Amish in the context of "Schism"

Excommunication is an institutional act of religious censure used to deprive, suspend, or limit membership in a religious community or to restrict certain rights within it, in particular those of being in communion with other members of the congregation, and of receiving the sacraments.

It is practiced by all of the ancient churches (such as the Catholic Church, Oriental Orthodox churches and the Eastern Orthodox churches) as well as by other Christian denominations; however, it is also used more generally to refer to similar types of institutional religious exclusionary practices and shunning among other religious groups. The Amish have also been known to excommunicate members that were either seen or known for breaking rules, or questioning the church, a practice known as shunning. Jehovah's Witnesses use the term disfellowship to refer to their form of excommunication.

Affusion is a method of baptism where water is poured on the head of the person being baptized. The word "affusion" comes from the Latin affusio, meaning "to pour on". Affusion is one of four methods of baptism used by Christians, which also include total or partial immersion baptism and aspersion or sprinkling.

Christian denominations which baptize by affusion do not deny the legitimacy of baptizing by submersion or immersion; rather, they consider that affusion is a sufficient, if not necessarily preferable, method of baptism. Affusion and aspersion tend to be practiced by Christian denominations that also practice infant baptism. This may be due to the practical difficulties and dangers of drowning and hypothermia associated with totally immersing an infant in cold water. However, most Eastern Christians (e.g. Eastern Orthodox) and some Catholics practice infant immersion. Amish, Old Order Mennonites, and Conservative Mennonites still practice baptism by pouring.

Child labour is the exploitation of children through any form of work that interferes with their ability to attend regular school, or is mentally, physically, socially and morally harmful. Such exploitation is prohibited by legislation worldwide, although these laws do not consider all work by children as child labour; exceptions include work by child artists, family duties, supervised training, and some forms of work undertaken by Amish children, as well as by Indigenous children in the Americas.

Child labour has existed to varying extents throughout history. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, many children aged 5–14 from poorer families worked in Western nations and their colonies alike. These children mainly worked in agriculture, home-based assembly operations, factories, mining, and services such as news boys—some worked night shifts lasting 12 hours. With the rise of household income, availability of schools and passage of child labour laws, the incidence rates of child labour fell.

Believer's baptism (also called credobaptism, from the Latin word credo meaning "I believe") is the practice of baptizing those who are able to make a conscious profession of faith, as contrasted to the practice of baptizing infants. Credobaptists believe that infants incapable of consciously believing should not be baptized.

The mode of believer's baptism depends on the Christian denomination, and is done either by pouring (the normative method in Mennonite, Amish, and Hutterite churches) or by immersion (the normative method practiced by Schwarzenau Brethren, River Brethren, Baptists, and the Churches of Christ, among others). Among those denominations that practice immersion, the way that it is practiced depends on the Church; the Schwarzenau Brethren and the River Brethren for example teach "trine immersion, that is, dipping three times forward in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit."

Pennsylvania Dutch (Deitsch, Pennsilfaanisch-Deitsch or Pennsilfaanisch) or Pennsylvania German is a variety of Palatine German spoken by the Pennsylvania Dutch, including the Amish, Mennonites, Fancy Dutch, and other related groups in the United States and Canada. There are approximately 300,000 native speakers of Pennsylvania Dutch in the United States and Canada.

The language traditionally has been spoken by the Pennsylvania Dutch, who are descendants of late 17th- and early to late 18th-century immigrants to Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina, who arrived primarily from southern Germany and, to a lesser degree, the regions of Alsace and Lorraine in eastern France, and parts of Switzerland.

Plain dress is a practice among some religious groups, primarily some Christian churches in which people dress in clothes of traditional modest design, sturdy fabric, and conservative cut. It is intended to show acceptance of traditional gender roles, modesty, and readiness to work and serve, and to preserve communal identity and separation from the ever-changing fashions of the world. For men, this often takes the form of trousers secured by suspenders, while for women, plain dress usually takes the form of a cape dress along with a headcovering (normatively a kapp or an opaque hanging veil).

In the Anabaptist tradition, an Ordnung is a set of rules describing the way of life of church members. The term is mostly used by Amish and Old Order Mennonites. Ordnung (pronounced [ˈɔʁdnʊŋ] ) is the German word for order, discipline, rule, arrangement, organization, or system. Because the Amish have no central church government, each assembly is autonomous and is its own governing authority. Thus, every local church maintains an individual set of rules, adhering to its own Ordnung, which may vary from district to district as each community administers its own guidelines. Among the Amish, these rules are largely unwritten, yet they define the very essence of Amish identity. Conservative Mennonites refer to Ordnung by the English terms "discipline" or "standard", and their rules are usually written.

Jakob Ammann (also Jacob Amman, Amann; 12 February 1644 – between 1712 and 1730) was a Swiss Anabaptist leader and the namesake of the Amish religious movement.