According to Steven Nolt in A History of the Amish, the split between the tradition-minded Old Order Amish and the change-minded Amish Mennonites happened around 1865, though gradually and not due to any single event. Among the Amish Mennonites there was a bishop named Henry Egly who had a powerful conversion experience during an illness in the 1840s. Whether the influence of American evangelicalism and revivalism on him came before or after this experience is not clear from the text. In any case, he came to insist that this sort of emotional experience was necessary for salvation, which brought him into conflict with his Amish Mennonite fellows. He refused to baptize people who did not have such an experience. He even refused to discipline one member, insisting that since she had never had a conversion experience, she wasn’t a member anyway.
About half of his church eventually left with him and came to be known as Egly Amish. I wondered what became of them so I looked them up online. Turns out, they’ve changed names over the years:
- Egly Amish, to
- Defenseless Mennonites, to
- Evangelical Mennonite Church, to
- Fellowship of Evangelical Churches
At this point they have 46 churches, over half of which are in Illinois and Indiana. But the point of this whole post is I wanted to tell you that there was a group at one point in history that had the extremely cool name of Defenseless Mennonites.