white picket fences: a mennonite boy’’s global adventures

White Picket Fences follows the adventures of a Mennonite boy, from sheltered origins in eastern Pennsylvania's Anabaptist community, to a career that takes his family around the world. Alternately hilarious and poignant, this engaging self-portrait immerses the reader in pervasive religious tradition, teenage rebellion, and devastating family tragedy. Set against the backdrop of world events, White Picket Fences travels through one hundred years of family history, from the early 1900s to the present day, a story as close to home as the Wright brothers' first flight and as far away as the Vietnam War. White Picket Fences is an earthy, honest and sometimes excruciating account of Christian faith lived in the real world. In the end, one man's journey and the family legacy that guided him helps us understand why people of faith hold so tenaciously to their values and why everyone yearns for its fruit: the intimacy of family and that place in our hearts we call home.

Doug Gehman grew up in the conservative Mennonite community of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He attended a Mennonite college in Indiana, and then spent fifteen years serving with his family in South East Asia. Doug now leads Globe International, an inter-denominational mission agency based in Pensacola, Florida. Globe and its affiliate organizations oversee nearly three hundred missionaries serving in forty nations. In their career, Doug and his wife Beth have traveled in sixty countries. They have four married children and eleven grandchildren. White Picket Fences is Doug’s third book.