History & overview · every faith gets one
The Ordnung is not a costume — it is a fence, and the district votes on where it runs.
Swiss Anabaptists who followed the elder Jakob Ammann out of the Swiss Brethren in 1693, over how completely the excommunicated should be avoided. They worship in one another's houses rather than in church buildings, choose ministers by lot, school their children to the eighth grade, and settle twice a year by members' vote what the district will and will not carry. The rules differ from settlement to settlement; there is no bishop over the whole and no headquarters to write to.
The founding
In 1693 Jakob Ammann, an elder in the Emmental, pressed the Swiss Brethren to practise Meidung — avoidance of the banned in ordinary life, at the table and in business, not only at communion — and to hold communion twice a year instead of once. The ministers led by Hans Reist refused, and Ammann excommunicated them where they stood. Seven years later Ammann and his own ministers placed themselves under the ban and asked to be received back; the Reist party did not accept. The two halves of the Swiss Brethren have never reunited, and the ones who went with Ammann are called Amish after him.
Its founding is bound to Jakob Ammann — 1693 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A world to be lived beside rather than in — the church visible, bounded, and small enough that everyone in it knows what everyone else drives.
The divine. The Trinity as stated in the Dordrecht Confession of 1632, preached in a High German nobody speaks at home and sung from a hymnal printed without notes..
Death and after. Resurrection and judgment. To state that you are certainly saved is heard as pride; the word used instead is a living hope..