I’ve had the opportunity to attend new Order Amish church services with friends. It is different than the evangelical services you may be familiar with. I’ve also attended the local Beachy Amish-Mennonite Church for the past 25 years.
The Beachy are more like the evangelical services, but there is a difference in the music and in the attitude. My experience with evangelical, and Baptist churches is that the services are more focused on the people than the Lord. The Beachy have no instruments in their music and sing as a congregation in 4-part harmony. The preaching centers more on the Bible, whereas in the majority of Baptist and evangelical churches I’ve attended, the preaching seems to be one verse or one short passage and then 30 minutes of opinion and application.
This is not to put down other churches or elevate the Beachy Amish-Mennonites above other churches but just stated for comparison’s sake. We are all Christians and all family in Christ.
The Beachy do have weekly church, whereas the New Order and other Amish churches have church every other week. Unlike the majority of Amish churches, the Beachy do build meeting houses for services.
How often do Amish have church services?
Amish people have church every other Sunday and they take turns, hosting it at their house. Church starts at nine o’clock on Sunday, and it ends usually around 12 o’clock, then people will mingle and hang out for another couple of hours and then go home. Having church at your house is a pretty big deal. And, and you start preparing for it weeks ahead of time.
The men will start cleaning out the barn, cleaning out all the cobwebs, and organizing all the tools. Often they take everything out of the barn. Then they clean it, sweep it, and put everything back nice and neat. And the yard gets mowed and trimmed. The leaves get raked, and the flower beds get done up really nicely.
The men will set up a hitching line so that when the church members do come, they have somewhere to tie their horses to, and they’ll have hay out there for ’em.
On the other side, the women start cleaning the house. They’ve already canned pickles and beets. They’ll start cleaning the house. And even a couple of days before that Sunday, the neighbor ladies will get together and they will clean the house top to bottom. Every wall, every ceiling gets scrubbed.
The furniture, sofas, couches, they all get taken outside and shampooed and aired out. The China cabinet gets cleaned out and all the dishes get scrubbed inside cabinets. Everything’s clean and they have fun doing it. They enjoy the fellowship of it.
Different Amish communities have different ways of doing things.
The Amish are not one homogeneous societal culture. The funniest thing with non-Amish people is that on the Facebook groups, they want to tell Amish people how Amish people live. I find that comical.
Everything’s prepared for weeks ahead of time, the peanut butter is made. The cheese is ordered. The bench wagon is brought over from the previous person’s house who had church.
Sometimes with a tractor or with a team of horses, they’ll pull the bench wagon over on Saturday. The men usually will bring in all the benches and set them up. They’ll set the benches up so that the ladies can sit on one side and the men can sit on the other.
Some homes don’t have a house big enough to host it in there. So they would do it in the summertime, in their farm shed, where they kept the implements or even in the barn loft. In the wintertime they might have it in the basement
But the benches are set up so the women could sit on one side and the men on the other and the preacher could kind of stand in the middle so everybody could hear ’em and then it’s ready for Sunday morning.
What do the Amish wear to church?
Sunday morning comes around and the whole community attends. Amish people have a strict dress code. The men always will dress in black or dark gray pants with a white shirt, and then they’ll have a suit or a jacket that they wear usually with the vest underneath and the boys in the summertime, the young boys won’t wear the jacket. They’ll just wear black pants and a white shirt with suspenders and obviously black hats.
The women wear dresses. They may be allowed to wear different color dresses to church, although they stick with the not so bright colors for Sundays. They wear reds and oranges and whatever their community allows during the week, but on Sundays they would wear the darker colored dresses.
Sunday mornings everybody would be getting around, getting dressed, making sure everything was looking good.
You know, the head covering is good and the dresses are looking good and the shoes are clean and shined.
Sunday morning they will load the family up in the buggy. They will head to wherever the church is at. And they would pull into the churchyard.
Usually, the men are out by the barn, standing in a circle, waiting for church to begin, but the families would pull in and the men would turn the horse to the one side, which meant the wheel would turn away from his wife’s side of the buggy so that she could get out without getting her dress all dirty.
All the kids would climb out the and girls go with mom and the boys go with dad. The father will then drive out to the field usually, or the lawn and unhitch the horse, take him over to that hitching line or rail, or inside the barn, if it’s big enough and tie up his horse in there where it can chop on hay all day.
Then the man will go in and, and he would join the circle of men. He will start at one end and he will go through each man doing a handshake and giving him the holy kiss. The holy kiss is a symbol of brotherly love and acceptance. The kiss is only practiced among members in good standing of the Amish.
All the little boys up to a certain age, usually around 5 or6 stay with their father, they go with their father and they stand with their father. Anybody older than that goes and hangs out with the rest of the boys who are usually in a separate part of the barn hanging out and waiting for the host to come get them. The women are doing a similar thing in the house.
Sometime a little bit before nine o’clock, the host of the place would start sitting people. He will start with the ministers and he will put them in the front.
Then he will skip a couple of rows of benches and then the rest of the married men will file in by age and sit down according to age and on one side of the room. In the meantime, all the women will file in and sit on the other side of the room. The first few rows are where the young people sit.
A lot of the things are done by age. After the men are all seated and the women have come in and been seated, the young girls that don’t have to sit with their mom anymore will file in by age. The girls file in and they sit up usually front, somewhere closer to the preachers.
Then they will bring in the boys from the barn and they will also come in by age. Usually the single boys who aren’t married, but have joined the church will come in first. Then all the other younger boys that still aren’t members of the church, that aren’t 16 years of old age yetill all file in and usually shake hands with the preachers. They have to sit in the front.
Then at nine o’clock, the Bishop of that church will call out that church is starting and a person who kind of takes care of songs, calls out a page of a song. Then he picks on somebody in the congregation to start singing that song. He sings the first word of the line and then the rest of the church joins in.
There’s one person singing the first word, then everybody else joins in for the rest of that line. And then, then he does the next verse. He does that first word again and everybody joins and so on. The songs are all written in German. They pick these songs out of the Ausbund Hymnal. It’s a German book full of German songs written by the Anabaptists who were martyred or who were going through persecution.
They were writing these songs as they were sitting in jails or hiding. They’re all serious. Like Amish church services. You don’t see a lot of smiling. You don’t see a lot of joy and happiness. It’s all very solemn and, and serious. This is God’s time. There’s not to be a whole lot of joking around and stuff.
They sing a song and then when that’s over, they do the same thing. There is always a second song in a service every Sunday. Then they do the third song and a fourth.
In the meantime, right after the first song started all the preachers and the visiting preachers go out to a separate room and pray and go over some things and they discuss who is going to preach that day. As a minister, you show up to church on Sunday and you don’t know if you’re gonna preach or not. You can kind of have an idea because the person who went the longest without preaching on a Sunday, will be the one preaching that day. They decide who’s gonna preach that day. There are two people that preach and another person who reads scripture.
The ministers come back in, sit down, they finish the song they’re on, whether that’s a third or fourth song. And then the first preacher stands up and starts preaching. The songs are sung slowly, and it takes a long time.
Once the songs are completed, the preacher stands up and starts preaching. If it is an older preacher he will know more German and a lot of what he preaches may be in German. The preaching as a whole is done in Pennsylvania Dutch, but if there are nonAmish guests, there will be some English, too.
When I was visiting the New Order churches they would always preach in three languages, German, PA Dutch, and English. Now I know German from high school, and I’ve picked up some dutch. But every time it seemed I was getting the message, it seems the preacher would change up languages on me. I still enjoyed the services and fellowship, though.
Prayer will follow the preaching. When it is time to pray, the members will turn around, kneel down on their benches and pray. Then they all stand up and scripture is read.
Usually, after the first time prayers are said, there is a break time where members can go outside and use the bathroom. After the break, the people all come back in and the second preacher will stand up and preach. This is followed by more praying.
After that first little break or prayer the lady of the house would come out with cookies and crackers and pretzels and pass them around to the families with the little kids, just as a little snack to keep them from getting too hungry and keep them a little bit more occupied. The whole family attends the service together. There is no “children’s church” or nursery. Two, three, and four-year-old kids get kind of get antsy when asked to sit still for three hours. It’s hard for them but will bring the little kids toys, little tractors and dolls that they can play with.
After both preachers are done and scripture has been read the Bishop will ask for corrections and testimonies. He will ask the other preachers or men of the congregation who hadn’t preached that day to give their testimony, share with what they heard and if it was good and biblical.
Then another song will be sung and church is over. If there is somebody who needs to confess their sins or if there is church business that needs to be discussed, these are handled where only the members of the church are be involved. After the last song was sung, all the baptized members of the Amish church will stay in the room and everybody else has to leave.
After church, all the men will take the benches they sat on and they set them up for the meal. The women spread out tablecloths and then the food is brought in. All the women will be helping and the men will be setting up the benches.
They will usually call the boys, then the ministers. The preachers sit at a table and there are a couple of tables for the women. Everyone will be sitting there with all the pickles and the beets and the peanut butter spread and ham.
There will be homemade bread and a glass of water. When the tables are full, the Bishop will call for prayer and everybody will go quiet and pray. And then as soon as the Bishop shuffles his feet or clears his throat the prayer is over and everyone will start eating.
That’s a common way to pray in the Amish community. Even if they’re out eating dinner or something they will just bow their heads and pray silently. Nobody actually says a prayer.
They eat ham and pickles and bread. They have a unique peanut butter spread. It’s peanut butter, marshmallow cream, and some other ingredients. It’s so good. So sweet. So good. One of the boys taught me to put the peanut butter on the bread, then a couple of slices of ham to make a sandwich. Sounds weird, but it is absolutely wonderful.
The ladies who are helping serve will pass plates of sliced cheese, Colby Jack, cheddar, and Swiss. The men will often have coffee. The women will serve them coffee. They have coffee sitting on the table and when everyone is done, they will pray again. There are always cookies at the end, delicious cookies, homemade cookies.
The children will run out and play. The women will clean up.
The rest of the adults will mingle and just chat. They will fellowship until about two, three o’clock. Popcorn will often be brought out. After the afternoon snack, the families will go home. In the evening the teens will often gather at the host family’s house for a sing.
That is a typical Amish church Sunday.
