Old Order Amish
Old Order Amish belongs to the Anabaptist family of churches.
Governance: congregational.
Old Order Amish reports 2,863 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020).
Not present in our data at all under any string — see the mapping report.
RCMS reports one aggregate row, "Amish Groups, undifferentiated" — 2,863 congregations, 320,625 adherents. There is no separate Old Order Amish row. NOT ONE of these appears anywhere in our 661 strings.
Churches with no buildings, no websites, and no advertising — and among the fastest-growing Christian bodies in North America, worshiping in homes as they have since the beginning.
Heritage
The Amish descend from the 1693 division in which Jakob Ammann, a Swiss Anabaptist elder, pressed for stricter church discipline including shunning, and the congregations siding with him became a distinct people. Emigration brought them to Pennsylvania from the 1730s; the "Old Order" took shape in the 1860s–80s as these congregations declined the changes their more assimilating kin adopted. An Amish congregation is a church district of a few dozen families worshiping in one another's homes; RCMS 2020 reports a single aggregate of 2,863 Amish congregations, and the population roughly doubles every twenty years, spreading to new settlements across more than thirty states.
Theological family
Anabaptist: believers' baptism, nonresistance, and separation from the world, ordered by the Ordnung — each district's agreed discipline covering dress, technology, and practice — and carried in the conviction that the church is a people whose daily life is its confession.
Who decides what
Radically local: each district is led by a bishop, ministers, and a deacon, ordained by lot from among its own men, and answers to no structure above itself; districts in fellowship recognize one another's discipline.
What a first-time visitor would find
Worship is in homes and barns every other Sunday, three hours in German and Pennsylvania Dutch: slow unison singing from the Ausbund — the oldest hymnal in continuous Christian use, its hymns written by imprisoned Anabaptists — with preaching, kneeling prayer, and a fellowship meal after. There is no public evangelism; the Amish do not seek converts, and growth comes through their own children choosing baptism as adults.
What it has always cared about
The community over the individual; forgiveness as practice, not theory; mutual aid — barn raisings, shared medical costs — in place of insurance; the family farm and shop; and the discipline of asking what any new technology will do to church and family before adopting it.
Its gift to the wider church
Two gifts the world has actually noticed: after the 2006 West Nickel Mines school shooting, Amish families forgave and embraced the killer's family within hours, giving the whole world its clearest modern picture of enemy-love; and their standing practice of judging technology by its effect on community has become, in the smartphone age, everyone's question.
Commonly confused with
With Old Order Mennonites constantly — also plain, also horse-and-buggy in some groups, but a separate people with meetinghouses and different practice; with the Beachy Amish Mennonites, who drive and evangelize; and with Hutterites, who live communally. "Pennsylvania Dutch" refers to a language and culture, not a denomination.
Range of views inside it
Settlements and affiliations differ genuinely in Ordnung — from Swartzentruber groups with minimal technology to New Order districts permitting more — and in openness to outsiders; there is no single Amish rule on most disputed particulars.
A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of a specific district. Amish districts have no signboards, listings, or websites, so a map built from public records — including this one — radically under-represents them: not one appears under any of the strings in our data, and the 2,863 figure is the RCMS aggregate for all Amish groups, undifferentiated. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Amish districts typically…" and are written of neighbors, with respect.
Sources: The Riddle of Amish Culture (Donald B. Kraybill, Johns Hopkins University Press) · A History of the Amish (Steven M. Nolt, Johns Hopkins University Press) · 2020 U.S. Religion Census (ASARB)
More of the Anabaptist story · Find these churches on the map