Ernie wrote: ↑Mon Feb 19, 2024 9:26 am
Soloist wrote: ↑Mon Feb 19, 2024 8:13 am
We never would have gone to Payette church. Payette Mennonite church on the other hand, we would have tried.
How many years ago was that? Might it be different today with all the online resources?
Will Church Index be a resource for folks like yourself? Or must the website have the name Mennonite in it?
If the latter, which of the following do you think is the better domain?
amishmennonite.org
amish-mennonite.org
Well, this was the sort of search we tried
https://rb.gy/y5mfne
or
https://rb.gy/1gxp7h
or
https://rb.gy/rs0o4f
Somehow we stumbled on Cory's website and I don't quite remember how but he told us that nothing was within our range (we put 50 minutes I think) and we lived in Stayton Oregon at the time. He did mention an Apostolic church which we went to, I walked in and walked out after seeing men kissing (completely ignorant that anyone actually did that)
As you can see though, we were using regional searches for information an not just generic "Amish churches" or Mennonite churches" We had no idea of the diversity of Mennonites and didn't even know how to search.
I actually gave up using the internet and went to a farmers market to find crazy people.
I vaguely think we stumbled on to some historical information about sleeping preachers and got really confused.
When we did eventually find where to search (thanks to a lady selling bread) we found RZehr's church and Brownsville Mennonite.
We didn't use facebook anymore and Brownsville had a Facebook but no website. RZehr's church did have a website. I strongly suspect we would have wrote off Mennonites if we saw a picture of them, but I don't know for sure... The primary reason we drove away at RZehr's was because we arrived early and only saw old people and thought it was a cult.
Brownsville was a desperation try really... Worked as a starting point, but eventually wasn't what we needed and wanted.
Of course I now know how to search for it, but I didn't then.
The other thing was... we were using google maps to find churches, not just browsing the web.
This was 2014 btw.