Anabaptist governance is congregational, and its distinctive instrument is discipline rather than office.
Congregations choose their own leaders, often by lot in the older communities, and pay them little or nothing; many Amish and conservative Mennonite ministers still farm or work a trade. Authority within the congregation rests on the gathered members, and the sanction is the ban, exclusion from communion and, in the stricter groups, from ordinary social and business dealing. Whether shunning should extend to a spouse at the family table was the specific question that split the movement in the 1690s, when Jakob Ammann pressed for the stricter reading and the Amish separated from the Swiss Brethren over it.
The family that resulted has three main branches. Mennonites, the largest, named for Menno Simons, run from plain rural communities to fully modern urban congregations. The Amish hold to a settled ordnung governing dress, technology and separation, decided congregationally, which is why practice varies noticeably from one district to the next. The Hutterites, from Jakob Hutter in Moravia, hold goods in common and live in colonies, and they are the only Christian community to have maintained community of property continuously since the sixteenth century.
The Bruderhof, founded in Germany in 1920, is a later community of goods now in fellowship with parts of the Anabaptist world. Various Brethren bodies also descend from the tradition.
Persecution set the geography. Anabaptists moved to Moravia, then to Prussia and Russia at the invitation of rulers who wanted farmers and would grant exemption from military service, then to North and South America when those exemptions were withdrawn. Every major Anabaptist migration was driven by conscription.