"From Compromise to Conviction: The Story of Jacob Ammon" ~Ephraim Renno

Guide me, O the great Jehovah, pilgrim through these barrenness. Well, good morning and welcome to Hope for Wandering Amish. We're so glad you're with us here this morning. This morning we have Ephraim Reno on. Ephraim Reno is one of the admin of Hope for Wandering Amish. And Brother Ephraim actually did the four first talks for Hope for Wandering Amish. That's been over four years ago. Sorry, not four years ago. That's been a little over two years ago. So we appreciate everybody that contributed to Hope for Wandering Amish in the last two plus years. It's been a blessing doing this, and we look forward to what God may have for the future for Hope for Wandering Amish.

And we hope that this morning can be a blessing also. Brother Ephraim plans to share some on Amish history, and that's something he's talked about for quite a while. So I look forward to hearing what he has to share this morning. So are you ready, Brother Ephraim?

Yeah, I'm ready. Whenever. You got to say a word of prayer yet for us? Yes, I'll have a prayer for you, and then the time will be yours. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this beautiful morning that you have given us, Lord. And you're so good, Father. We thank you for life and life more abundantly. And we just pray that you would be with Brother Ephraim this morning as he shares. We pray for your peace and your grace upon him. And we pray that the history of the Amish, Lord, as he shares this morning, that somehow it could be a blessing to many and that your name could be lifted up as we see how you've worked in people's lives in the past.

And Lord, I pray that we could learn from this lesson here this morning. We pray your blessing upon the people in the audience, and we pray that this meeting could be a blessing in the precious name of Jesus. Amen.

Sorry, can I say one more thing? I also want to say that, like always, at the end, we have a time for questions and answers. So if you have anything you'd like to ask Ephraim or share this morning, we'd be very, very glad to hear from you. All right, the time is yours, Brother.

All right, well, greetings, everyone. Welcome to whoever's on here and whoever might listen to this later. This is going to be largely a history lesson. I enjoy history increasingly as time goes on, church history and all that. There's so many lessons to be learned from history. History can be a little bit like a wax nose where we can just, we can bend it this way or that way and make things look the way we want it to look. And we have to be careful with that. This morning, my desire is to take an honest look at a portion of history and hope that we can learn lessons from both the good and the bad and that we can hopefully not be guilty of biases that keep us from learning what we should learn.

So I'm going to be sharing my screen here. I hope that all works out all right. I'm on my phone here. I haven't quite mastered the computer thing yet. So let me see if I can share my screen. That's largely for myself just to have my notes in front of me. And then you can see them as well as we go. Much of what I'm sharing this morning is taken from this book, Grounded Upon God's Word: The Life and Labors of Jacob Ammon by Andrew St. Marie and Mike Adnip. I feel like it's an excellent work and definitely recommend it. So maybe after this morning, you'll be motivated to get the book yourself and read it.

And there's going to be so much more than what I can share in a brief time this morning. Amish beginnings. Who was Jacob Ammon? The 17th century, the 1600s in a year was riddled with trouble. I'm trying to give a little bit of a picture of what the European culture was like in Jacob Ammon's time. The 1600s were just full of wars. The Poles and the Swedes from 1600 to 1629, the English and the French 1627 to 1629, British, Irish, and the Scots from 1639 to 1653, the Portuguese and Spanish from 1640 to 1668, the Poles and the Russians from 1654 to 1667, Swedes and Poles 1655 to 1660, the French and the Dutch 1672 to 1678, French against their neighbors, many of their countries 1688 to 1697, and then the big one, the 30 Years' War from 1618 to 1648.

As you can see, there were the 16th century or the 1600s, rather, was just full of wars. And besides the wars, there was the plague or the Black Death that would come through every so often and sometimes wipe out as many as one-third of the population.

For example, in 1612, the Canton of Bern lost one-third of its population to the plague. And much of the history that we are talking about this morning happened in Bern. Unbeknownst to the people at the time, rats were carriers of this dreaded disease. And right here is a map. In the bottom center, you see Bern and Oberland just below that. Emmental is right there. Oberland means highlands. It was up in the foothills of the Alps. Emmental was a valley.

Switzerland was largely spared from armed conflicts through the wars mentioned previously. But to the north in Alsace and the Palatinate, there was extreme devastation. In large areas, buildings were burned and fields were growing up in brush. While Europe was at war, the demands for Swiss goods were high. Switzerland spent large amounts in fortification against invasion.

After the wars, demands for goods dropped and taxes were climbing.

In response to the struggling economy, Bern issued copper coins, which had the same value originally as silver coins. The rich tended to hoard the silver coins while the poor generally traded with copper. Then in December of 1652, the Canton of Bern devalued the copper coins by 50% with a three-day notice to exchange them for silver or gold before the drop, which gave the urban people enough time, but the rural peasants were forced to take the loss.

Enough was enough. The angry peasants rose in rebellion and attacked the city with pitchforks and clubs. Those in the cities had better weapons and quickly overcame the revolution and executed its leaders. There's an example of some weapons that would have been used by the Bernese peasants: clubs and whips and whatever they could lay their hands on. And here's a leader that was part of the rebellion.

This conflict played itself out in the rural areas between Bern and Zurich, with the Emmental, where many Anabaptists lived, being right in the middle of the action. This conflict brings to light how the common rural peasants often had no qualms with the Anabaptists who lived among them. They had more gripes against the Cantonal government leaders who lived luxurious lives, all the while spitting out decrees and taxations for the people who did all the hard work. It is no wonder that some of the Anabaptist neighbors took their side when Canton officials, I'm sorry, when Canton officials made these rules against the Anabaptists and became hard on them, the surrounding people often were sympathetic.

And those sympathizers, we will see later how that sometimes played into life there. Tension was high between the ruling elite and the peasant population. The Anabaptists were a peace-loving people, highly regarded by their poor neighbors. When the rulers persecuted the Anabaptists, the peasants would often sympathize with them. Jacob Ammon first saw the light of this world among the pine-clad mountains, crystal-clear streams, and lowing cattle of the Simmental Valley, just a few miles to the west of Lake Thun, Switzerland. If a man could live off of natural beauty, the residents of Erlenbach in Simmental would be about as long-lived as anyone on this earth. What boy would not want to grow up with a 7,100-foot Stockholm mountain in his backyard?

This majestic masterpiece of God's handiwork is such a charming place that today a cable car has been built to access the summit. There, sitting among the clouds, one can eat at a restaurant while filling his soul with the inspiration from the grandiose views. One has to wonder what Jacob Ammon would think to see a cable car floating over his home today.

Jacob Ammon was born early in 1644 to Michael and Anna Ammon. He was baptized as an infant on February 12, 1644, in the Erlenbach Reformed Chapel. Today, that chapel still stands, and the Tauwrodel, or the baptismal list, still exists, and lives are still being shaped by Jacob's influence three and a half centuries later.

There's a lot of myths surrounding Jacob Ammon.

The question might be asked, "I have often wondered where the Amish come from." And I used to wonder that, and I didn't really know. I just knew I was Amish and had Amish people around me and didn't really know where they came from. This is a little excerpt from Uncertain Light Books by Leroy Beachy.

He's writing about a time when, as a young boy, he was visiting with his parents somewhere, and this man, Filthy, asked the question about where the Amish came from. Well, the people around there didn't really know. The people at that table didn't really know, but there was an 18-year-old girl that had a ready answer. And it's kind of humorous. I'll read it here. She said, "At one time, long ago, there were only Indians in America, and since their tribes were always fighting with each other, there never came to be very many of them."

She went on to explain that at the same time in Europe, the white men had never been engaged in wars and so had become overcrowded. A meeting was held in 1492 in which it was decided to send three shiploads of people to America to alleviate the situation. The people chosen to leave were called pilgrims, and the ships were named Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.

As the ships were crossing the ocean, the captain, John Smith, had been busy preparing three papers which he read to the passengers when they landed. On the papers were the rules they were to live by in America. The passengers of one ship were to be Amish, those on the second ship, conservative, and those on the third, Mennonite.

Something didn't seem quite right to Filthy, but when he wondered about the Hoi, or those that had, those that weren't either of those or any of those categories, Elsie had another quick answer. They were the outcome, those who had defected. Well, that's kind of a humorous concoction of some details that were mixed together, and she came up with this story.

So another thing that often gets said is that the Amish simply spit off the Mennonites. And one thing to say about that is, if that were the case, we would expect to find many of the same last names, which is not what we find. We'll come into that again a little later. At about 20 years of age, Jacob married to Verena Stoodler. As a young housewife, Verena was fined by the Quirky React, which was the moral court by the state, because she had carelessly brought fire and transported it without proper receptacles.

Verena asked for forgiveness and paid a fine of five shillings. Somewhere that's still in the records that as a young married couple, they were fined for being too careless with fire.

Jacob appears to have remained faithful to the state religion through the late 1770s. All in all, Jacob appears to have had everything the world could offer to make him happy: a wife and children, a good trade, a house, relative financial stability, a state-approved church.

So here we have another one or two excerpts of things that get said or myths about the Amish division. Jacob Ammon was a ruthless Swiss bishop who took it upon himself to convince others of his own ideas. It is plain that he was the cause of the division in which his group separated from the Mennonites. And in his rage, he excommunicated all the Swiss ministers.

And there's Elsie giving her spiel of her version of the story where the Amish came from. And here's another excerpt from Uncertain Light. It's an example of many truths and untruths that get mixed together in stories that get passed on of where the Amish come from. Remember, this is largely untrue facts.

Jacob Ammon, stern and censorious Swiss schismatic Anabaptist Mennonite elder, Ammon brought about the split within the German-speaking Swiss Anabaptist Mennonites between 1693 and 1697, which resulted in the formation of the Order of Amish. Ammon, as the conscientious and ultra-conservative bishop of the Erlenbach congregation, Canton of Bern tried to force his views on all of the congregations, demanding that they shun all non-believers and ostracize lapsed members. The others balked. Ammon stirred dissension, excommunicating recalcitrants. Ammon's sect was forced to adopt his rigid rules regarding uniformity of dress, untrimmed beards, and foot washing as a practice of worship. After experiencing extreme persecution, particularly in Germany, the Amish emigrated to Wellington's colony in North America, settling on rich farmland near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where they carefully preserved the Swiss Alsatian Palatine Mennonite practices of 1700.

Now, Leroy Beachy went on to say there that out of that last piece that I read, that there were 15 untruths and nine verifiable truths in that whole statement. But that is often what gets passed on. And I would like to dig into who was Jacob Ammon really, what was life like in his time, and dig up some of those details.

It may not surprise you, but in the time of Jacob Ammon, a tailor got in trouble for making a pair of pants which were too fancy. Now, Jacob Ammon was a tailor. What may surprise you is that it was not Jacob Ammon who thought that pants with a crease in them were too far out. Yes, it was the Quirky React or the Moral Police, located less than 10 miles from Jacob Ammon's hometown of Erlenbach, that fined a tailor for making creases in pants for his customers.

Known as sumptuary laws, such restrictions were in place all across Europe. In an attempt to keep the serfs or the poor people from thinking too highly of themselves, fancy clothes were restricted to only the nobility.

And here's just an example of some laws that were enforced in Switzerland in the time of Jacob Ammon. I'm not going to read all of them, but the state church had their own moral police that made sure that people stayed in line. I'm going to have to just keep moving.

So Jacob Ammon, it seemed like he had everything that it would take to make a man happy. He had his trade of being a tailor. He was well off financially. He had his own home, wife, and children. He was a member of the approved Reformed Church. But these things cannot satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart.

At some point, the Anabaptists and their beliefs began to draw his attention. How interesting it would be to know how that came about. His older sister, Maddalena, had married Anthony Wolfe, and their oldest son, Hans, ended up among the Anabaptists in later years.

The last names of Jacob's maternal grandparents, Hans Rupp and Maddalena Fry, would become Anabaptist names which were transported to America. Who was the first to convert to Anabaptism? Who influenced whom? Dozens of families within a 10-mile radius of Jacob's home would eventually join the Swiss brethren, abandoning the Reformed Church. The day came when Jacob himself had to choose to follow Christ, even though it meant living as a hated outlaw, a ridiculed Anabaptist, a hunted fugitive, and a fleeing refugee.

In those days, Anabaptism spreads like fire. It may have been the strongest influx of fresh converts that the Swiss Anabaptist movement had seen since its beginning. How is it that over 200 new family names appear to be added to the Anabaptists in the space of about one generation?

All of them within what would be the size of one large county in the United States. The majority of modern Amish family names can be traced back to the brave souls who left the Reformed Church in Canton Burn in the 1670s to 1690s.

Can we imagine 200 new Amish family names in the next 20 years, and all of them from one county? Anabaptism was truly spreading like wildfire, or from the perspective of the Reformed authorities, like terrible invasive weeds. Untold stories of faith and valor must have happened in those alpine foothills. We will probably never know the details because those who were acting as evangelists had to do so with greatest secrecy, lest they be found out and imprisoned or even killed.

Most of what we know about the heroic nighttime meetings, the secret baptisms, and the hard choices to be true to God come from just various sources, but there's so much that we really don't know about those times. We just know that there was a tremendous amount of people getting converted from the Reformed Church and coming over to the Anabaptists. And because of persecution, because of hard times that they were in, everybody tried to not be broadcasting the stories. So many, many stories back through there have been lost. Maybe sometime we'll find sources where we can learn of some of those stories of faith and valor. But for now, most of it has been lost to history.

So here is a list of the names that joined the Swiss brethren in the Bernese Oberland in the late 1600s. If you have any Anabaptist roots or Amish roots, I should say, you probably are a descendant of some of these people. And there's a very good chance that your name is in this list. Towards the bottom on the right, you'll see Reynold, which is my last name, Renaud, would be coming from that, just a slightly different spelling. So it's pretty fascinating. Can you imagine in your county, 200 different last names coming to the faith in a matter of one generation? That is pretty mind-boggling, isn't it?

And there's the completion of that list. And it's very, very interesting to read down through and see just how many are in the Amish faith today. Not all of them, but most of them. And most Amish names are in that list. So it's clear to see that the Amish church is not simply a split off of the Mennonites. Otherwise, we would see many, many more of the same last names than what we do. There was one particularly zealous evangelist named Ulrich Miller.

Court records show there were at least 18 people fined for housing Ulrich or giving him a place to preach. The fines were as much as two years' wages or the equivalent of $60,000. Can you imagine? Would you be willing to house a preacher, a preacher of the true faith that was being chased, and you would give him a place to sleep and hide him at the risk of two years' wages? These people were dedicated. This tremendous advance against the kingdom of darkness was not without consequences.

Attempts were made to squelch or restrict the movement, but they were stupendous failures. Despite Ulrich Miller and others being imprisoned, in these years, the church was blessed with less stiff persecution than the Burn Council demanded. Some attribute this to the semi-tolerant Schultheis or town mayor at Thune, Carl Manuel.

He held office from 1686 to 1692 and may have obstructed the anti-Anabaptist efforts of the Reformed pastors and lower government officials in his territory. Although he was a fervent and pious churchman, he was involved in bringing more than 200 Piedmont Waldensian refugees to Thune.

He was not entirely tolerant of Anabaptists. Records show his involvement in more than one imprisonment of Anabaptists, but there was another side to the story. At church one Sunday, after the regular sermon, the preacher began to inform the congregants of the evils of the Anabaptists.

At this point, Manuel simply asked the preacher to leave and then turned to the waiting congregants. "One has to ask himself," he told them, "if the reason for all of our people leaving us and turning to the Anabaptists has to do with the failings of the preachers or not." So here was a town mayor that recognized that the preaching of the Anabaptists was much more alive than the preachers in the Reformed churches, and he gave a very open rebuke to the preacher at this certain Reformed church, saying it was at least in part the preacher's fault.

Interesting. Carl Manuel Thune was not the only Reformed person critical of the sinful lives of many of the Swiss Reformed clergy. In many government edicts regarding Anabaptism, the preachers with their sinful lives are blamed for causing people to leave the Reformed church and turn to Anabaptism.

In Steffisburg, which was near Thune and would later become a seedbed of the Amish movement, two Reformed preachers were particularly ungodly. One was beheaded for the lawless deeds of his youth, while his successor was fired for embezzlement and dull preaching. So dull, in fact, that it is said that a town official was the only person to attend his sermons. Jacob Ammon himself was converted from the Reformed church to the Anabaptists in 1678 or '79 at about the age of 34.

Some converted from Anabaptism from a life of wickedness. Others were sincere Reformed churchgoers who got tired of hypocrisy in the state church. At this time, if someone moved from the state church to the Anabaptists, the government would try to confiscate his property.

And in order to get around that, many times they would quickly sell their property, put it into somebody else's possession. And we have record that Jacob did this. In order to avoid confiscation of his property, he sold it to his younger brother in 1679.

In 1680, the governor of Oberhofen wrote to the Quirky React of Burn asking what to do with Jacob Ammon of Erlenbach, who was now infected by the Anabaptist sect. The answer was, "If he refuses to recant, banish him from the canton and confiscate his property."

Those were the times, and that was what it was like. That was the cost that people faced to follow Jesus. The words that Jesus said, "Those that will follow him must deny self," and that it may cost father, mother, wife, children, lands, and so forth. That was very real in this time.

The next historical record we have of Jacob, nearly a decade later, he was living in Alsace, France, and ordained as a minister and later as a bishop.

Okay, we are now nearly a century removed from the last martyr among the Swiss brethren, Hans Landis. He was beheaded in Zurich in 1614. Although persecution was still an ongoing reality, it was less intense. There was still cost of property, and there were floggings going on and banishments, and sometimes children were taken away from parents. There were still very real costs, but there had been quite some time since there was actual martyrdom. It seems like segments of the church were cooling off. There was a certain Heinrich Funk who was being shunned as a matter of church discipline by the upper brethren that is in the Oberland, but not by the lower brethren that was in Emmental.

This shows a possible rift early on in Jacob's life in the area of church discipline.

Some were allowing their babies to be taken to the Reformed church by friends and relatives in order to be baptized as infants so they could enjoy Swiss citizenship. This would have been unthinkable among the earlier Swiss brethren. See, if a baby was not baptized and put into the baptismal record, he would not be granted Swiss citizenship. He couldn't be a landowner. Many other privileges that would have been denied him. So in order to get around that, the parents didn't take the babies themselves to get baptized, but some were allowing them to be taken by others.

So compromise in this area was setting in.

Lying was another thing that the more lenient of the ministers were not using discipline for anymore. Hans Reiss, a minister in Emmental, admitted that a woman in his church had told a lie but had not been disciplined for it. See, lying was very tempting in those times when you could lie about somebody's whereabouts or this or that. Maybe it will save you a lot of money, a lot of trouble if you could escape the ever-present suspicions of the state church.

In Emmental, there was a state preacher that reported that he went to visit a man that he knew, or at least suspected to be an Anabaptist. When he arrived at the man's residence, the man's wife informed him that the man was not at home because he had gone to town. However, about that time, not knowing that his wife had just reported him as gone off to town, the man stepped out of the cellar. He had heard the preacher's voice, and when he realized who it was, he had decided he would like to talk to him. Oops.

Was this an accident? A misunderstanding? Had the wife really thought that her husband had gone to town? That could be the case, but the preacher left the visit with the idea that the woman had simply lied, lied plainly and openly.

Some members were occasionally attending the state church in order to avoid discrimination. So the state church had its rules that you must attend at least so much or you'll be in trouble. So some were starting to go attend enough to stay out of trouble.

In this environment of some slipping into laxity with large segments of zealous first-generation converts, a rift was in the making. Church discipline was increasingly on the hot seat. Much of the drift and the compromise that I'm talking about here was happening in Emmental, down in the lower parts, down closer to the bigger towns.

Whereas in Oberland, where there were many, many first-generation Christians and less prosperity, there was less compromise, and the rift was starting to happen between Oberland and the lower lands.

So excommunication and shunning, church discipline. What do we do with these people that are compromising, allowing their babies to be baptized, going to the state church in order to stay out of trouble, and other compromises that were happening?

How, as ministers, do we stop this drift, stop this cooling off, this lukewarmness? What do we do about it? So excommunication and shunning was obviously being talked about and discussed and so forth. What specifically did Paul mean when he wrote about an excommunicated person with such a one known not to eat? Those that tended to take the easier route were saying, "Well, it means to not allow them to have communion."

The scripture in question would be 1 Corinthians 5:9 and 10 and 11. "I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators, yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the coveters or extortioners, or with idolaters, for then must ye needs go out of the world. But now I have written unto you not to keep company if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator or coveters or an idolater or a railer or a drunkard or an extortioner with such an one known not to eat." So there was a lot of discussion about what exactly did Paul mean here.

And there were some that were taking a more strict route and some that were being lenient. Some believed it referred to the eating of common meals, and others, like I said, were taking the easier route, saying it referred only to communion.

And here's a writing that someone wrote at the time. "We reply, moreover, that Paul had reference to common eating and not to the Lord's Supper. If this were spoken of the Lord's Supper, as some very ignorantly assert, then it would be incontrovertibly. It would follow that we are at liberty to invite the world to the Lord's Supper, to greet them with a kiss of peace, and to be one body with them. For this intercourse, unclean and prohibited with an apostate brother, is, according to Paul, clean and permissible with the world." Oh, no.

So there were rumors that some of the ministers in Emmental were consoling the true-hearted. Here's another subject. There were those that they called true-hearted that were sympathizers, but they weren't actively identifying with the Anabaptists. And let me just read this.

There were rumors that some of the ministers in Emmental were consoling the true-hearted and telling them that they were saved because of their good deeds toward the Anabaptists. These true-hearted people were also called half-tipher, which means half-Anabaptist. These true-hearted agreed with the Anabaptist teachings and even risked their own safety to support and help the Anabaptists. For example, hiding them from officials sent out to arrest Anabaptists. Some of the true-hearted were themselves government officials, but they were unwilling to take up Jesus' cross by being baptized and joining the persecuted brotherhood. After all, open identification with Anabaptism meant possibly losing everything one had, possibly even one's life.

Jacob Ammon was indignant at the very suggestion of consoling the true-hearted with salvation. Remember, he was a convert from the state church. He was not brought up in the Anabaptist church. He was surrounded by many who had made the same decision he had to leave everything behind, even the security of the state church, and take up the cross with the Anabaptists. Could there be a less demanding way? Could he give his blessing to those who halted between two opinions? Did the scriptures teach that those who were unwilling to follow Christ all the way should be consoled in their non-commitment?

The Oberlanders decided to send a delegation of ministers to Emmental to discuss these matters of concern that they had. Jacob Ammon was chosen to go along with his fellow minister, Nicholas Ausberger, and several others. Church discipline was central to their concerns, as how else will we keep the church pure in these times of compromise?

One of the questions asked to the Emmental ministers was the question of social shunning, to which some replied that they believed in and thought it should be observed more consistently. Hans Reiss, one of the senior ministers, however, stated that what goes into the mouth does not defile the person, but what comes out of the mouth, that defiles a man. So he was suggesting that sitting and eating with an excommunicated person, no problem. What goes in the mouth doesn't defile the person.

Being unsatisfied with his answer, the Oberlander delegation asked for a meeting with all the local ministers present. The agreed-upon day arrived, and Hans Reiss was missing from the meeting. One was sent to see if he could come, and his reply was, "This is the time of harvest. I don't have time to come."

To make matters worse, some of the others that previously agreed with the Oberlander ministers now were backing down. And it seemed like they were lying because they had days earlier agreed that they believed in shunning, and now they were saying they didn't.

And Hans Reiss refused to come to a meeting. Things were intensifying, and emotions were high. Having had enough, the delegation of ministers led by Jacob promptly excommunicated Hans Reiss and six other ministers. Many of the lay members present were shocked and begged him to show forbearance, but Jacob would not be moved. He had so much patience already for weeks, something the lay members may not have realized. So they had been here in Emmental for a number of weeks waiting till everybody could agree to a date set for a meeting. You know how it is when you make a meeting or plan on a meeting. Sometimes it takes a while till everybody can get there. So they finally agreed on having a meeting where everybody would be present two weeks out, and Jacob and the others at the risk of being located by the authorities and imprisoned or fined with hefty fines, they stayed in the area, laid low, did some preaching, and finally the time of the agreed-upon meeting had come, and Hans Reiss was absent and refused to come.

And others were backing down on their previous commitments. All right, Peter Zimmerman, Jacob's companion, said, "There you have it." And they left the meeting without shaking hands with anyone. In the aftermath that followed, there were some heated exchanges and two more excommunications.

In a follow-up meeting, Jacob walked out when Peter Geiger, one of the excommunicated, was speaking. So they had agreed that they were going to come together. They were going to hear each other out. And instead of doing that, Jacob shared his part, and then he walked out when Peter was ready to share.

And was that because he was excommunicated? I don't know why he did that. That seems like a definite failure on his part. So this confrontation during the summer of 1693 was only the beginning of a painful division. At the conclusion of the confrontation, nine Emmental Anabaptist ministers had been excommunicated by the Oberlanders.

There were obvious deficiencies in the Emmental or churches, which the Oberlanders tried to address, but they sometimes failed in their attitudes. We must remember that as far as we know, all the Oberlander ministers were first-generation Anabaptists. As such, their methods of dealing with sin in the church did not have the years of experience that we may take for granted.

Jacob had been an Anabaptist less than 15 years, and his brother Uli for perhaps only half that amount. Within a decade, the Oberlanders would express extreme repentance for the way they had handled the matter. Jacob Ammon's actions were not always above reproach. Yet we should recognize that he probably truly meant well. He believed that sin was in the camp. He was under extreme pressure from the state that was hunting his head and from fellow ministers who one day said they supported him, and only days later, suddenly, they didn't.

Unfortunately, it seems for the next 250 years, many would not forgive Jacob Ammon for his failures in the matter. Even though, as we shall see, he later humbled himself and admitted he had erred. The Oberlanders probably started out with all good intentions and attitudes, yet the pressure of the situation got the best of them in some instances. This created unnecessary pain and distrust in some who otherwise may have eventually acknowledged the sin in their midst.

As it was, it seems evident that the whole underlying source of stress was that of friction between older, lukewarm, established Anabaptism with a newer, zealous, and revived group of fresh converts. This same story has been repeated again and again throughout church history and had happened many times before this occasion as well.

The new converts want purity and consistency, while those who have grown up in the movement do not like the boat getting rocked. The zeal of the new Oberlander converts and the laxity of at least some of the lukewarm established Emmentalers would very likely have clashed sooner or later, even if Jacob Ammon would never have been involved.

It is time that Jacob quits getting blamed for the division. Yes, his failures added fuel to the fire, but underlying the whole situation were two visions, two irreconcilable visions: church discipline and permissiveness, zeal and lukewarmness. So that's the end of my screen sharing there. I'm going to come back in here and discontinue the sharing.

All right. So just recapping a little bit.

So how are we doing? How will we keep from drifting into lukewarmness as we go from generation to generation? And how will we, if we get challenged by fresh new converts that are very earnest about church discipline, about holding us, about evangelism, and about being on fire for God? Can we make sure that we don't make the same mistakes of division and getting upset about those that rock the boat?

Can we welcome fresh blood, fresh zeal, fresh vision, and work together in that way? That would be one challenge I have. The other thing is I'm very challenged by the dedication of these people, willingness to lose everything they had for a genuine, fresh, living walk with Christ.

And the amount of converts that happened in just a generation or so, 200 families. I mean, that's just 200 last names. I'm sure there were many multiple families with the same last name. So definitely, there was a lot of fire going on in those hills, foothills of the Alps in Switzerland.

And I would agree, but I'd like to hear your input. It's not fair to stereotype Jacob Ammon as just this harsh ruler that was just focused on shunning, and that's all he could think about. We've seen clearly that he had a zeal for God, and as a minister, he was very zealous to remain on the narrow way.

So there's so much more that could be talked about after the split happened there and how things went on. Jacob, in his older years, he continued living in Alsace, which is quite a bit north of Emmental, maybe 150 miles or so. And he retired there. I shouldn't say retired.

That's where he lived out his life. And he was a well-loved, well-respected church leader. It seemed like he was a true servant of the gospel all his days.

But I'm going to just hang it up right there and give it back to you, Elam, as the moderator. And I'd love some open discussion. And possibly in the future, we can pick things up again and take some more lessons out of history going forward from what we looked at this morning.

All right. That's it. Well, thank you so much, Freddy, for my early appreciation. You kind of came across to me like yesterday that you're not sure if you're ready and prepared. I definitely didn't pick up on anything that you weren't prepared to share this morning. So thank you for that. That was very well done.

And you may have a few more coming later on. Is that correct on Amish history? I could see that happening. Sure. Good. I'd encourage you to do that. There's a lot of things I learned here this morning. And your question is, how can we avoid maybe some of the same mistakes, let's say, on the Mennonite side?

I guess they weren't really called Mennonites back then, but what do they call them? The brethren or something like that. Your question was, if there's new converts, fresh zeal that comes into the church, how can we avoid, yeah, being those that are, I don't know, more stuck? I'm not sure what terms he used.

We should always appreciate fresh zeal, people that have a fresh love for the Lord. I think what can happen with all of us is we can be rocked asleep by ease and comfort and tradition. And we don't, yeah, want our boat rocked, but we should always treasure people that have a zeal for the Lord and fire. And we need to be those people ourselves, is the thing.

And I think with more of the Mennonite side of things, yeah, they didn't want to lose their farms. They were compromising whether it was having their babies baptized and things like that. I really appreciate a friend of mine that says, "Yeah, we own our own houses and lands and whatnot, but we should always have a loose hold on what we own."

Therefore, if persecution comes and we're tested, whether am I taking what route am I going to take? Am I going to compromise so I can keep my house? Or do I have a loose hold on it where I can easily let go of it? And that's something we need with our earthly possessions. We always need to have a loose hold on it where we can easily let go of it if the challenge ever comes.

But yeah, I don't want to take a lot of time here. But again, I really appreciate you sharing. And you shared some of the cultural social issues that were going on over Jacob's time, things that he was facing, the moral police, the law. So I don't know if I was aware of that, that there was a law that the poor people couldn't wear a certain kind of clothing, that the fancy clothing was for more of the elite. Yeah, I think that was a new one for me. So yeah, just different points you brought out that was very helpful. So is there anybody in the audience that would like to ask Eve from a question or make a comment?

We always love to hear from the people in the audience, and we really appreciate y'all coming on this morning.

Yes, Eve from How You this morning. Very good. Praise God. Brother John, how are you? Okay. So you said, or Andrew St. Marie said, 200 families.

You were saying there was 200 of the Amish at the start. Is that correct? Well, there were 200 different last names that joined the Anabaptists in one generation in one area. So that was all of the Anabaptists. That was just in the Bernese canton. Okay. Okay. So how many are there now?

How many Amish last names? Yes. Is that the question? Okay. Yes. That's a good question. I don't know if there's more than that. If you look down through the list, some of those names aren't among the Amish anymore. And there's some that have been added, but I would say most in that list, you can still find Amish by that last name. So give or take, probably not that much different.

Yeah. And the reason I'm asking is I'm looking at this list of people right now who are listening to you. And it's pretty much most, it looks like only two, Clifton, Terry Clifton. That doesn't sound like a Mennonite name either, and myself.

So it seems that this thing is just keeping on going in that respect.

Now, do you feel like they were adding at that time as people were joining? Yeah. That part, I'm not understanding too much, but has much changed in these 300 years? That's a good question. Certainly, there was a fire going on there. The times were right. I guess the dull preaching and the hypocrisy and all that in the Reformed Church wasn't working for all these people, and they were just coming over in mass.

There's probably quite a lot of factors why that kind of steam didn't really carry on through other times since. I'd like to see more of that.

I'm not sure if I'm completely answering your question, John.

So I have some answers to that. I don't know at all, but I don't know if there was a lot of last names added to the Amish, but there was some.

What's his name in Michigan, Elam? Michael Stury. Yeah, Michael Stury. I don't know how that name was added. He plans on coming on at some point, sharing his testimony. He may share some of that history. But then Lambright was added to the Amish name, but that was through young children coming to the Amish, I think, as a place to stay or something. So that's not being added as a convert, really. So just a thought. That's true. And I can think of two names here in the Shippensburg area among the Amish. One is Lee. That was a little Irish. No, sorry.

Was it Irish? Yeah, I think it was an Irish name where a little boy was taken care of by the Amish. And the other one is Flawed, is another name in the area. Yeah, both of those names came in among the Amish here in North America. So yeah, it'd be a fun study to do. Maybe that's your next project, Brother Ephraim.

It could be.

Appreciated the question, John. Are there anybody else that has a question or anything, comment? Hello, this is Terry Clifton. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes, we can hear you well. Thanks for joining us this morning, Brother Terry. Good morning, brothers. I wanted to say that I see a theme throughout the men and women of God that were faithful to the Word. There's some staying power in their testimony that draws people that want the same thing.

And I think that's the theme that, as I've come to understand a kingdom or a historic faith understanding of Scripture before I even knew what it really was, is that I saw it most lived out in the lives of people that did hold on to the things of this world loosely. The more they've seen everything that they have, not as their own, but as that they're just stewards over the things that the Lord has given them. And so what I'm trying to say is I've seen that played out in the lives of Brother John Higgins when I first saw him at Kingdom Fellowship Weekend in 2023. And Ephraim, when I met you, I could tell you have a love of the Lord.