Does anyone here actually know anyone either Amish or Mennonite?

[1bassoon]

Dh whisked me away to northern Indiana for a romantic trip, and we ended up in Amish country. Dh was slightly disappointed - it was more touristy/historical, and he was hoping to learn a bit about their farming methods.

 

It was really fascinating, and I just got to wondering if anyone actually knows - enough to have a relationship with - someone of Amish or Mennonite persuasion.

 

We watched the musical, "Plain and Fancy", and the funniest part was sitting behind 6 Amish women, who were laughing hysterically at some of the lines of dialogue - that most of us Englischers didn't find all that amusing :)

[Tree House Academy]

I know several mennonites - as in people who go to the Mennonite church...but they don't live the Amish life. I use CLE...does that count??? LOL

[EthiopianFood]

I'm a Mennonite by conversion, so I know many. :) Not all Mennonites live the traditional lifestyle, even though they may still very much be commited Mennonites. Here is an awesome website to give you an idea of some of the great things we get to be associated with: www.mcc.org

[Shadowwolf549]

We took a trip to Amish country in Ohio this Summer and it was so beautiful and peaceful! We didn't want to come home! We are also fascinated by their simple lifestyle w/ focus on the family and spending time together away from the "rat race". I am interested to read what other's have to say as well. :001_smile:

[sparrow]

....there are hitching posts at the bank, if that gives you an idea. We have friendly relationships with our Amish neighbors. They sell their baked goods at our business.

 

What are you interested in knowing? It's hard for us to romanticize their "simple" life, when they shop at Wal-Mart, like the rest of us, and their carts are filled with junk :tongue_smilie:! Seriously, LOTS of hot dogs and processed food!

 

Some of the Mennonites in our area are Amish that have been shunned. They still live a simple life (no "fancy" clothes, only "plain"), but they drive cars and use laptops :).

[TracyR]

We lived in a highly populated Mennonite and Amish country. Except the Mennonite are more liberal I guess you would call it. They don't live the life.

Amish around here. Yes, we know a family that lives up the road from my inlaws. I've known them for well 14yrs now. We've learned some of their ways of life.

I do like their simple way of life, but I'll admit there are some things I don't like about the Amish.. no bashing here I'm just stating my own opinion.

First its rare to find a friendly Amish family to befriend. We just got lucky the family we've known forever just are a bit more friendlier.

With that said its because well they like to use my mother in law's phone to make long distance calls but they don't have a phone of their own, and they don't pay her for the bill. Some are beginning to get cell phones but usually that's the New Order Amish( there are two , Old Order, they live the old fashioned life , and the New Order where they do have electrical hook up to their home and use some electrical appliances).

They like to bum rides off of people and not pay for gas.

They run around in their buggies, all the while with car bumper stickers plastered on them and music coming out of them because they've rigged them with radios.

Their teenagers like to drink , get drunk and pass out in public places or get into accidents with their buggies and kill their horses in the course of it all.

The Amish in our area have a serious problem with animal cruelty. Many get fined for cruelty to their animals( which I have seen with my own eyes).

 

Basically my point is , yes they live the simple life but they can be no different then the rest of society. Its great to read all of the books out there about them but when you see it first hand its a different story. I guess we have the good Amish and the bad Amish. LOL.

 

What is it specifically that you want to know about the Amish? We have Old Order, New Order and I believe we must have some shunned Amish that still live the Amish life style but have been shunned from other communties.

[mommaduck]

1) Know, yes

 

2) Have family that are/have been, yes

 

3) Have nearly joined a group, yes

 

Anything you need to know?

[Audrey]

Dh whisked me away to northern Indiana for a romantic trip, and we ended up in Amish country. Dh was slightly disappointed - it was more touristy/historical, and he was hoping to learn a bit about their farming methods.

 

It was really fascinating, and I just got to wondering if anyone actually knows - enough to have a relationship with - someone of Amish or Mennonite persuasion.

 

We watched the musical, "Plain and Fancy", and the funniest part was sitting behind 6 Amish women, who were laughing hysterically at some of the lines of dialogue - that most of us Englischers didn't find all that amusing :)

 

 

I live in a largely Mennonite area. I think people get Mennonites confused with Amish because they're both Anabaptists. Hutterites are another Anabaptist group, and there are many Hutterian colonies around here, too.

 

The Mennonites I know are not at all like Amish. The Mennonites that are sort of like that are called Plain Mennonite (around here at least), and are few and far between, IME. Most Mennonites here look and act (in public at least) just like anyone else.

 

If you really wanted to learn about Amish ways of life you'd have to seek out a vacation farm somewhere. Those are still kind of touristy, but better than the "attractions" they've developed for the auschlanders. With Hutterites, you're out of luck unless you happen to be neighbours to a colony, or friendly with them. We're lucky enough to have a colony bordering our farm, and one of my best friends is a lady from that colony. It also probably helps that my dh's mother was the colony's kindergarten teacher for 20 years until she passed away. Oh! You should have seen them all at her funeral. It was really touching to see how many from the colony came. It's not something they would normally do.

[dangermom]

My husband had a co-worker friend who is Mennonite. They're still kind of in touch, they were buddies.

 

There are a lot of Mennonites around here, though I don't know any personally. We seem to have the same taste though--we are always running into Mennonite folks at restaurants, the fabric store, and the bookstore.

[Rose in BC]

They are no different than us although their upbringing may have been slightly more conservative. None of their families lived in Mennonite colonies. They were all just Mennonites living in society just like I'm a Baptist living in society.

[Scarlett]

In the small town in AR that I grew up in there were many mennonites. They had their own school though so I never got close to any of them. In fact, my husband's father sold farm land to them long ago.

[Mamasteff]

but good friends with some Mennonites, and to follow up on Audrey's comment, we also had an ex-Hutterite living with us for several years overseas. We got what I think of as a good education about her experiences, but without rose colored glasses.

 

Apparently they are not supposed to have personal tvs, computers, etc. (at least in her colony) - so every time I see her friends list on Facebook full of her relatives who are still on the colony, I crack up. (She also had great stories about "not having a tv" - at least officially).

[staceyobu]

What is a Hutterite?

[Mamasteff]

Hutterites are also Anabaptist by history. The big difference is that they live on large communal colonies. As communal farmers, the money earned goes much farther. Well known for being big spenders for things like 12-15 new tractors, all paid for with cash. Women do communal gardening, cooking, and cleaning. Each family may have their own home, but there are a lot of worldly goods or "freedoms" that are proscribed.

[Renee in NC]

I have a friend that became Amish. She dresses plain, but they do drive a van (they had it painted black), have electricity, and have a phone. Their community doesn't allow televisions, radios, or computers, though.

 

She used to homeschool, but now her children attend her church's school. (They use a mix of Pathway, Rod and Staff, and CLE.) She told me that they only went through 8th grade.

 

It has been awhile since I've talked to her, but at the time her dh was still working at his computer related job and hoping to quit and operate a portable sawmill for people. They had a small farm.l

 

Before they became Amish, they were a pretty normal upper middle class family. The change was astonishing. I wish I had been able to see her before we moved (she is in NC), but I ran out of time.

 

I've read the complaints posted here other places, too, but almost always in relation to the much larger settlements. I wonder if the breakdown in values occurs when a community gets too big.

[Carrie12345]

The family that runs our farmer's market is Amish. I've never stopped to think about how they get the goods to location, but they look traditional in dress and sound traditional with the Pennsy Dutch accents/speech patterns. If we want to order chickens, we have to fill out the form at the stand or mail it in, since they don't use telephones.

 

Other than that, my only experience with the Amish was learning how to share the roads with buggies when I lived in southern PA. ;)

[Oak Knoll Mom]

I have a friend that became Amish.

 

(she is in NC),

 

There are Amish here in NC? Where?

[Renee in NC]

There are Amish here in NC? Where?

 

Up near Yanceyville there is one church district. They are not Old Order, but they are plain. There isn't a distinct "town" of Amish or anything, so no tourism really.

[dandelion18]

?

[FunnyFarmMom]

 

Basically my point is , yes they live the simple life but they can be no different then the rest of society. Its great to read all of the books out there about them but when you see it first hand its a different story. I guess we have the good Amish and the bad Amish. LOL.

 

 

 

Ha! LOL - As I was reading your post I thought that you were describing the Amish near us to a tee. Then I scrolled back up to see that you are in Corry - we're in Findley Lake! For you non-natives, that means that we live on the north side of the Amish community Tracy described and she lives on the south side. I agree that the Amish around us live far from the idealized life depicted in movies and books. Sometimes the rules just seem so arbitrary! I mean, they're allowed to borrow the neighbor's tractor, but not own one; anywhere they go over a couple miles they hire a van; they shop at Wal-mart and go to Disney World. I've seen little ones waiting for the bus with hot pink Barbie backpacks! One of the top tractor mechanics in the area (he runs the shop for a nearby dealership) is Amish.

 

Just like any other group of people though, there are all sorts. We've had good friends and there are some we wouldn't let step on our property. There are some that are neat as a pin and put my housekeeping to shame and others that you have to leave the library when they come in because of the smell. They are just people. It just gets my goat when they are set on a pedestal by those who don't know them. :tongue_smilie:

[TravelingChris]

WE never had much contact with Amish except when we were driving through areas with them. On the other hand, my ds went to college in southern Michigan and he met Amish either there or when he went to visit friends' houses in northern Ohio or elsewhere. He related the same type of stories as some of the other posters here did. I think they were coming to Walmart in his town with buggies and he said that the teen boys were not acting well at all. Bipolar disease is a big problem in the AMish community of PA, I believe, since they are so closely related.

 

Now the Mennonites I knew were normal, nice people. I used to babysit for a Mennonite couple in CHicago when I was in college. They were very nice and just more back to nature than maybe some others. The husband was in charge of a recycling plant. THe children went to a Montessori school. Then I recently met a Mennonite at a conference for my disease. He and his wife did dress a bit differently but they didn't shun electronics or anything. In fact, my husband was looking at the small engine repair manual at the CLE exhibit this week and they had other books there about repairing electronics and woodworking with power tools.

[SnowWhite]

I grew up next door to an Amish school and attended it for 8 years... as far as I know we were the only "Englisch" family ever to attend Amish school. Then I taught the Amish school for 4 years... I was 15.5 when I began teaching grades 1-4, then I took a year off to complete my hs at home. I went back and taught 2 more years of grades 1-4. The year after that I taught grades 1-8 because the attendance was dwindling. Some of my best friends growing up were Amish and we have kept in touch.

 

Their lifestyle has changed since I lived there (central Ohio, Knox county). At that time there were no power mowers or refrigerators or bicycles. Now they have all of those, but you would not likely see a pink Barbie backpack and certainly no children getting on buses (they walk or drive pony carts to one room parochial schools). It is a slower paced quieter lifestyle, but each family has its own ideas about nutrition, so some of them would be getting lots of hot dogs at WalMart while others would butcher a hunted deer and make their own homemade hot dogs to can.

 

My brothers were a part of the local "ruhm schpringe" in which the young people "sow their wild oats". The idea behind that was that they experienced some of "the World" before settling down to the Amish lifestyle and joining church. I barely avoided it... db said that one evening I chose to accompany Mom to our grandparents instead of ice skating at the pond next door, where I would have been physically coerced to smoke and drink so that I would never "Tattle" on the others who were doing that. However, all of that wild stuff was kept on the Q. T. and would have been cause for some "parental guidance" and "church discipline" if the word had gotten out. It's just a time of looser supervision in that community.

 

Just like other posters have said, there are very friendly kind Amish people and less friendly less consistently nicely behaving ones. Some seem to be Amish just because it is their culture and never really take the beliefs seriously. They just do "what they have to do" to get by. Others are VERY sincere and I admire their devotion.

 

I'm willing to answer other questions as well. There was a time I briefly considered for a short time (like 10 min- LOL) joining the "Beachy Amish" which was our local CLE style Mennonite car driving community. Our family was very conservative, but I envied the Anabaptists their clear cut community and guidelines for life.

[plansrme]

The book Rumspringa about the Amish tradition of giving kids a year or two to sow their (often very) wild oats, is an excellent read, very informative. It covers a lot of what has been mentioned here--the variances between communities and how those variances come about, the wild teenagers and the forces that are impinging upon their rural lifestyles (the high cost of land, for instance).

 

Terri

[FunnyFarmMom]

 

Now the Mennonites I knew were normal, nice people.

 

Just wanted to be clear that most of the Amish we know are normal, nice people. They just live differently than us. And really, in our community where the Amish population tops 50%, WE are the ones that are different. :D

[emeraldjoy]

I grew up within 15 miles of 3 Hutterite colonies. Just last week I spent the afternoon at one of them. My uncles land border theirs and my grandpa was very good friends with the original "boss" of this particular colony. Each colony has a different flavor even those around here that are so close to eachother. Some let the woman come into town, some don't. About 80 miles north of here the girls can wear make-up even. As someone else mentioned there are all kinds, just like in the outside world. Some nice people some not so nice. Alchohol sometimes is a problem within the colonies. Just yesterday I spend the the day with a renegade named Scotty. Renegade is what they call the ones that leave and don't come back.

Is there something specific you would like to know? Hutterites are different than the 'Amish or mennonites too.

e

[emeraldjoy]

I really like how you stated this.

Just wanted to be clear that most of the Amish we know are normal, nice people. They just live differently than us. And really, in our community where the Amish population tops 50%, WE are the ones that are different. :D

[Renee in NC]

Ha! LOL - As I was reading your post I thought that you were describing the Amish near us to a tee. Then I scrolled back up to see that you are in Corry - we're in Findley Lake! For you non-natives, that means that we live on the north side of the Amish community Tracy described and she lives on the south side. I agree that the Amish around us live far from the idealized life depicted in movies and books. Sometimes the rules just seem so arbitrary! I mean, they're allowed to borrow the neighbor's tractor, but not own one; anywhere they go over a couple miles they hire a van; they shop at Wal-mart and go to Disney World. I've seen little ones waiting for the bus with hot pink Barbie backpacks! One of the top tractor mechanics in the area (he runs the shop for a nearby dealership) is Amish.

 

Just like any other group of people though, there are all sorts. We've had good friends and there are some we wouldn't let step on our property. There are some that are neat as a pin and put my housekeeping to shame and others that you have to leave the library when they come in because of the smell. They are just people. It just gets my goat when they are set on a pedestal by those who don't know them. :tongue_smilie:

 

There is a book called "The Riddle of Amish Culture" that explains very well the reasons behind the strangeness of the apparent hypocrisy in the Ordnung of various communities. When I read the book, it hit me that the changes in Amish culture are very similar to the changes that globalization has caused in third world countries. They don't seem to be good in either place!

[Sara R]

I enjoyed Beverly Lewis' series of books about the Amish and Mennonites. The "Abram's Daughters" series was my favorite.

[phathui5]

Um, I know me.

 

We go to North Baltimore Mennonite Church, which actually feels a little too liberal for me, but I love them anyway.

Edited July 13, 2009 by phathui5

[Lovedtodeath]

 

Um, I know me.

You sure? :tongue_smilie:

[FunnyFarmMom]

There is a book called "The Riddle of Amish Culture" that explains very well the reasons behind the strangeness of the apparent hypocrisy in the Ordnung of various communities.

 

Thanks - this looks really good!

[Mom2boys]

My extended family on both sides are mostly Mennonite. None of my family are old order or plain, so they dress and live the same as main stream society. You would never know they were Mennonite except for their surnames. :001_smile: My parents both went to Mennonite colleges (Goshen in Indiana and Bluffton in Ohio).

[mamamace]

My last two home births were attended by a wonderful Mennonite midwife whom I adore! Very self sufficient lifestyle and yes, she drives an SUV so she can make it to births in the winter months! :)

[QuirkyKapers]

I'm Mennonite :)

[BlsdMama]

We used to live closer to an Amish settlement, now we're about thirty minutes away. I guess you'd consider the Amish old order.

 

They are not allowed to have vehicles, even black, and drive only buggies. They are not allowed to HAVE telephones, but use them. We don't wear our cell phones into stores anymore because you will be asked if they can borrow it and make a call, or two. They do have telephones off the property of the schools in booths that they can use. They do not have electricity, but are allowed generators.

 

Most still have agricultural roots as in they do milk their cow or their goats. Many do own larger farms, but more and more Amish are finding that tourist shops are more profitable. More and more Amish are renting their land to their English neighbors for agricultural use. You'll still find them here training horses for sale. They do woodworking as far as making cabinets and shoe or harness/leather repair. You have to be wary of the shops though - much of it is Amish made but you can't be certain. We were looking at a cute toy one day and found the Made in China stickers on them. That said, the furniture shop here brings in their Amish furniture from family in Pennsylvania. They still make much of their own bakery stuff, but don't think it is necessarily "homemade" often it is a premade shell with premade filling. Some are offended by this, but seriously? Where do you think they find the THOUSANDS of blackberries they'd need to stuff all those pies? It really is VERY much a tourist thing here.

 

All of them use laundry lines, year round. All of them have huge gardens.

 

The contrast to this is that their children, in the teens, have a reputation for drinking too much. And last year we counted six? girls in the local "bent and dent" store with hickeys on their necks. No, they weren't married.

 

They wear very traditional clothing with no decoration like buttons - all blouses are pinned.

 

It's very much a contrast of things you expect and things you wouldn't at ALL expect. We've found them to be very friendly. After moving away a bit ago we went back to a store yesterday and an old gentleman told us it was nice to see us again after so long. :)

 

We find they tend to be more friendly with certain people - after all we drive a 15 passenger van and have a bunch of kids, garden, have chickens, et cetera. But there is still definitely that English/Amish line.

 

They still teach their little ones German (a dialect of, not the same you'd find in Germany) as their first language and you can hear the lisp of the older teens and sometimes adults as English is their second language, learned later.

 

Our stores here are heated by wood stoves and lit by lanterns when/if necessary.

 

That said, my uncle had a telephone on his property for their use, or they'll ask to use the house line... And an Amish fellow ran up a couple hundred dollars worth of a phone bill and it was never paid. He had the line taken out.

 

It is assumed that anything Amish is superior - tables, work done on houses, baked goods, etc. which is simply silly. It depends on the quality, the ability, the workmanship, the work ethic, the ingredients, whatever used by the maker, just as it would with the English.

 

I think some people are harder on the inconsistencies of the Amish because they set themselves up with such high expectations and then they're twice as hard on the Amish when they fail. That said neither do they have quite the quaint little culture that stories portray. It's a mixed bag.

[Karenciavo]

My niece is Amish. My sister and her husband lived among the Amish (as Amish) in upstate NY for 10 years and my niece married an Amish boy. They live in a pretty conservative community in Missouri.

 

The contrast to this is that their children, in the teens, have a reputation for drinking too much. And last year we counted six? girls in the local "bent and dent" store with hickeys on their necks. No, they weren't married.

 

You know, I hear this about some communities, especially in PA, but I've not seen this behavior in the NY, Ohio, or Missouri Amish communities we've had ties with.

[Sharpie]

I grew up Mennonite.:001_smile: Both sides of my family are still Mennonite.