AMONG THE MENNONITES

PENN'S CREEK, PA. -- PENN'S CREEK, PA. -- -- With spring breaking and the soil spongy with moisture, horse-drawn tillers have been turning over the earth of sun-warmed croplands.

In this farming community, which includes old order Amish known as ''plain people'' to Mennonites, who have called themselves ''peculiar people,'' horsepower means what it meant 304 years ago when the first religious refugees settled in these parts of southeastern Pennsylvania. Then and now, horses had their power and God had His. Strength was to be taken from both in the pursuit of crops and salvation.

The ephemeral nature of progress and profits that marks much of American agriculture is not found here. In the ''farm-crisis'' debate, the planters and sowers who live in this cloister without walls can be excluded.

Among the Amish and Mennonites, farm foreclosures are unheard of. So are debts to the bank. If you can't pay, don't buy. No down-at-heel farmers are leaving the land to look for jobs in town. Willie Nelson need never do a benefit here. The old order remains in working order.

The resonant simplicity of life in this rural isolation has a deceptiveness that easily fools outsiders seeing it for the first time. Negatives appear to loom. The pacifist followers of Menno Simons, the Dutch Catholic priest who parted from the war-minded and corrupted Roman church in 1536, own no cars, pay no Social Security, refuse military service, take out no insurance, don't vote, have no televisions, radios or phones, avoid what's fancy and prefer the functional to the comfortable.

Outsiders see these denials as extreme self-mortification. Here they are a means of self-liberation. The other morning, I spent time visiting a Mennonite family, the wife in the kitchen of her farmhouse and the husband three miles away in the garage where he repairs farm implements. Neither knew much about newspapering, having no acquaintance with this worldly trade except for a German-language weekly that provides sectarian news. I don't know much about raising crops, so we began even.

Several stereotypes were shattered quickly. Instead of a somber-faced gloominess that comes from too much moral sobriety, the couple exuded a natural cheerfulness. They did not allow an austere life to stifle a happy life. The wife, in her late thirties, joked about the modern intrusion of ''singles parties.'' Marriage is expected in the early twenties, she said. Each of her brothers had waited five years from the time he met a single girl to marrying her: ''That was too long.''

Two years of courting is preferred. ''If you're 24, you're really old. For women, that's being an old maid. . . . Right now, the young folks all more or less get together. They have something going which we didn't when we were single. The married couples all meet Sunday nights, so what do the singles do? They started having these singles parties. Somebody made up the name! It really stuck! First it was in Lancaster County, now it's in Union County and going all over. . . . They just get together and visit. That's where they get to know each other and couple up then. We used to just get together for singings.''

Historically, the Mennonites and Amish -- the latter are followers of Jakob Ammann, who found ''laxity of discipline'' in Menno's groups and broke away -- have not only feared the virus of modernity but have tried to stop its encroachment germ by germ. Allow newspapers, then it's radios. Then televisions. Soon it will be phones to talk about what you read, heard and saw. Now you're a pagan.

The Mennonite wife I spoke with works outside the community as a maid. Lightheartedly, she confesses to a fear that she may be coming down with a virus of mammon: television. ''Some days, your lady will have it on, and you'll see something that happens, like on a soap opera. It continues the next day. You remember what time it's on. My husband has really tried working with me. I quit it. But you're having your lunch hour at 1 o'clock, and you just can't help yourself. Nobody knows anything about televisions or radios. People wouldn't know which knob to pull. But if you're working there, you soon learn it. I think that's why it was better when I worked in a garment factory.''

A familiarity with ''As the World Turns'' separates this Mennonite woman from conservative discipline. But her husband has his temptations. He farms with a steel-wheeled tractor, rather than newfangled rubber wheels. Within the church, a theological debate is said to be raging on whether the modern rubber tire -- which makes plowing easier -- is another useless concession to worldliness. The steel wheel is seen as a wildly heretical deviation by those using team horses. And no doubt the horse farmers were once looked on as the devil's helpmeet by the strict constructionists who saw Isaiah's plowshare as high technology.

Whatever the depths that television knobs and rubber tires may be taking the local faithful to, no compromising in the basic Christian practice of communal love and service is likely. The Amish and Mennonites are legendary in their caring as much for strangers as their own. Their dissidence in customs is positive, not negative. Instead of trying to change the world, they have the harder and perhaps better course of keeping the world from changing them.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.