Three Generations of Giving
On her living room wall, Lila Nietfeld keeps a photo of her father standing in a Colorado wheat field with his pastor and a mission layman he had not previously met. It’s a memento of the time the pastor came to introduce “first fruits giving” to her father, Arthur Antholz.
Once he learned of it, her father adopted the practice of first fruits giving (sharing generously from the first fruits of the harvest), donating $25,000 to an American Lutheran Church (ALC) mission in Liberal, Kansas.
Over the years, Arthur was introduced to other organizations, to which he also gave generously. One of those was Martin Luther Home, a long-term residence for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, which he learned of from a fellow church member. (Martin Luther Home later united with Bethphage to become Mosaic.)
“Dad had a friend who lived nearby,” Lila said. “He told my dad, ‘We need to get to Martin Luther Home. They can use support.’ The two went together, from Colorado to Beatrice, Nebraska. While there, Dad said, ‘The young people here need help. It’s too hot in that building, and we need to get air conditioning there.”
He gave money for the air conditioning, and from then on he made the trip back to Beatrice many times, she said, with or without the friend who introduced him to Martin Luther Home.
After she married, Lila and her husband, Clayton Nietfeld, became dry land wheat farmers. But a career change happened through the arbitrariness of nature. “We lost our shirts, because we didn’t get any rain,” she said.
Clayton became an ALC parish worker and eventually a pastor. Their ministry took them to several communities, one of which was the small Nebraska town Pickrell.
“We were near Beatrice, and we became more and more connected with Martin Luther Home (MLH) and the Fruehlings,” she said. (The Fruehlings were the chaplain and the director at MLH, both sons of one of Martin Luther Home’s founders.)
Lila said her family’s faithfulness to MLH, and now Mosaic, came from several things. Most importantly, she and her family believe in the ministry and its natural caring and respect for those who reside there.
Fast forward to the 1990s, and daughter Eileen (by then married to David Stirtz) landed in Lincoln, Nebraska. Martin Luther Home had moved its offices to Lincoln in 1993 to better support the mission as it expanded into other states. Eileen began working for MLH, and continued as a receptionist for several years, until the birth of her son. Even after she left, Eileen continued to be an active volunteer and donor to MLH and, now, Mosaic.
“They offer a service with Christian love,” she said, “and I think that buoys others up, giving them the potential to live well.”