Greetings from Wisconsin
Contributed by Amy Phillips
The Heritage Wisconsin community resides in the beautiful “Driftless Region” of the state. It began in July of 2022 with a few families from our Texas fellowship and a small handful of local formerly Amish families. We have since grown to 25 families, 135 people in all.
It’s been a big year for our community! In 2024 we saw the completion of two major building projects and our first wedding. We renovated a building in the heart of Wonewoc, a nearby small town, and opened the Heritage Market. This market provides affordable grocery and home items to the surrounding community, as well as a space to enjoy a cup of coffee, fresh homemade baked goods, and soft-serve ice cream. Having a storefront presence in the area has opened doors for fruitful engagement with the broader community.
In October of last year, we held our second annual Cider Press Festival, which included handmade crafts such as baskets, leather goods, pottery, linens, sewn projects, crocheted hats, candles made from our own beeswax, bouquets grown from our garden, and food items such as honey, seasonal baked goods, and garden produce. Our first children’s choir worked hard to perform “Joyful Noise,” to the delight of our guests. We look forward to adding more songs to their repertoire this year.
When Brother Ryan Phillips and Sister Hannah Wiley got engaged in September of last year, it prompted us to remodel the barn on our community farm as a space for our first wedding and for our future church meetings. With a December wedding date in mind, the timeline for completing such a large project was tight, but we believed that if God was in it, nothing was impossible!
Brothers worked tirelessly, often through the night, to see the building project completed on time. Several families from the Virginia community came up to lend a hand. Their arrival accelerated not only the work but also our unity and joy! The building was finished in time for the joyous Phillips wedding, and now we look forward to the October wedding of Isaiah Herbert and Annalise Wayman (she’s from our New Zealand community)!
In January, it was time for our annual ice cutting to stock the ice houses used for food storage on a number of our properties. Men and boys woke up early for several days in a row and cut enough ice blocks to fill five ice houses. We are now six months out, and that same ice still keeps our food cold.
This winter we also built our first sugar shack and harvested 120 gallons of pure maple syrup from our trees! Few smells compare to the sugary sweet aroma of boiling maple sap.
Our youth now gather on Friday nights and have experienced a powerful move of God in their meetings. The young people have also begun a biweekly singing ministry to the local nursing home.
Nature served as a wonderful classroom this year. Several of our sisters worked to put forth a hands-on, Wisconsin-specific nature study for our curriculum. Each week moms and children met to walk and study God’s creation with a different brother or sister teaching about trees, birds, flowers, seeds, soil, and bees.
We held our second baptism on March 23, 2025. Peter and Lynne Friesen, Zane and Nichole Knoller, Katie Fisher, AnnaMae Stoll, and Royce George were all baptized in the name of Jesus.
Our whole community recently studied Building Christian Character from cover to cover together, and it transformed us and our families. We felt the joy in victory and newfound freedom in surrender to the Lord and His Word. The experience of our collective journey through this discipling season has brought us closer together than ever before.
And “together” has been a theme here! We garden together. Nearly all the brothers work together. The sisters join together for community projects and family and education-based activities. We meet regularly for work nights and fellowship. In June we held our first communion as a local community. It was a powerful, joyful event, and we felt unified in the shared purpose of building God’s kingdom.
We feel that what we are experiencing in Wisconsin is the same spirit of unity that our church felt at its beginning in 1973 in New York City. As Brother Joel Stein shared at a meeting in Texas: “We had nothing, but we had each other! We were together!”
We’re so grateful for all we’ve received as a daughter community within the Heritage church family. We’ve been grafted into a cultivated tree, growing through the momentum of prior sacrifices that have made us more than we could ever be alone.
We were recently blessed to receive visits from some of our community’s founding ministries, first from Brother Howard and Sister Rhonda Wheeler, then, following the Minnesota conference, from Sister Regina Adams, along with the Asahel Adams and Dan Lancaster families. They gave their time to visit with many of us in our homes and around our tables for meals and fellowship, and we gathered several times with the whole community for worship, ministry, and testimony. We communed with much laughter, tears of joy, and awe for the way God has intertwined our lives and stories.
We rejoiced in the words of faith, encouragement, and affirmation from these brothers and sisters, and the shared unity of the Spirit and of the faith assured us that God truly is at work here in Wisconsin and is knitting us all together across the earth.
Brother Blair Adams wrote a poem included in the book To Be a Community from which we have these lines:
Little we know the labor—
We of the younger race—
That cleared through the tangled forests
A path to the garden place.
They stood in the bitter struggles
Through weariest months and years
And gave to our hands these promised lands—
The gift of our pioneers.
We owe our lives to the love and grace of God poured out for us by our brothers and sisters in this fellowship. We deeply desire to give back as freely as we have received.
We would like to close with these lyrics from the song “The Best is Yet to Come,” which resonates as an anthem with our community:
Better than I ever imagined, You are the God everlasting;
We see the impossible happen—the best is yet to come!
