Turns out, I’m probably the plainest, most low-tech person on the campus of eastern Mennonite University that day.
I wait for Dr. Keim outside his office. Along one wall run a detailed historical flow chart of the Anabaptist movement. Next door the steady tapping of computer keys lays a staccato rhythm over the whine of printers.
''Excuse me - do you run the computer center?'' Before me stands a young blond woman wearing long dangly earrings and a spiral perm, shorts and a t-shirt. No white net headcovering. No apron.
"No," I say. "Just visiting."
Al Keim has a computer in his office, too. The chairperson of the history department specializes in recent American history and spends several days a week doing research and writing. He's an articulate and thoughtful man, generous with his time and knowledge.
"I have the bonnet tradition," he says. '' I grew up in an old-order Amish family in Ohio. I was drafted in the 1950s and went to central Europe as an Amishman, a conscientious objector, and came back a Mennonite. I discovered a whole world. I came to Eastern Mennonite for my degree and, aside from a few years graduate work elsewhere, I've been in Harrisonburg ever since."
He explains that the Shenandoah Valley Mennonites first arrived in Page County, near Luray, about 1727. From there they carved out farms up and down the Valley. Their farming expertise is legendary: a quarter of Virginia's milk comes from Old-Order Mennonite farms in Rockingham County.
Keim lists some of the numerous divisions of the Mennonite Church in the Valley. The Harrisonburg-based Virginia Conference is the most liberal of the groups. Founded in 1835, the Conference tolerates great diversity among its 4,000 Rockingham County members. It includes charismatic, Pentecostal congregations, ''who speak in tongues, borrowing the language of the conservative Bible Belt. '' Keim says. He cites the Cornerstone Church in Broadway as the first church in Virginia to attract a state trooper - an ironic addition to the traditionally non-violent, self-monitoring Mennonite community.
More conservative is the Southeastern Conference, with 500 Rockingham County members. Disagreeing with the Virginia Conference adoption of Sunday School classes and Eastern Mennonite liberalism, the group, ''stopped the cultural clock 20 years ago,'' says Keim. The men wear plain coats (without lapels) and hats; women adhere to the I Corinthians admonition, ''Any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled dishonors her head.''
And then there are the Old Order Mennonites: the separatist, farmdwelling, plainly dressed believers who choose their own company apart from the busyness of the world. How can one church encompass such a wide range of lifestyles and beliefs, I ask Keim. What binds them together as Mennonites?
He doesn't miss a beat. "It's not an easy relationship, '' he admits. ''These are not easy times to be Mennonite. There's a great deal of struggling and pain among us these days. We're not sure who we are.'' He points to Mennonite ethnicity - strong genealogical connections - as one powerful cohesive factor. Too, the Virginia Conference has taken on "a new middle-class tolerance," leaving behind the more rigid, personality-dominated control.
Most binding, though, are the basic Mennonite tenets of adult baptism, simplicity and pacifism. Keim speaks eloquently about the latter.
"The Persian Gulf War helped us remember what we are about - an alternative understanding of how the world ought to work. One-third of our student body are not Mennonites, and many of them had relatives fighting in the war. War took on a face - we've never as Mennonites thought about who these soldier-people really were.''
''My congregation has four millionaire members. Our theology suggests that wealth is a sign of caving in to the world, so how do we reconcile having so much money?'' The search for a simple life amidst plenty is often difficult but must continue for all Mennonite believers, Keim asserts. The Virginia Conference provides a mediation service for congregations struggling to work out equitable salaries for its traditionally poorly paid ministers.
Is the Old-Order Mennonite community losing members to the more liberal Virginia and Southeast Conferences? Keim smiles.
''Not at all. They're gaining! The Old-Orders believe in large families. They're succeeding wonderfully in keeping their young within the fold, largely because they're working very hard and successfully at appropriate agriculture."
Whether they'll be able to acquire new farmland in Rockingham County to sustain their members is another question.
"I wouldn't be sure of their future here," Keim says carefully. He explains that migration has traditionally been used by Old-Order Mennonite and Amish communities for survival: as their land commands premium prices and available tracts disappear, groups move westward to take advantage of the cheaper land and open spaces.
"Many of their farms lie just outside Harrisonburg city limits and carry prime value. They'll be gobbled up sooner or later, I'm afraid."
Southeastern Pennsylvania is home to the largest and oldest concentration of Mennonites in North America. In Lancaster County, ''The Garden Spot of the World,'' you can take a bus tour of Amish and Old-Order Mennonite farms; the farm women will feed you lunch, Pennsylvania-Dutch style. You can get off your bus in Intercourse and Bird-in-Hand, buy cast-iron horse and buggies and faceless dolls in gift shops. Check the tags: they're made overseas.
Al Keim thinks Rockingham County will escape similar exploitation. ''We're too far off the beaten track,'' he says. ''People here have seen what's happened in Lancaster County, and they don't want it to happen here. In fact, someone tried to promote a Mennonite restaurant here a few years back, and it went out of business!''
David Huyard serves wonderful barbecue sandwiches at his restaurant, Huyard's Country Kitchen, housed in the Dayton Farmer's Market. And he knows all about the tourist trade. He grew up on an Amish farm in Lancaster County - one of the first to feed busloads of hungry outsiders in the 1940s.
Forty-five years and an excommunication later, Huyard says he will not capitalize on his faith.
''I could use the word 'Mennonite' in the name of my restaurant,'' he says. ''But I won't. I don't think it's right to use your religion to attract customers, to make money off of your faith.''
Huyard is an intense man with a flair for the dramatic: he wears a high chef's hat with ''Le Chef'' written in loopy cursive, and willingly shares stories of his strict Amish upbringing.
''Three years after I married, I chose to leave the Amish community and join the Mennonite believers. I believed strongly in the Mennonite missionary emphasis, which my Amish community avoided. My father disowned me, and the community shunned me, '' he says.
He and wife Mary went to Tennessee, where Huyard served as missionary minister to a rural parish in Mountain City. There he began a radio ministry which now reaches around the world. Seeking some formal training, Huyard came to Eastern Mennonite College, where he received his master's degree in Christian counseling.
Both Huyard and bed-and-breakfast operator Verna Leaman speak openly of the drawbacks of Old-Order society.
''I don't think they really understand anymore why they do things the way they do, but they're not about to change, '' Huyard says.
Charismatic Mennonite Leaman puts it more directly: ''The Amish and OldOrder Mennonites don't have the Jesus experience - the born-again and saved. They're all don't, don't. '' Such controlling traditions, she says, are bondages.
''They don't have anything to do with the life within, those bondages. The Old-Order lay their hope for Heaven in tradition.''
''After the Mormons, the Hutterites, Amish, and Old-Order Mennonites are the fastest growing groups in America,'' says Mennonite minister and counselor Harvey Yoder. And why do the young stay within the community? ''The more distinctive the group, the scarier it is to leave it, '' Yoder points out.
We sit in the Eastern Mennonite College library, a modern facility housing a large special collection of Mennonite historical materials. Yoder, who grew up in Augusta County's Beachy Amish community, is a soft-spoken, bearded man who currently is a counselor at the Family Life Resource Center.
Sponsored by the Virginia Conference of Mennonites, the five-year-old Center provides counseling to Mennonite and non-Mennonites alike.
''I’m seeing the effects of the loss of community as our culture becomes more isolating and individualistic, '' Yoder says. ''I deal every day with matters of faith and conscience, people struggling with what's right and wrong.''
Yoder recently left a 25-year pastorate at Zion Mennonite to form a house church.
When asked where the Mennonite Church is headed, Yoder is cautious in his prediction.
''The pessimistic side of me says that assimilation is inevitable. We've joined the mainstream. But we've seen waves of resurgence that keep the traditions alive - the charismatic groups have helped tremendously in that respect.''
So, perhaps, has Yoder's own housechurch movemen, which harkens back to the earliest Anabaptist necessity of house worship to escape prosecution, and his gently phrased pacifism. What goes 'round comes 'round.
We talk theology in the dim light of Martin's low-ceilinged repair shop, the air close with the smell of leather and horse sweat. He stands behind the counter working the zipper of somebody's Aigner purse.
''God's word doesn't change - there will always be those trying to find their way around it,'' says the Old-Order Mennonite minister. ''Our community offers a structure, a set of rules, a discipline. Outsiders get their discipline from civil authority. We get ours from within.''
Martin is a slender, clean-shaven man, very certain of the rightness of his faith and lifestyle.
''The farm is the best place to raise a family - close to the soil and working together, not separately,'' he says. ''Our children go to school through the eighth grade - the rest of their education takes place on the farm for the boys and in the home for our girls.''
I ask how women fit into a religion with such rigidly defined roles.
''Women are loved and appreciated and accepted as our equals,'' he says. ''God's order places them in a different position from men: it's Christ and man, and woman and child, in that order. Not really one above the other, but side by side.''
The concept of the brotherhood is central to Old-Order Mennonite faith that we are bidden to be our brothers' keeper. It is, Martin says, a ''protection.'' He tells the story of a farmer crushed by a hay baler, leaving him with movement only from the shoulders up. ''He had to retire off the farm, so we worked together and built him a small house on the corner of his land and help out as we can.''
Martin concedes that more and more Old-Order Mennonites are working off the farm in order to survive, but points out that their jobs are trade-oriented: carpentry and carriage and harness shops for the men; rug-making, quilting and baking for the women.
We talk about Jim and Tammy Baker, Martin expressing disdain for their ''false cheerfulness'' and materialism. ''Being a mature Christian doesn't mean you smile all the time,'' he says. ''It's a serious thing, living a Christian life.''
Martin sits at a large sewing machine, silhouetted by the light from the cobwebbed window. My finger itches to push the shutter button on my camera. ''Do you mind if I take your picture?'' I ask.
''Yes, I do,'' he replies. ''I don't mean to be short with you. But, yes, I do mind.''
Down the road the one-story Mennonite school is letting out for the week. A late-model Chevy Lumina van sits in the driveway; a plain-dressed woman unloads bicycles from the side door: Behind the school building a horse stands hitched to a buggy, waiting patiently.
The students jump on their bicycles, as happy as, well, school kids. Some head down the road, toward the plain church on the rise. Others pedal furiously past my parked car, the gravel popping beneath their tires. I watch them, my camera in hand, and they watch me, watch my hand. Then they are gone.
''That's the picture you should take,'' Al Keim had told me. ''The juxtapositions and the ironies of Mennonite life today - they're laid out right there before you.''
Luther's Swiss counterpart, Ulrich Zwingli, had its own rebellion to deal with. Conrad Grebel and followers wanted more: a return to the Apostolic Church - a community of believers committed to a pacifist, Christ-like life. At the heart of their creed: believers' (adult) baptism. In January 1525, Grebel and followers met secretly in a home and baptized one another.
They called their new church ''the Brethren. '' Others, both Catholic and Protestant, called them sacrilegious. They were Anabaptists, or ''rebaptizers,'' and they suffered a century of persecution rivaling the worst of the Spanish Inquisition. Chronicled in a gruesome detail in the 1,000-plus-page ''Martyr's Mirror,'' the sufferings of the early Mennonites are beyond comprehension: hangings, beheadings, burnings, rackings and stretchings, dismemberment, drownings.
Hiding throughout Switzerland, Holland, and Germany, the brethren rallied behind Dutch priest Menno Simons, taking on his name. Not surprisingly, the Mennonites were among the earliest immigrants to Pennsylvania, with its reputation for religious tolerance and fertile land. And when land there grew too expensive and too scarce, the Mennonites moved westward into Ohio and Indiana and southward into the Shenandoah Valley. Which is, skipping a couple of centuries, where our story takes up.
The Amish and Mennonites share most Anabaptist beliefs; it's the mode of practicing those beliefs that differs. Most visible are clothing variations. OldOrder Amish men wear plain coats, no ties, suspenders, broadfall pants, white or solid pastel shirts, black shoes, and black or straw broad-brimmed hats. Their hair is blunt - cut at the collarline. After marriage, they grow beards but no mustaches (the latter being associated with the military). The women wear long, high-necked dresses with a black or white apron and do not cut their hair, which is covered by a white organdy prayer veiling. Black bonnets are worn in public. Both men and women eschew all jewelry, even wedding bands. All clothing is buttonless.
Old-Order Mennonite men also wear plain coats, but are allowed buttons. No beards or mustaches are worn. The women's dresses are similarly modest but may be of print material, as can the aprons and capes they wear.
Old-Order Amish do not have electricity or telephones in their homes, though both are able to be used in the ''outside world.'' For the most part they rely on horse and buggy for transportation, as do their Mennonite counterparts. The latter, however, do allow electricity and telephones in their homes.
Amish society practices shunning the banning of wrongdoers from the fellowship of believers - while Mennonites generally do not. (It was over this issue of excommunication that the Amish Church first broke from the larger Mennonite Church in 1693.)
Neither old-order group believes in missionary outreach or formal school beyond the eighth grade. The more liberal Mennonite groups, however, are heavily involved in mission and world relief work. Their annual relief fundraising sales are well-known for the quality quilts and needlework as well as the food. Too, they support 13 colleges and three seminaries in North America.
Finally, the authors remind us that all Anabaptist believers - Modern and OldOrder; Amish and Mennonite - are people of, ''tender conscience'' and deep faith. In that, they stand as models for all of us.
Due to those beliefs, taking intimate photographs of this Mennonite lifestyle is almost always inappropriate and disrespectful. So, while our photos in the past have shared that region's scenic beauty, they rarely shared this aspect of its soul.
However, Mennonite beliefs regarding photography may vary among churches. It was recently our good fortune to meet Mennonites from this community who are comfortable with our desire to share their beliefs through our photos.
Thus, last spring we were invited to spend an afternoon photographing the daily activities of these Mennonites' friends and families and to share those photos in Blue Ridge Country.
As the world rushes headlong into the future, this culture will continue in its own rhythm - one guided by the seasons and the fields, by tilling, planting and harvesting, and by God, family and community.