158 / The Role of Conference in Transitions and Expansions

Among the innovations which Levi Miller of Holmes County considered threatening in the 1862 conference were lightning rods, lotteries, photographs, and insurance.

The agelong problem of shunning excommunicated members was not to be avoided. The various discussions on this tended to reinforce the generations-old Amish practice of shunning the excommunicated member with the hope that he would repent and return to the fold.'

The role of the Ohio Amish congregations in the Diener Versammlungen was considerable if one can judge by the proceedings which were printed in German. At the first conference in 1862, held in the barn of N. W. Schrock near Smithville, Ohio, of the seventy-two delegates present, forty were from Ohio. Of the fifteen meetings, seven were held in Ohio, which was perhaps as central a location for the Amish as any state. Important, too, was the leadership role of John K. Yoder of Wayne County who served six times as conference moderator. Other Amish bishops who played an important role were Moses Miller of Holmes County and John P. King of Logan County.

The Diener Versammlungen were discontinued after 1878, it is usually thought, because the diverse elements of the Amish brotherhood could not agree on a sufficient number of issues. Amish history in America then took three different directions: (1) A progressive group in Illinois under Joseph Stuckey formed a separate body, the Central Illinois Conference of Mennonites organized in 1899; (2) the Old Order, the traditional and conservative, continued in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa to perpetuate the old forms of worship and discipline; (3) a moderate group which formed the Indiana-Michigan Amish Conference in 1888, the Western Amish Mennonite Conference in 1890, and the Eastern Amish Mennonite Conference in 1893. All conferences of the moderate group have since joined the Mennonite conferences in their respective states or districts.'

The Origin of the Eastern Amish Mennonite Conference

After the demise of the Diener Versammlungen in 1878, the scattered Amish churches in Ohio did not organize a conference until 1893." The circumstances that led to their organization are not clear to the historian, but the reasons for such a conference are doubtless the same as for any other. In 1897 when the conference