Ordnung as Renewed, Not Fixed, Discipline

No single document states the Ordnung; it is an understood body of discipline that each church district, typically twenty five to forty households sharing one bishop, works out and re-affirms for itself, which is why an outsider can find real differences between an Old Order district in Lancaster County and a stricter Swartzentruber district in Ohio, or a more accommodating New Order settlement elsewhere. Twice a year, before spring and autumn communion, the district holds a members' meeting, Ordnungsgemee, at which the community reviews its standing rules and any proposed changes, so the boundary is renewed by consent rather than simply inherited as fixed law.

Technology decisions are negotiated case by case rather than by a blanket rule against modernity: a telephone may be permitted in a shed at the end of a lane but not inside the home, a gasoline engine may power a washing machine but not a car, and horse drawn transportation is required on the public road even where battery or hydraulic tools are allowed in the workshop. Shunning under the Ordnung applies to baptized members who have made a vow and later broken it, not to outsiders or to relatives who were never baptized into the church, which distinguishes the practice from a rejection of the wider world in every relationship. Most Mennonite conferences dropped Ordnung style discipline and Meidung during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as they urbanized and diversified; the Amish retained it as the concrete, communally policed expression of the nonconformity doctrine both bodies still profess in common.