If you ever find yourself wondering just how the Amish, Mennonites, or Hutterites came to be, you might enjoy today’s video.

Mike of Primitive Christianity has put together a short (8 min) and entertaining video detailing how each Anabaptist group ended up where they are today.

I particularly like his use of maps to tell the story (on one map he has highlighted the precise house in Zurich where the first Anabaptist baptisms took place).  This won’t substitute for reading a good history of Anabaptism, but it gives a nice outline of where these groups came from and how they landed in North America. A few interesting points from the video:

  • Hutterites once numbered 50,000 in Europe, mainly in Moravia (today part of the Czech Republic)
  • Amish came to America in two main waves, numbering about 300 in the 1700s, and increasing tenfold to 3,000 in the 1800s
  • At one point Holland was almost 10% Mennonite
Mike prepared the video for a Lancaster County historical society, which is why the story begins there:

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