From the Rector

Dear Friends,

On Monday, Pete and I returned with the girls from a brief trip to Michigan to celebrate my dad's 80th birthday. All but one of the siblings were able to make it from various parts of the country. It was a happy reunion, as we haven't been together in such numbers in years. We even got to meet our 3-month-old nephew, Luca.

The cottages we rented were deep in Amish country on the Indiana-Michigan border. It was interesting to peer in from the outside at a unique group of people who live life very differently from most other Americans. The Amish have their roots in the sixteenth century Anabaptist movement, which was a radical wing of the Protestant Reformation centered in Switzerland and southern Germany. Anabaptists rejected the practice of infant baptism that had developed in the middle ages, in favor of adult baptism as a mature profession of faith. This later evolved into the Mennonite church.

In the 1690s, a schism ripped the church in two, with a conservative leader, Jakob Ammann, calling for a literal interpretation of scripture and doctrine, as well as a modesty code, including unshaven beards for men. Ammann's followers became the Amish, while the more lenient group remained Mennonite. They fled Europe in the eighteenth century and settled primarily in Lancaster, Pennsylvania due to that colony's stance on religious toleration. They eventually spread westward into Ohio and Indiana.

Social and technological changes in the nineteenth century led to a further, permanent split. The more conservative group became the Old Order Amish, while the other integrated into the Mennonite church. As the twentieth century progressed, the Old Order rejected things like automobiles, telephones, and grid electricity.  Modern Amish life is still governed by the Ordnung, a set of unwritten rules that dictate modest dress, horse-and-buggy transportation, and restrictions on modern technology.

Blessings,
Father Rick

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