A group of us from SMBI went down to SC & GA to visit some former SMBI students. We spent time at the Riehls’ in SC and time at Heritage Bible School in GA, where some of these former students are deans. We spent a day in Greenville, SC walking through its picturesque old town streets and beautiful downtown park.
As we were eating our lunch on some downtown park benches, the majority of the ladies, with their prayer veilings (I Corinthians 11:1-15), sat in a row on two benches. Several of us men sat on the curb at a right angle to them. The ladies couldn’t see the people coming down the sidewalk behind them. We guys, however, could. The ladies got a lot of curious looks.
I am not used to Southern friendliness, being in the context of impersonal Northern Virginia. Thus, I really enjoyed our eclectic stream of visitors. The first man to stop by was a jogger. He was the head of the local soup kitchen and stopped to say “Hi” and to thank us that some similiar Mennonites helped out at the soup kitchen. He was wondering if we were those people. We weren’t, of course, but he thanked us anyway.
Our second visitor was a homeless man with a large beard who stopped and wondered what we were. He thought maybe we were “a-mish” (he pronounced it “a-mish” instead of “ah-mish”), but we informed him that we are conservative Mennonites. He hung around and seemed to be starved for conversation. So we talked with him for a while. Soon he went over and sat on a bench about 20 feet away.
The next person was sort of the grand finale of our visitors. It was an older, black lady who was a Jehovah’s Witness. She came along and pulled out her Bible and started asking us questions about our beliefs. She started by saying that the real name of God was Jehovah and that the other “names” were just titles, not names. We pointed out Elohim, Immanuel, etc, etc. She then went on to disavow the Deity of Jesus. She pointed to the verse where Jesus said that “I and my father are one” (John 10:30) and said that this only meant that he was in one accord with his father, just like a Christian should be in one accord with Jehovah. The homeless man had sidled back up and was listening intently. Also, another man came up and interjected somewhere into the conversation, “How about Mohammed? He was a prophet too.” All participants immediately expressed disagreement and then we continued. An officer who had been patrolling on foot stood about ten feet away looking on with amusement at our passionate discussion. I then took the lady to John 5 with the story of Jesus healing a man on the Sabbath. When the Pharisees accused him of breaking the Sabbath, His defense was a claim of Godship in that God didn’t observe the Sabbath, so he didn’t have to. The Pharisees recognized that and Scriptures say (in John 5:18, Bible in Basic English (BBE)), “For this cause the Jews had an even greater desire to put Jesus to death, because not only did he not keep the Sabbath but he said God was his Father, so making himself equal with God”. At this point the homeless man, who obviously had a strong Southern Bible Belt orthodox view of Jesus and the Scriptures nodded vigorously, expressed smug agreement with the point I made. She responded that the Pharisees were simply wrong and lying. I wished later I would have answered that Scripture states it as a fact, but we had to leave. As we left, the officer commented in an amused voice about the “diverse group of people” we had there.
Truly we had a very strange-looking, eclectic, and interesting group. That cop shadowed us the rest of the afternoon as we strolled around Greenville.
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