Lessons Learned From My Boyhood in the Amish, Part 1 — Ephraim Renno

In the first of a planned series, Ephraim Renno shares the story of his boyhood growing up Amish on a dairy farm in Juniata County, Pennsylvania, one of thirteen children. He paints a warm picture of Amish life—hand-milking cows by lantern light, a one-room school, barn raisings and house rebuildings that showcased extraordinary community togetherness, and the slower-paced, contentment-shaped rhythm of family and church. He also traces the early spiritual stirrings that God used (his sister Annie’s death, secretly reading a Bible storybook, a book on marriage) and closes with a discussion of what is gained and lost when people leave the Amish—especially the tension between deep community and genuine spiritual life. This talk lays the groundwork for later talks on his seeking, what he found, and lessons for others who leave.

Key Points:

– Ephraim grew up Amish, number eight of thirteen children, on a dairy farm, and describes the daily rhythm of chores, milking, and family life off the grid.

– Amish community togetherness is a genuine strength—shown in a 300-man barn raising and a house rebuilt and reoccupied just fourteen days after burning down.

– Every technological "gain" (like automatic milkers) also brought a loss, in this case the quiet togetherness of hand-milking as a family.

– Church life was structured and disciplined—three-plus hours on wooden benches, slow German hymns, sermons preached from memory—with plenty there for a soul that wanted to hear from God.

– Early spiritual stirrings came through his sister Annie’s death, secretly reading a Bible storybook, and taking marriage seriously before wedding Saloma.

– Leaving the Amish often trades community for spiritual seeking; Ephraim’s burden is to help people hold on to the good, not live reactively, and not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Scripture References: 1 Corinthians 12 (the body and its members)

Guide me, O the great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land. Good morning. Welcome to Hope For Wondering Amish. We’re so glad you found us. My name is Elam Peachey. I’m hosting this meeting. This morning we have a special guest with us, Ephraim Renno from Berks County, Pennsylvania.

He’s an outstanding special friend — friends of my family. We’ve had many wonderful times of fellowship together. Ephraim and his family are members at Ephrata Christian Fellowship. He was ordained deacon there about a year ago. This morning is the first of a series of talks that Brother Ephraim plans to do for us. Every year, Amish and Old Order type people leave their communities and find themselves in a struggle. The purpose behind Hope For Wondering Amish, along with Ephraim’s talk, is to help these people in their search.

Ephraim and his wife wrestled with many, many things years ago when they left the Amish. So at the end of this talk, we’ll have an opportunity for you to share your questions or comments. So are you ready, Brother Ephraim? I’m ready. Go ahead. So glad to have you. And we really appreciate you joining us. I want to have a prayer for you, and then the time is yours.

So, Father, I thank you for Brother Ephraim and his family. And I just pray for your blessing, your peace upon Ephraim this morning as he shares with us. And I pray for your grace to be upon him and your Spirit to minister to his heart, Lord, that the words that he shares with us could minister life and could bring hope to many, Lord. Wandering sheep, there are people in confusion. We pray for the light of your gospel to shine across this land. Bless Brother Ephraim. And we pray for your name to be glorified this morning, in the precious name of Jesus. Amen.

Well, thank you, Brother Elam. Good to be with you all. I am very happy to share about my life and what the Lord has done and those things. I’m hoping to do maybe four talks. This morning being the first one. And I am sharing on my growing-up years this morning. Then I would like to do a talk on our time of seeking, my wife and I, as we entered marriage and seeking the Lord for deeper things in life in our journey there. And then the third one would be life after leaving the Amish.

Being blessings for others you have left. I’m really excited about especially the later talks, this morning as well. But basically I’ll be just sharing my life story of growing up this morning, not making as many spiritual applications perhaps, but laying the groundwork for the later talks. So I grew up in a family of 13 children, nine boys, four girls.

I was number eight. Grew up on a dairy farm in Juniata County, Pennsylvania. Most of the Amish families there were occupied either with farming or sawmills or pallet shops and some other occupations in between there. My second-to-oldest sibling had a handicap. She had spina bifida. Was a very sweet sister. But she had that handicap. My youngest brother has Down syndrome.

So farm life was a good life in so many ways. A normal day would be getting up about five o’clock or so, waking up to my dad being downstairs in the kitchen, pumping up the gas or [unclear] lantern. And it was fairly noisy. He would pump it up and then out the door. And by the time I was awake, I would see his shadow from the lantern by his side cast up over the barn as he was on his way out. And I knew it was time to get up and go out and join Dad in the barn for an hour, hour and a half of milking, doing chores before breakfast, and hungry by the time breakfast came around.

We started out milking cows by hand. When I was a little boy, maybe 12 years old, I joined the family, had my two to four cows to milk, and did my share there. Good memories of being in the cow stable, mornings and evenings, with Dad and perhaps four or five of my siblings milking cows.

Then when I was 14, the church decided to allow automatic milkers, and we doubled the dairy herd. And it was a time of a lot of other young families buying farms and starting up their own dairy, and that being made possible with having milkers. But I also just remember how that change from the family being in the cow stable, milking cows by hand — everything was quiet, other than the squirting of milk, the contented chewing of the cows eating their feed, and the family talking with each other. And then this new technology came in. And while it was an advance in being much more productive with less people, there was also an element of togetherness that wasn’t there anymore after that.

So it felt like a gain. There also were elements of loss. So I’ve experienced that kind of thing quite a bit through life, where there’s things that you add to life, technology that makes life easier, more productive, but it seems like there’s always some sort of loss with every gain.

There were some boys on the farm. There were few dull moments. My mother was gray-headed at a fairly young age. And I don’t know, maybe it was genetic, but I also think perhaps us boys put her through a lot. You know, life with no television, no video games, no phones, completely off the grid, no cars. But we were left to more creative possibilities. I’ll just give one example. I could give you many. We had an old buggy running gear on the farm and converted it into a machine to coast down the hill. Our farm was on a big hill. Took the shafts off the front, put seats on the back axle, baler twine to the front axle to steer. And one problem — we didn’t have any brakes.

For a way to slow down, we had a short cable tied to the back axle with a weight on the free end. And if you decided that it was time to slow down, you’d throw this weight into the wheel. And after a few revolutions, the cable would wrap up in the wheel and start packing the wheel and bring you to a gradual stop. The only problem was, you had to come to a complete stop, back up, unravel the cable before you could keep going. That’s just one of many things I could share about life on the farm.

School years. Of course, we had a one-room parochial school with grades one to eight in the school and up to 30 students with one teacher. If it went over 30 students, then they would add a second teacher. As you could imagine, the teacher sometimes was stretched pretty thin with 30 students or close to it. And there were times where it wasn’t too ideal. Things went on in the playground and within boundaries in the woods that the teacher just wasn’t involved in because she was too busy. But a lot of really good memories about school. It was on our farm, up the hill.

The school didn’t have a well, or at least it didn’t have a good well. So the boys would take turns to take the big five-gallon water jug down to our farm and fill it up and take it back up to school for drinking water. I went through eight grades in school, and ninth grade was a half day a week in school and keeping a journal of what I did the rest of the time. And after that I was done with school.

Community togetherness — I would like to talk about that a little bit. That’s definitely a strong point the Amish have. I was five years old. My mother was at home with a four-day-old baby brother of mine and my older sister. The rest of us went to church about a mile away at my uncle’s place. And our big barn lit on fire, and word came to church that our barn was burning. It was quite an experience at five years old. A big part of the church stopped. The men left. I left with one of the men. Went back home and remember very vividly the great big fire. All the fire companies coming out, and eventually got the fire out.

It was a total loss as far as the barn and some other outbuildings and all the animals. The only thing that was saved as far as the animals was two or three horses at church and the chickens that were running around on the farm. Everything else was a total loss. They were able to keep the house from burning, and most of the other outbuildings were lost. The way that everybody came together and pulled together and brought these barn raisings to build a new barn —

I’ll tell you a little bit about the main barn-raising day. There were 300 men there raising this barn, a very large barn, and they basically got it up from first floor up to the roof in one day. At lunchtime, somebody was getting hungry and mentioned to a fellow worker there, "Isn’t it about lunchtime?" And his fellow worker said, "Yeah, 80 men just left, didn’t you know?" So 80 of the workers had gone for lunch, and some of the people didn’t even notice that anybody had left. 300 people working on a barn.

A bit later, in December of 1999, my cousin’s house burned down, and my brother and I and one other fellow were the first ones on the scene. My cousin Amos had just left for the neighbor to use the phone to call the fire company. His wife was there, and we happened on the scene on our way to work. And the fire was shooting out the top of the house. It had started in the bottom and went right up the walls and up through the roof, up to the top. Burned down very quickly. And I’d just like to share a little bit about the tremendous effort that was displayed there.

How people dropped their work and just came and really pitched in to build a new house. The fire started about eight o’clock in the morning. By noon, the house was completely burned down. Or basically anyway — they got in some equipment to tear the rest of it down, clean it up. By late afternoon, the excavator was making footers for a new house. And concrete was poured that same evening. Nine hours after the fire started, concrete was being poured in the same spot for a new house. The next day, the block were laid and the first floor built. Two days after the fire, the roof was on the new house. Fourteen days after the fire, the house was basically completed and the family moved in.

And it was a time of camaraderie. It wasn’t like, why do we have to do this? There was, as far as I could tell, no competition, you know, of people wanting the best job there. Everybody just came and found something to do and pitched in. It was community effort. Good memories there. Another time of community togetherness that was very touching, more sad for me — my older sister that had some health complications and a handicap. Sister Annie passed away when she was 21 years old. I was 12, I believe. I was pretty close to her. She developed kidney failure and passed away about two months later. And it was a time of great sadness for me, and thinking a lot about heaven, what God wants for me, and how to live a life for God and all of that.

I felt very close to God over that time. I really wanted to commit my life to him. But it didn’t go real long after that until I got discouraged with the idea of serving God and had a few years there of pursuing the self-life in a greater way than before.

But I’d like to share a little bit about church life and structure. The Amish church happens every Sunday — and I realize that some of you grew up with this and you’re very familiar with it. Others didn’t. I’d like to just share a bit for those that didn’t experience Amish church life, just to tell you how it was. Church every other Sunday. And the in-between Sunday, it was expected that you would stay at home in the forenoon and rest and meditate, unless you visited a neighboring church district, which was pretty common — to go visit another church district on your in-between Sunday. So church service was typically from about 8 to 11:30, if I remember correctly.

About three, three and a half hours long. And as a little boy, I would sit with my dad in church, and you’re expected to sit still on a wooden bench for three and a half hours. It was a very good discipline. Don’t regret having to do that. That was good for a young boy to have that discipline. There were ways for the younger children and girls to be able to get through the service a little better. We would sing for about 45 to 50 minutes, two or three songs. And a very unique style of singing. Very slow. That’s a beautiful way of singing, if you have the patience to sing one song for 25 minutes or so.

And a lot of deep meaning in the hymns that were sung. It was all in German. And unfortunately, the German teaching was probably lacking in our setting, where, at least in my experience, I didn’t really understand very well what I was singing and what I was hearing. But there was plenty there to be gotten for the soul. If someone had a desire to hear from God, it was there.

It was about 20 minutes long. And there was silent prayer, kneeling. After that, the deacon would read a designated scripture for the day. And then the main sermon would be an hour or so long. After that, testimonies, announcements — the deacon would announce where church is to be gathered in two weeks. And if there were any special matters to be handled by the members of the church, the deacon would announce that the members could stay seated at the end. And they would handle the special matters.

Just before testimonies, there would be another prayer again, kneeling. And it would be an audible prayer read out of the prayer book. Then you would have another song and dismissal. This was every two weeks. After church then, everyone would file out. The ladies would stay in the house, the men would go to the barn. And lunch would be prepared. Shortly, everyone would file back in and sit down to a very good meal that was served after every church service. And it was typically about the same food every time. It was very good, enjoyable. After lunch, most people would stay around for a little while visiting.

Friends and family would typically stay for supper and stay all afternoon into the evening and have a lot of visiting and fellowship. The preachers would preach from their heart, from memory, rather than reading out of the Bible. There’s a lot of scripture quoted, but it generally tended to be certain scriptures repeated many times rather than all of the Bible. And I’m not critical necessarily about that. Again, there was a lot there, and the scriptures were varied mostly through the Gospels and Epistles, and mostly through the New Testament. But because of every Sunday having its designated scripture and everything being preached from memory, it did tend to be fairly repetitious.

So yeah, that’s about it for church life. My youth years — at the age of 16, I joined the youth group, as was typical. Every Sunday evening, the youth would gather together and have a time of singing about an hour and a half long, and some visiting before and after. Afterwards, the courting couples would go home together, and the rest would stay around, visit, chat for a while, until they left as well. Singing was again in German, but it was the faster singing, and again, very enjoyable, and a lot there if someone had a heart to understand and do it as unto the Lord.

There were bonus singings for the youth on holidays with games afterwards, which would sometimes go into the night pretty far. Occasionally, especially summertimes, there would be a work night for the youth, whether weed pulling or corn husking. The farmers all husked their corn by hand, and it was a very time-consuming job. It was enjoyable again, and often would be a time of family together.

Where Dad’s out there with his boys and sometimes girls husking corn side by side. You know, if one got ahead, he would help the one that’s behind. And there was a lot of time to talk about anything and everything. But the young farmers would often struggle to get their corn husked because it was a very time-consuming job, and they didn’t have enough time to reach around. So the youth would get together and go husk corn for a young farmer. That was a good, enjoyable exercise as well.

At 17 years old, I fell in love with a young girl named Saloma, who is today my wife. And as our courtship progressed, I sensed the seriousness of marriage. Here again is a strength that the Amish have — to take marriage seriously, to take the scripture seriously about the permanence of marriage. And as I started looking at getting married, I really wanted to try to do it right, realizing it’s a one-time thing. You don’t do it over.

I picked up a book on marriage. I think it was a good move, as I look back. I am thankful I did that. I read it, took it very seriously, thought about it a lot. This book sparked something in me — an interest and desire to read spiritual books, to learn things about God, and to be understanding of what God has for me and what is true and right in life. So it did spark that within me. And we got married then, when Saloma was 19 years old. I was 20.

So I will probably stop about there. There’s, of course, lots and lots of things I could share about life there. That gives you a snapshot of what it was like. In many ways, it was an idyllic life. It was slower-paced, and contentment was drilled into us. Family life was important — family gathering together three times a day, for a meal, sitting around the table. We’d have silent prayer before and silent prayer after. It was a good structure. Many good times.

I will share this yet. When I was perhaps 12, 13 years old, right around the time my sister passed away and I was thinking more seriously about God, I wanted to learn about God. But I didn’t want anyone to know that I had that interest. So I would go and sneak my dad’s — he had an English Bible storybook that was pretty detailed. It was written kind of on an adult level. I decided maybe if I would read through this book, I would learn good things about God, learn what life is all about.

So I would every so often go and sneak this book out of Dad’s desk and go away and hide myself somewhere and read a lesson or two, and then I would sneak it back again. So there were those spiritual stirrings at that time that I’m thankful for. And God used it to start pointing me in that way.

Now, there were plenty of times where I sowed to the flesh. I certainly had a selfish nature and many things that I would be happy to do differently if I had the opportunity again. But there’s only one life. And like the saying goes, "Only one life, ’twill soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last."

And I would like to share in future talks about the times of wrestling with God, with the Bible, and with truths about life, and trying to look at things from a biblical perspective and searching for historic faith and just wrestling through those things. So I plan to share that in future talks. Again, like I said in the beginning, I’d like to share about our searchings, and then about what we have found, and then lessons for others that have left the older settings and perhaps are leaving. I want to say this, that I am not saying you should leave. The reality is there are many that do, and I would like to help you find your way through historic faith, to the glory of our Lord Jesus and for his kingdom.

Brother Elam, I’ll hand it back over to you, and you can take it from there. Yeah, thank you very much, Brother Ephraim. I really appreciate your talk here this morning. Now, we have a handful of people on the meeting here this morning. You should be able to unmute yourself if you have any questions. So if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to unmute yourself and, yeah, ask or share anything with Ephraim that you would like.

I really appreciate your talk, Brother Ephraim. I guess probably one thing that, through your talk, kept jumping out at me — you used the word togetherness a few times in your talk. And I think that’s something, and I was thinking about that recently. I don’t know if any group of people — let’s say, I mean, there’s definitely communities out there of people that have a togetherness, but at the scale as the Amish, I’m not aware of any group of people like that. Like for myself, I grew up Amish. It wasn’t in an Amish community, though, but we had neighbors that would come over, just people from the community, you know, older people maybe, and they would just spend time with us, watching us work.

And then they would share their stories when they grew up on a farm years ago, how they would, you know, work together as farmers, harvesting the crops. And they just had a lot of really, really good memories of that growing up. But I feel like that community life has been lost at large in our Western culture, which is really sad. That community life is a great place for children to grow up in.

I think that’s something that will be with us as long as we live. So the thought of, you have Amish with their close community, and there’s a lot of people that leave the Amish to go more something like Mennonite. And when you make that switch, there’s something lost as far as community life goes. Well, I would say the reason that a lot of Amish leave would be a seeking for more of a spiritual walk and answers, and to have spiritual needs met in their life in a larger way, I would say.

Would you agree with that, Ephraim? I would, yes. Then they go more Mennonite, but then you sort of lose the community there. Then the next step would be more like Protestant or evangelical. Then the community life is lost in a further way. Then — my next, I don’t know, I’m just kind of putting things in categories here — then you have more, let’s say that there’s a lot of really, really lonely people in the world we live in, in the cities and stuff where there’s a lot of people, a lot of children growing up with absolutely no community. If you look at statistics and stuff, like depression is increasing, and suicide and stuff like that. It’s a very lonely world we live in, and it’s really sad.

I desire for Christians to take that togetherness more serious, and to be that light and that testimony to the world we live in. I feel like the Amish have a lot to offer as far as community life goes. But then there’s that sort of lacking of spirituality. And then when you move more to, let’s say, more spiritual kind of churches, then you lose the community. I don’t know. It’s just some thoughts that I’ve had. But yeah, I don’t know if you have any input on that or not.

Yeah, there’s a few things I could say to that. And in some of the later talks, I would hope to address it more in detail — that the Amish do stress a lot the idea of laying down your own identity for the group as a whole. Your identity is found in the group. It’s not about you as an individual as much as, do what’s best for the whole. And then when the whole is healthy — and I’m not saying it always is, but when the whole group is healthy, that’s where the individual can really prosper. So there’s that constant push — maybe push isn’t the greatest word there — but the teaching to lay down your selfish nature and individualistic approach to life, and approach life as a group, whether it’s family or church, just to really promote that togetherness.

And, you know, we can be negative about perhaps some of the requirements that the Amish have on their people. Uniformity and doing everything the same. Basically — I shouldn’t say everything, because there’s room for individual creativity and variation there as well. But we can be negative about perhaps the rules that lay on their members, whereas at the same time, that does create a togetherness and a giving up of your own identity for the sake of the group.

Especially in our Western, 2023, individualistic approach to life, with our fast-paced life and our electronic communication capabilities, we have to be very intentional if we’re going to experience any kind of community togetherness like the Amish have.

Many, many good memories about my Amish upbringing. And most of my brothers and sisters and extended family are still Amish. And I would just love to see the Amish keep that togetherness, and at the same time, experience more of that genuine spiritual life, you know, individually connected with the Lord Jesus, gaining community togetherness, and find their way in that. The Bible does teach us to lay down our life for each other and to submit to one another, and that when we are in the body, that we are literally like, you know, a hand or a foot. And we know how much our bodies — you know, we need each body part. And if one member suffers, the whole body suffers.

There are those teachings in scripture that we tend to lose, especially in our times. And we have to be very intentional if we’re going to experience that kind of community togetherness. Yeah, thank you so much. All right. Any questions, comments? You should be able to unmute yourself. And yeah, turn your video on and let’s hear what you have to say.

I want to hear your story. But I was wondering — was there at any point in time after you, because obviously you’re not Amish anymore, or at least not that which you grew up in — was there at any point after you left that you regretted your decision or looked back, so to speak, or thought maybe you should have not left?

That’s a really good question. No, I wouldn’t say that I ever regretted leaving, although there were enough times of perhaps real life falling short of the ideals that I left the Amish with — some unrealistic ideals — and when I found out that the rest of the Christian society outside of the Amish is just as much made out of real human beings as what the Amish are. There were many times where I could have looked back and thought, well, what did I leave and what did I lose and that kind of thing. But what really has kept me going, though, is the things that we have found as spiritual life in the church that we’re a part of, and the broader Christian church as well.

That’s a good question. There’s been enough of that perhaps tugging at heartstrings to remember the values that were there and the togetherness. There’s been enough of that that I’ve tried to be very real with, in helping me to not throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. Yeah, thank you for that question.

Yeah, all right. We have time for a few more questions, so we’d be glad to hear any questions you may have or comments. If I could just say a little bit of something, if nobody’s coming on. Like I said earlier, this talk largely was to lay the groundwork, give some background for future talks. And the part I’m really passionate about later on will be the idea of — well, let me say it this way. I see so many folks leaving the Amish, and maybe they start out well with good intentions, but then losing the boundaries that they always were used to, they don’t know where to stop. And oftentimes there’s a reaction to perhaps hurts or disappointments, confusion from the past. There’s a reaction to that, and they just don’t know where to stop.

And I really look forward to sharing about some of those lessons in life, as far as to not live life in a reactionary way, and to sort through the good and the bad and leave the bad and hold on to the good. We as ex-Amish, we tend to be very quick to throw out traditions as a bad thing, where I’m going to say that there are times where it’s better to find the meaning behind the tradition than it is to be quick to throw traditions to the wind. So how to sort through that and really hold on to the good is what I’m passionate about and look forward to sharing about. Turn it back to you.

Is there anybody else with any questions? Yeah, I appreciate what you said, Ephraim. Yeah, I know both people from Amish and Mennonite backgrounds that have sort of left, let’s say, their traditional church as a family. And there definitely is a struggle as you leave your community and everything you knew from childhood and try to take your entire family and integrate it into a different community. It’s like, who am I? You know, and there’s all the changes that a whole family goes through. I think it’s a lot bigger struggle than most people realize.

And I’ve heard from parents — I can think of an Amish family and a Mennonite family where the changes, it’s almost like the speed of change as the family left. It’s like the children, I don’t know. I think it creates a lot of confusion perhaps with the family and the children, where — what I’m getting at is where I’ve talked to parents maybe some years later. They’re like, wow, you know, their children like maybe lost all — I shouldn’t say all, but, you know, are they barely, are they even Christians kind of thing? You know what I mean? Where the parents are like, wow, what did I sow into my children?

Maybe the parents are finally coming, making that circle and really finding, being grounded in Christ and his word. And meantime, the children are sort of lost in the sea of humanity, and they don’t see a road for return for their children maybe kind of thing. So, and there’s a lot of heartaches in that for the parents, to, you know, see their children go that route and realize, wow, I may be a part to blame for this. And so I do look forward for your future talks, and hopefully it can be a big help to a lot of people that are making the changes or thinking of making the change.

Yes. Amen. Well, let’s keep praying to that end. I might just say this yet, just jumping ahead of myself a little bit again, but I want to give a lot of credit to discipling that I received from brothers as we were leaving the Amish. I don’t want to get into it in detail right now, but that was a tremendous help to me. And one thing that one of the brothers really laid to me is God’s call in my life to live the Christian life in such a way that there’s a consistent testimony for years to come, where Amish people looking on can see something there that’s good and that’s right and biblical.

What happens is so many people end up leaving and going a lot further than they ever intended to, and really just throwing so much good to the wind. And then that causes for reaction. So there’s reaction going on on both sides. The ones leaving react to their background and just end up getting really, really far from it. And then the ones that are still there looking on say, look there — now you see where it leads to if you leave. So you can’t leave. And there’s a staunchness that develops where there’s a real resistance to change because of seeing where change leads. So that’s a challenge that this brother laid to me, and I’ve wanted to take it to heart.

I plan to get into that more in the future talks. Yeah, we’re definitely looking forward to that. And the next one is when? Is that in two weeks? Saturday morning again? That would take us to March 18th. Is that what you’re planning on? I believe that should work. I will plan on it, Lord willing. And yeah, we’ll plan on it. Yeah, well, thanks to everyone for joining us here this morning. Blessing having you with us. And we’re looking forward to, in two weeks, March 18th. And hope to see you back then. God bless everyone. God bless each one of you.