The Ordnung

Jakob Ammann was a Swiss Mennonite bishop who, in the early 1690s, concluded that his fellow ministers had grown lax in applying the ban, the practice of excommunicating and then shunning members who violated their baptismal vows or church discipline. Ammann argued for Streng Meidung, strict shunning, meaning that even a spouse or close relative under the ban should be avoided in ordinary social life, including at the table, until repentance restored fellowship. He also pressed for twice yearly foot washing as part of communion and for plainer, more uniform dress than many Swiss Mennonite congregations then practiced.

When the wider ministerial body declined to adopt his standard, Ammann and his followers separated in 1693, and the division, despite several attempts at reconciliation in the years immediately following, proved permanent. The group that formed around Ammann took his name, becoming the Amish, while the majority who did not follow him continued as Mennonites. The split therefore did not turn on any disagreement over core Anabaptist doctrine, believer's baptism, nonresistance and separation from the world were common ground on both sides, but specifically on how visibly and how strictly that shared doctrine of separation should be enforced within the community itself, a question the Ordnung exists to keep answering generation after generation.

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.