Old Brethren Church
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Old Brethren Church is a Schwarzenau Brethren denomination in the Anabaptist tradition of Christianity. They are a believer's church made up of those who voluntarily choose to follow Jesus as His disciples, and are baptized at this time, during their teen or adult years.
The Old Brethren Church dates back to Germany in 1708, when the Schwarzenau Brethren were formed in Berleburg under the leadership of Alexander Mack. Soon they moved to Pennsylvania to escape religious persecution in Europe. As the American frontier moved west, the Schwarzenau Brethren followed to Ohio, Indiana and beyond. A schism within the Schwarzenau Brethren led to the Old Brethren splitting from the Old German Baptist Brethren in Carroll County, Indiana (Deer Creek), in 1913, and in Stanislaus County, California, in 1915.
History
The issue which is often given as cause for division in the early 1900s was the changes brought by quick acceptance of telephones and automobiles among the Old German Baptist Brethren.
Historically the Schwarzenau Brethren groups have believed in and practiced the independent authority of each local congregation. After immigration to North America, the Brethren spread west with the frontier and settled in mostly rural groups. Annual Meetings started out gradually as a time for worship, exhortation, problem solving and unity among the first several generations of dispersed, frontier living, German-speaking Brethren families.
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This entry incorporates text from “Old Brethren Church” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.