On the platform, a guitarist was playing worship music with a country twang.

After a while, he was joined by children, most in Amish dress, to sing Sunday-school songs like "Deep and Wide."

It was Day 15 of the 50-day Glory Barn at Victory Christian Fellowship in Palmyra.

Steve Lapp, whose kids were among the singers, took a break to explain why he and his ministry coworkers are spending 50 days, 24 hours a day, engaged in prayer and worship.

The point of the Glory Barn is to prepare churches for what he believes will be a great influx of people.

Amish people.

"We believe there's going to be a big harvest of the Amish," Lapp said.

"There is a growing spiritual hunger in the Amish community right now, which is really of God," said Lloyd Hoover, bishop and secretary for the Lancaster Mennonite Conference.

The Web site for Lapp's organization, Light of Hope Ministries, says its mission is "bringing God's word to the Amish people of America" and "bridging the gap between the Amish and the Christian community."

Not all the Amish would agree with the mission.

Light of Hope has developed into a point of controversy in the community. A handful of families have left the Old Order church as a result, according to Amish sources.

And Amish bishops have decided that church members who participate in "outside" prayer meetings and Bible studies will face excommunication — what the "English" world knows as shunning.

The conflict is not just about associating with non-Amish Christians, said observers inside and outside the Plain community.

For one thing, Amish sources — all of whom asked, in line with Old Order practice, not to be named — believe the genesis of Lapp's ministry was the "McGrane courses," a series of seminars that were popular among some Amish two years ago.

The classes caused divisions in the church and led to a bishops' ruling forbidding members to participate.

Another issue is the difference between the Amish approach to faith and the one more prevalent in evangelical and Pentecostal churches.

In the Old Order tradition, church authority is communal. In other churches, authority may be far more individual, based on the relationship between each believer and Jesus Christ.

Periodically those understandings come into conflict when splinter groups break from the Old Order church.

The Glory Barn seems to be the latest such hot button.

"It's a sensitive and deep-rooted story," one Amish man who took a McGrane course said.

"I actually think it's one that needs to be told."

Hurts and healing
Steve Lapp's story, told on his Web site (www.lightofhopeministries.com), begins with a farm accident in 1999 in Indiana in which his pelvis was crushed.

Afterward, he felt called to a healing ministry. In 2005, he attended a class in "understanding emotional needs" — the McGrane course — and the healing ministry "exploded."

Church leaders asked him to stop. He did for a while, but resumed last spring. Lapp was excommunicated from the Old Order church a year ago.

Lapp and other participants in his ministry, including Aaron Fisher and Jacob Lapp and their families, came back to Pennsylvania — Steve Lapp is originally from New Holland — in answer to what they see as God's call.

The Glory Barn started in a barn on a Palmyra farm at Christmas. Afterward, Steve Lapp said his team felt God telling them to launch a 50-day ministry — Easter to Pentecost — that would move among churches, preparing for the Amish "harvest."

Some evangelical leaders suggest there is an ongoing revival, or spiritual awakening, in the Amish church.

"Within the Amish community, many individuals have had increased hunger for God," said Keith Yoder, chairman of the Leadership Council of the Regional Church of Lancaster County, a network of Christian leaders.

"In recent years a growing number of Amish youth have gathered for Bible study in more than one movement and more than one venue. Some Amish families have participated in reconciliation conferences" involving other Anabaptist groups and the Reformed churches whose ancestors persecuted Anabaptists in Europe.

Other Amish, however, think what's happening is more a result of lingering McGrane influence.

"We don't look with much favor on it," one man explained.

The man who took the McGrane seminar compared it to "The Secret," the popular book based on the so-called law of attraction, which teaches that whatever a person wants can be had by thinking the right kinds of thoughts.

The McGrane Center for Personal Transformation, based in Kentucky, charged $4,975 for the courses, originally billed as business training.

"There's much typical Western success thought in it," the man said. "The Amish in their shifts from 'plows to profits' [farming to businesses] are hungry for" such instruction.

But McGrane "soon took this further" and "started lecturing about this energy healing code ... a lot of sexuality issues, abuse issues."

"I just thought it was emotional rape. He took advantage of their emotions to make a million dollars. I just couldn't accept his spirituality and his theology."

Nor could Amish bishops, who, according to a 2005 Lancaster New Era story, ordered church members to stop enrolling.

Revival or schism?
By that time, though, an estimated 300 Amish had taken the courses.

Some of them, an Amish source said, came back feeling spiritually "invigorated." They started attending Bible studies outside the church.

This type of response, two Amish men said, produced Steve Lapp's ministry and led to his shunning.

Lapp noted that "we were in the ministry before" he took a McGrane course, so blaming the classes for his work now isn't entirely accurate.

One observer with close knowledge of the Amish community, who also asked not to be identified, said he was told four or five families left the church with Lapp.

"My impression is that the people who left would have left regardless," he said. "They are calling it a revival," but he describes it as "a number of sort of disenchanted people who found each other."

Both the outside observer and the man who took the McGrane class said bishops were patient with Lapp and let a number of issues pass without action until finally excommunicating him.

"It would depend on what you call patience," Lapp said.

"You're not going to find very many Amish in Lancaster County who know the whole story of what happened with us" because they were in Indiana at the time of the excommunication.

Last month, sources said, county bishops at one of their regular meetings decided that church members involved with outside prayer meetings and Bible studies also would face shunning.

"My uncle used to say [that] studying the scripture is a good thing," the man who took the McGrane course said. "However, if you study it to condemn your brother, then you may as well not read it.

"That's the fear" — that those in outside groups will use their studies "to justify themselves and to condemn what they're used to."

In traditional Amish practice, Bible study is done at home, under the tutelage of parents, the man said, adding that bishops won't apply the ruling "universally."

Yoder, who is executive director of Teaching the Word Ministries in Leola, said as he understands it, "some Amish ministers and bishops may appreciate and desire to bless their people in the spiritual growth they are experiencing, but are caught in a personal conflict about doing so."

"When they accepted ordination as leaders in the Amish church, they make a vow to uphold the teachings of the Amish church. To in any way depart from those teachings at this point would be breaking a vow on their part."

Amish people who attend meetings outside their church "are perceived to be violating the teachings of the Amish church," he said.

The situation may be a call for soul-searching, the man who took the McGrane class said.

"We're being caused to think about who we are and what it is we believe in. The challenge is to respond to this in ways that we don't fall into sin ourselves by condemning these people."

Swimming in two streams
Who the Amish are, indeed, is a key to the controversy.

The observer of the Amish said there are "two different languages of spirituality" involved.

"Typically when some people leave like this, they get into a evangelical/Pentecostal language of spirituality. It's easy to condemn all of the other Amish" for different approaches to faith.

The Amish church views authority as "vested in the discerning community," while other traditions see authority resting with individuals.

Lapp, the observer said, is "setting himself up personally as the spiritual authority. That's what is very uncomfortable to the established Amish church."

Hoover, the Mennonite bishop, said the Lapps have "come to see that the kingdom of God is bigger than the Amish community or any single denomination. It has changed their philosophical perspective of church."

One Amish man recalled earlier splits, as dissatisfied Amish left, often to start new churches. It's a phenomenon that seems to happen every 30 to 40 years, he said, but typically it runs its course and fades away.

The man who attended the McGrane course agreed there's a pattern.

"All the spirituality nowadays is focusing on self," he said.

Yoder said Amish contacts with other church cultures in some ways "are a threat to the culture, traditions and values of the Amish way of life," but he hopes a balance can be struck.

Because of the reconciliation conferences, he said, "a new level of communion has begun" among Christian traditions. The Amish community also was "thrust into a new level of interacting with the 'English' both in giving and receiving" in the aftermath of the Nickel Mines school shootings last October.

Hoover said he thinks Amish bishops recognize spiritual seeking in their people.

"They have really challenged their ministers recently to become stronger people of the Word to be able to interpret the Bible better, helping people to grow," Hoover said.

"It's a real concern for them as to how they can maintain their community as it is, as they let their people be open to teaching outside their own church."

"We are praying that the Amish bishops will be able to know fully God's heart for their people and how to lead them accordingly," Yoder said.

Steve Lapp and his ministry team are praying, too.

"We think God is at work," he said on Day 15 of the Glory Barn. "We don't know what he's going to do with us next. We have a sense that something big is about to happen."

Like his children, he still wears Amish garb.

"God has called us to keep our clothes," he said, "and stand in the gap for the Amish."

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Helen Colwell Adams is a staff writer for the Sunday News.  Her email address is hcolwell@lnpnews.com.