerosene) lantern for light. Tractors are used in some Amish communities but only for belt power, not to pull machinery. "Different communities have rules and regulations on what the Amish can and cannot do," Burkholder said of a complex set of rules that often are confusing and contradictory. "The bishops always warn you not to believe anything else but what they say," Burkholder said. As a result, the Amish communities become somewhat of a theocracy, with the church preachers and the bishop making most of the decisions on what is acceptable in the community and what is not. Anything not approved by the church elders is considered sinful. A hodgepodge of rules and regulations ("ordnung" in German) dictate whether a particular sect will use telephones, have power equipment on their farms or what color of clothing the members will wear. Almost all Amish dress "plain," meaning they make their own clothing. Women wear a bonnet. They pin their clothing together instead of using buttons or zippers. Men wear suspenders. Men also do not shave their beards, but they do not have mustaches. "I had a cousin say to me at a funeral, 'I am counting on my Amish clothing to get me into heaven,'" Burkholder said.