Swiss Brethren Settlements in America
In the United States and Canada, Mennonites now number well over 300,000. Many also reside in Africa, Asia, South America and Europe. Today the heaviest concentrations are in Canada and the United States. The Mennonite villages in Soviet Ukraine were dispersed after World War II. Other groups similar to the Mennonites are the Amish and the Hutterites, both of which have settlements in North America. Missionaries from Europe and North America started congregations in Latin America, Africa, India, and Oceania. The denomination also supports colleges and seminaries. Many of the denominations that emerged after the Reformation were attempts to revive the church by returning to 1st-century conditions described in the New Testament. Such was the aim of Anabaptists, Baptists, Quakers, Methodists, Moravians, and others. When the printing press was invented around 1455, the Bible was one of the first books printed and mass-produced with movable type.
In the late 1600s Quaker and Mennonite Christians in the British colonies of North America were protesting slavery on religious grounds. Some of the followers of Zwingli's Reformed church felt that requiring church membership beginning at birth was inconsistent with the New Testament (Greek Testament or Greek Scriptures or New Covenant example.) It was written by various authors after c. 45 AD and before c. 140 AD. Each of the Gospels narrates the ministry of Jesus Christ [Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.] However, the original text of the New Testament was most likely written in Koine, the vernacular dialect in 1st-century Roman provinces of the Eastern Mediterranean, and has since been widely translated into other languages, most notably, Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. Some believe the English term New Testament ultimately comes from the Hebrew language. The Hebrew term is usually also translated into English as new covenant. The New Testament is a collection of works, and as such was written by multiple authors.
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In Pennsylvania, Lutheran ministers such as Henry Melchior Muhlenberg and Reformed pastors such as Michael Schlatter promoted Pietism. A few radical Pietists sensed the need to separate from the unconverted in the state churches. They formed churches that their opponents called sects. These included the Moravians, the Schwenkfelders, and the German Baptist Brethren. The Moravians traced their beginnings back to John Huss, a Bohemian priest. He was martyred in 1415 for speaking out against corruption in the Roman Catholic Church.
Swiss Brethren were Anabaptists, a group of radical evangelical reformers who initially followed Huldrych Zwingli of Zürich. The first Swiss Brethren suffered martyrdom. Later the Swiss authorities jailed, beat, fined, or banished the steadfast Brethren. The Palatinate emerged from the County Palatine of Lotharingia, which came into existence in the 10th century. During the 11th century it was dominated by the Ezzonian dynasty, who governed several counties on both banks of the Rhine. Around 1650 the ruler of the Palatinate, a neighboring German country, invited the Swiss Brethren to his land. He need these hard-working farmers to restore his wartorn land. There they prospered. Due to the practice of division of territories among different branches of the family, by the early 16th century junior lines of the Palatine Wittelsbachs came to rule in Simmern, Kaiserslautern, and Zweibrücken in the Lower Palatinate, and in Neuburg and Sulzbach in the Upper Palatinate. The Elector Palatine, now based in Heidelberg, converted to Lutheranism in the 1530s.
 | By the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Frederick V's son, Charles Louis, was restored to the Lower Palatinate, and given a new electoral title, but the Upper Palatinate and the senior electoral title remained with the Bavarian line and refers to the pair of treaties signed in October 1648 which ended the Thirty Years' War. The treaties were signed on October 24, 1648 and involved the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III, the other German princes, France, and Sweden. Sweden had favored Münster and Osnabrück while the French had proposed Hamburg and Cologne about 50 km apart in the present day German states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony. In any case two locations were required because Protestant and Catholic leaders refused to meet each other. |
The Catholics used Münster, while the Protestants used Osnabrück. Most of the Swiss Brethren passed through Germantown and settled further inland. They sought out land along the creeks and rivers. Some Swiss Brethren joined earlier Mennonite settlers at Skippack. In 1710 Bishop Hans Herr and his preacher son, Christian Herr, led a group who settled along the Pequea Creek. Inspired by the fertile land, they sent Martin Kendig back to the Palatinate to urge other Brethren to come over to Pennsylvania. After 1717 Swiss Brethren flooded into Pennsylvania. They overflowed the Skippack and Pequea settlements, spreading out in all directions. By the 1730s a few families located along the Conococheague Creek in the Cumberland Valley. Others ventured down the valley into Virginia and settled along the two forks of the Shenandoah River.
The Amish. The Amish, a smaller body of Swiss Brethren, also settled in Pennsylvania. They were the followers of Jacob Ammann, a Swiss Brethren bishop from the Alsace. Ammann and his opponents also disagreed about the salvation of the true-hearted, members of the state church who fed and sheltered the persecuted Anabaptists. Ammann insisted that as long as they did not unite with the Brethren they were not saved. Most of the other Swiss bishops, led by Hans Reist, felt they should allow God to decide who was saved or not. Ammann separated from the larger body of Swiss Brethren in 1693. Most of the Swiss Brethren in the Alsace sided with Ammann. In 1736 the first Amish settled along the Northkill Creek in Berks County. By 1759 a few Amish began to move into Lancaster County where many Mennonites lived. A letter written in 1773 by Mennonite bishops stated that the Amish "hold very fast to the outward and ancient customs."
At the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815, the Left Bank Palatinate enlarged by other regions (e.g. the former bishopric of Speyer) was returned to the Wittelsbachs and became a formal part of the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1816 and after this time, it was this region that was principally known as the Palatinate. The area remained a part of Bavaria until after the Second World War, when it was separated and became a part of the new state of Rhineland-Palatinate, along with former left bank territories of Prussia and Hessen-Darmstadt.