Lover's Quarrel: The Mennonites and Me—A Testimony

By Ken Yoder Reed

At the raucous, weekly Saturday night 'prayer and praise' meetings at Upper Octorara Pres in the Nineteen Seventies, Rev. James H. Brown would always start with a shout-out: 'Does anyone have a testimony?' I was there. This book is my response to Pastor Brown, my testimony. This is what God has been doing in the life of Ken Reed. You should expect to read surprising things. God is very jealous of the human beings he creates and when He is getting credited or debited, we can count on him to do hardly believable things. Because he was working in the life of Ken Reed, a cannonball-dive-into-the-cesspool sinner, we know God was working with fatally flawed material. This story illustrates the astonishing truth of Romans 5:8. Because He loved this boy, He intervened when I had been doing my best for about ten years to disparage and curse his people, convinced that I wasn't 'the faith type'. But I had come at last to the point of exhaustion, a kind of final knot on the rope to which I clung and dangled over the Abyss of Hell, which is where this book begins.It's the story of a Blessed Community, a Mennonite community. I was dyed-in-the-wool. My story sets in the Mennonite landscape of the 1955 - 84 period and profiles institutions: Lancaster Mennonite School, Eastern Mennonite College, Mennonite Publishing House, the Dutch Family Festival and Haight-Ashbury Mennonite Fellowship. It also celebrates well-known Mennonite figures: E.G. Gehman, Omar Eby, Daniel Hertzler, C.F. Yake, Merle & Phyllis Good, Paul Schrock, James Rhodes and Lois Janzen. And some non-Mennonites, such as Rudy Kuyten and Rev. James H. Brown.Yet the scandal at the heart is that I walk away from it all. I dedicate the book to all who walked (or ran) away from the Blessed Community..

• Format: Paperback
• ISBN: B0DVW9K553
• ISBN13: 9798218432430
• Release Date: February 2025
• Publisher: Ken Yoder Reed
• Length: 424 Pages
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 9.0" x 6.0"