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Under the cover of a dark September night in 1889, three children of Martin W. and Anna Zimmerman crawled into the newly constructed Lichty Mennonite Meetinghouse in Eastern Pennsylvania. Sent by their parents, they quietly tore out a newly installed pulpit and replaced it with a traditional small preacher's table, constructed by their father. Their mischief remained hidden for nearly nineteen years until Martin's wife Anna confessed their sins ten years after his death.

Meanwhile, the pro-pulpit and anti-pulpit factions boiled with anger. Traditional Mennonite habits of humility kept the feet of their lay ministers on equal footing with other members. For a number of years, a few Mennonite churches following Protestant patterns had added simple pulpits that raised their preachers six inches or so above the crowd. The three-member building committee in the Lichty congregation installed the innovative pulpit without consulting the congregation, igniting controversy and encouraging conservatives to argue that it was fair play to rip it out without consent.

The pulpit fiasco was but one of many controversies that strained the love of North American Mennonites in the last quarter of the 19th century. Final ruptures tore the fabric in Indiana (1872), and then Pennsylvania (1893), Ontario (1889), and Virginia (1901), as Old Order Mennonites formed separate communions to protect old practices and protest innovations—Sunday schools, revival meetings, and preaching in English. During the same era, Old Order divisions splintered not only Mennonites, but also Amish, German Baptist Brethren, and Brethren in Christ groups.

Imbibing progressive Protestant emphases of the late 19th century, forward-looking leaders called for mission outreach, publications, institutes of higher education, and a more aggressive pace in the life of the church. The emerging Old Orders clung to the more informal, familial, rural, and community-based patterns of faith that were threatened by the vibrations of industrialization. The key issues were not technological at this stage but ecclesiastical—would Anabaptists and Pietists preserve their meek and mild manners of non-resistance and non-conformity from the world, or would they embody more mainstream Protestant values and styles?

The assimilationist voices won the day, as sizable majorities in all the groups stepped up in American society and moved over toward Protestant patterns of piety, leaving the Old Order Amish, the Old Order Mennonites, the Old German Baptists, and the Old Order River Brethren to guard old ways in the face of a rapidly modernizing society.

Despite their conservative bent, the Old Orders soon struggled with changes in their own ranks. In 1927, Bishop Mose Horning was surprised by a boycott of a Holy Communion service that normally celebrated the peace of the congregation in Anabaptist circles. He knew that many members of his Old Order Mennonite congregation were agitating to buy automobiles, which had been strictly forbidden by the church. Trying to flex with the flow of history, he decided to offer the cup of Holy Communion to those who were driving cars. In a dramatic boycott, the majority of members shunned the cup of wine he offered on that October morning, tearing the fabric for a new division—one that lined the horse-and-buggy drivers up on one side of the road and car owners on the other.

As the 20th century unfolded, Old Order groups who worried that the avalanche of technology would tear their communities asunder and connect them too directly with the outside world placed taboos on public electricity, tractors in fields, modern appliances in the kitchen, and of course—when it arrived—television. Meanwhile, the larger and more assimilated Mennonite, Brethren, and Brethren in Christ groups began looking and acting more like other Protestants. Dropping their plain dress, they adopted more Protestant styles of preaching and worship, employed seminary-trained pastors, built steeples onto some meetinghouses, and organized adult choirs.

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