Religion and Worship (continued)
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Several years after the Schleitheim meeting, a priest in Netherlands began to doubt whether the bread he held in his hands turned into the flesh of Jesus every time he recited the mass. He soon had second thoughts about infant baptism. By 1536, Menno Simons felt he had to choose between the authority of church tradition and the authority of the Scripture. The courageous example of the suffering and death of the Anabaptists around him was so compelling that he joined them. He preached, admonished, argued, and wrote long explanations of the Scriptures for the rest of his life. The high and learned doctors of the church, he said, were blinded to the simplicity and directness of the Gospels by many trappings: “Legions, histories, fables, holy days, images, holy water, tapers, palms, confessionals, pilgrimages, mass, matins, and vespers . . . , purgatory, vigils, and offerings.” He felt that the observance of these matters was trivial and kept the people in ignorance of the real Christ. Menno Simons became the most important Anabaptist leader in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century. His followers were called “Mennists” or “Mennonites.” And the name was later adopted by descendants of the Swiss Anabaptists who came to America.

The Amish division of the Swiss Mennonites owes its existence as well as its name to elder of Markirch (Sainte Marie-aux-Mines), Jacob Ammann. Little is known of him except that he was born in Switzerland and later migrated to Alsace, where he became an elder and a spokesman for the Anabaptists who had moved to that region. He is presumed to have left Switzerland in 1693 or earlier. In a state document of 1696 he is cited as the spokesman for a group of members in the Alsatian area who were seeking exemption from military service.

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