From May 1-4, 2003, in a conference center at Winterthur, in the mountains of Switzerland, over 1000 Christians from all over the world met to joyfully worship, prayerfully seek and faithfully obey the God who heals our land by healing our broken relationships. This “Heal Our Land” conference was sponsored by the Stiftung Schleife, a Christian ministry devoted to serving the body of Christ and headed by Geri Keller, a Swiss Reformed minister.

Geri Keller and other Swiss reformed pastors as well as Christian leaders outside the Swiss Reformed church discerned while seeking the Lord in prayer that God wants to bring healing to the nations by first healing long standing divisions among Christians. They became burdened with remorse and guilt for the way the founder of their church Huldrych Zwingli and his associates and their descendents had persecuted the Anabaptists for several hundred years. They came to see that the Swiss Reformed Church by persecuting the Anabaptists had “cut off its right hand” of authority and service. One Reformed pastor became so distressed as he reflected on the blood-tainted history of his church that he threw the leather bound Bible, given to him at the time of his ordination as a pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church, into the waste basket.

The Reformed pastors came to see that they still profited from the dispossession and persecution of the Anabaptists. Some of their churches were built with resources expropriated from the Anabaptists. Some of the pastors were also in turmoil about the issue of rebaptism. When persons who had been baptized as infants came to personal faith as adults and requested adult believers baptism, the Swiss pastors found themselves sending these persons outside the Reformed church for baptism to keep the peace with their denomination. They also knew that there continued to be a political component to baptism in that baptismal records are used to establish the tax base.

As Geri and Lilo Keller with the Schleife team and an extended group of Reformed pastors sought the Lord for direction in dealing with their guilt, they sensed God saying “there is no statute of limitations on reconciliation;” that “now is the time to seek reconciliation with the cut off Anabaptists”. They felt that for them to be personally faithful to God’s word they must pursue reconciliation at their own expense, whether or not any others inside or outside the organized churches understood or joined them in the journey. They began to intensively seek the Lord’s direction for this God-given vision of reconciliation.
Thousands of miles away from the Swiss Alps in the state of Montana, God was stirring up the desire for reconciliation in a group of Old Order Amish originally from Indiana. This group of Amish, under the leadership of Bishop Ben Girod, had experienced new Spirit-empowered life in Christ. They sensed that although they were free in Christ to leave the Amish traditions they were being called by God to identify with the Amish culture and to share their new faith with their brothers. One of these leaders testified that he had been a minister for a year before he had a personal encounter with Christ. He now “invites his Amish brothers in under his big broad brimmed black hat and shares the gospel with them.”

This group of Spirit-directed Old Order Amish has been widely misunderstood both inside and outside the Amish church. They have suffered much for the gospel. There have been periods where they are invited to speak in Amish meetings because the tradition dictates that visiting Amish leaders who maintain the traditions should be invited to share in the meetings. Ben and his associates have taken these occasions as opportunities to share the gospel. As a consequence many have come to a new or renewed faith in Christ. However some of these new believers will hesitate or even resist the call to fully participate in the life of the Spirit. Instead they will resort to a legalistic approach and become critical of Ben and his community.