Fellowship of Evangelical Churches

Heritage

In 1866 Henry Egly, an Amish bishop in Adams County, Indiana, began requiring a testified experience of regeneration before baptism, and the congregations gathering to that conviction became a distinct people — called in turn the Egly Amish, the Defenseless Mennonite Church, the Evangelical Mennonite Church (1948), and finally, in 2003, the Fellowship of Evangelical Churches, headquartered in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Each renaming marked another step from ethnic Anabaptist enclave toward mainstream evangelicalism, a journey the small body made openly.

Theological family

Evangelical with Anabaptist memory: the new birth, believers' baptism, and biblical authority, with the peace heritage held historically rather than binding all members.

Who decides what

Congregational: self-governing local churches in voluntary fellowship, served by a small national staff.

What a first-time visitor would find

A visitor finds ordinary warm evangelical worship — music, prayer, biblical preaching — with little visible trace of the Amish beginnings.

What it has always cared about

Regeneration before ritual — the founding insistence; church planting in the Midwest; and honesty about its own evolution.

Its gift to the wider church

A time-lapse of American church history in one small family: the arc from Amish bishop to evangelical church network shows, in miniature, the road many American traditions traveled — and the FEC walked it without a schism at any step.

Commonly confused with

With Mennonite and Amish bodies, its ancestors; and with the many other fellowships of evangelical churches whose generic names blur together — this one has a specific 1866 birthday.

Range of views inside it

Modest variation across a small, Midwest-centered fellowship.

Where Fellowship of Evangelical Churches churches are on the map

1 Fellowship of Evangelical Churches congregations appear on The Church Map, across 1 states.

• Illinois — 1