The Amish and the Mennonites are the same movement divided over a question of church discipline, and the division is documented in detail because both sides wrote letters.
By the 1690s the Swiss and Alsatian Anabaptists had been surviving persecution for six decades. Jakob Ammann, a minister in Alsace, held that the community had grown lax. His specific complaints were three: that communion should be held twice a year rather than once, that untruthfulness should be grounds for exclusion, and above all that a member placed under the ban should be avoided in ordinary life and not only excluded from the Lord's Supper. That last practice, Meidung, was the substance of the quarrel. Ammann found it in the Dordrecht Confession of 1632, which the Dutch Mennonites had adopted and the Swiss had not.
The Swiss ministers, led by Hans Reist of the Emmental, held that exclusion from communion was the discipline the New Testament required and that shunning a brother at his own table was not.
Ammann travelled to put the question and did not get the answer he wanted. In 1693 he excommunicated Reist and the ministers who agreed with him. They excommunicated him back. Later attempts at reconciliation failed, in part because Ammann's party conceded he had acted too hastily and the other side would not accept the terms.
The name Amish was first recorded in 1710, applied by opponents as an insult, in the same manner as Quaker and Methodist and Anabaptist itself.
- The European congregations on Ammann's side eventually merged back into Mennonite bodies or died out, so the Amish survive only in North America.
- Migration to Pennsylvania began in the 1730s and to Ohio and Indiana in the nineteenth century.
- A further split in the nineteenth century separated those willing to accept change from the Old Order who were not; the assimilated party became Mennonite congregations.
The practical difference today is not one of doctrine. Amish and Old Order Mennonites hold substantially the same beliefs about baptism, nonresistance and the church, and the visible differences between them are matters of Ordnung.