Where Did the Mennonites and Amish Come From?

Both traditions descend from a single act of disobedience in a private house in Zurich, and both take their names from men who joined the movement after it had already begun.

The Amish are not a separate religion from the Mennonites. They are a division within the same family, produced by a disagreement in 1693 over how strictly a congregation should discipline its own members. Understanding the family requires going back to the beginning.

Zurich, January 1525

Huldrych Zwingli was reforming the church in Zurich under the authority of the city council. A group of his younger associates concluded that he was moving too slowly and, more seriously, that he was allowing the magistrate to determine the pace of obedience to Scripture.

Their particular objection concerned baptism. They could find no instance in the New Testament of an infant being baptised, and they concluded that baptism belonged to those who could believe and confess.

On 21 January 1525, in the house of Felix Manz, the group acted. Conrad Grebel baptised George Blaurock at his request, and Blaurock then baptised the others. This was not merely a theological position; under the law of Christendom, rebaptism was a capital offence. Their opponents called them Anabaptists, meaning rebaptisers, a name the movement itself rejected on the ground that infant baptism had never been baptism at all.

Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat in January 1527, the first Anabaptist martyred by Protestants. Thousands followed, executed by Catholic and Protestant authorities alike.

Schleitheim and the Shape of the Movement

The Schleitheim Confession of 1527, associated with Michael Sattler, set out seven articles that defined the tradition: baptism on confession of faith, the ban as the means of discipline, the breaking of bread among believers, separation from the world, the office of pastor, the rejection of the sword, and the refusal of oaths.

Sattler was executed within months, and the confession's core convictions were established: a church composed only of believers, separated from the state, refusing violence, and disciplining its own members without recourse to the magistrate.

The movement was almost destroyed. The disaster at Münster in 1534 and 1535, where a militant apocalyptic faction seized a city and was crushed with great brutality, gave every authority in Europe a reason to treat all Anabaptists as sedition. The peaceful majority spent generations living down a reputation they had not earned.

Menno Simons

Menno Simons (1496 to 1561) was a Dutch Catholic priest who had privately doubted transubstantiation and infant baptism for years before he acted. The execution of Anabaptists near his parish, including his own brother, brought the matter to a decision, and he left the priesthood in 1536.

Menno's contribution was consolidation rather than innovation. He travelled the Low Countries and northern Germany at constant personal risk, gathering scattered and demoralised congregations, writing steadily, and separating the peaceful Anabaptist witness decisively from the Münster episode. His followers were called Mennonites, and the name spread to the wider peaceful movement.

The Amish Division

Jakob Ammann (c. 1656 to c. 1730) was a Swiss Mennonite elder in the Alsace who concluded in the early 1690s that discipline among the Swiss brethren had become lax.

Two issues divided him from the other elders. He held that communion should be observed twice yearly rather than once, and that the practice of foot washing should be observed. The decisive question, however, was shunning. Ammann held that a member placed under the ban should be avoided in ordinary social and family life, not merely excluded from communion. The Swiss elders held to the narrower practice.

Ammann pressed the matter, and in 1693 excommunicated the elders who disagreed with him. Attempts at reconciliation continued for years and failed. Those who followed Ammann became known as the Amish.

It is worth being clear about what the division was and was not. It was not about doctrine in the sense of the nature of God, salvation, or Scripture. On those the two groups agreed and still substantially agree. It was about the strictness of church discipline, and it produced a permanent separation.

To America

Both groups emigrated for the same reason: they were persecuted where they were, and William Penn offered land and liberty of conscience.

Mennonites settled Germantown, Pennsylvania, from 1683. Amish settlement began in the 1730s, chiefly in Lancaster County. Later migrations carried both traditions to Ohio, Indiana, Ontario, and eventually to Central and South America.

By the twentieth century the Amish had effectively ceased to exist in Europe, absorbed back into Mennonite bodies. The tradition survives only in North America.

Mennonites today range widely, from conservative groups using horse and buggy transport to fully assimilated congregations engaged in academic theology and international relief work. The Mennonite Central Committee is a substantial relief and development agency. The Amish maintain the older pattern: Pennsylvania German in the home, plain dress, selective and regulated use of technology, schooling through the eighth grade, and the Ordnung, the community's agreed rule of life.

What Both Traditions Actually Hold

Adult baptism on confession of faith. A church consisting of committed believers rather than everyone born in a parish. Separation of church and state, which they held three centuries before it was respectable. Nonresistance, the refusal of violence including military service. Discipleship understood as following Christ in daily conduct rather than as assent to doctrine.

What the Story Actually Shows

Two observations follow.

The first is that convictions once considered capital offences are now widely held. Believer's baptism, the separation of church and state, and religious liberty were the positions for which Anabaptists were drowned and burned in the sixteenth century. Baptists, and in a different way the American constitutional order, arrived at the first two independently. The Anabaptists were early, and they paid for it.

The second is that the Amish division is a caution worth sitting with. Two groups agreeing on Scripture, salvation, baptism, and nonresistance divided permanently over how rigorously to apply the ban, and remain divided more than three centuries later. Church history contains many separations over the nature of God. It contains at least as many over questions of practice among people who agreed about God entirely.

For readers tracing their own tradition, the Anabaptist case is the reminder that the Reformation had a third wing, that it was persecuted by both of the others, and that several of its distinctive convictions eventually won.