Reformed Mennonite

The Reformed Mennonite Church is a Conservative Anabaptist denomination of Christianity that officially separated from the main North American Mennonite body in 1812.

The Reformed Mennonite Church was founded on May 30, 1812, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, under the leadership of John Herr, the son of Francis Herr, a Mennonite who had been expelled from the church. Herr split from the main Mennonite Church on the premise that the Church leaders were deviating from the original teachings of Menno Simons, and thus deviating from the true foundation of Jesus Christ. The new denomination retained the name "Mennonite" and identified itself as the only true Mennonite movement. Others, however, referred to followers of Herr as "New" Mennonites or "Herrites", and subsequently as "Reformed" Mennonites, which eventually became the denomination's official name. The Church reached its peak membership in the mid nineteenth century, at which time it included up to 3,000 members in Ontario and eight U. S. states. It has experienced two divisions in its nearly 200 year history. In 1917, three congregations located in Huron, Richland, and Lucas counties in Ohio (along with a few members in Ontario) formed the New Reformed Mennonite Church under the leadership of Minister John Miller. The cause for the split was disagreement over whether funerals should be held in cooperation with non Reformed Mennonite ministers and over the Church's support of the American Red Cross during the First World War. Milton S. Hershey's mother was a Reformed Mennonite. Robert Bear, a Pennsylvania farmer who was excommunicated in 1964 and again in 1972 has since been actively and publicly attacking the church.

Reformed Mennonites have been depicted in a variety of literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Leo Tolstoy, in his book The Kingdom of God is Within You, praised the religious pamphlet Non Resistance Asserted by Reformed Mennonite bishop Daniel Musser. Helen Reimensnyder Martin harshly portrayed the Reformed Mennonite Herrites and other Pennsylvania Dutch groups in her novel Tillie: a Mennonite Maid (1904), a novel which provoked cries of misrepresentation from those who resented her depictions. Early in the story a young girl of Pennsylvania Dutch, but not Mennonite, background, joins a Reformed Mennonite group after listening to a funeral sermon but is excommunicated within a few years for allowing curls of hair to peek from her bonnet. The chapter depicting the funeral scene makes much of the Herrite prohibition of attendance at funerals of other faiths; to accommodate them, two separate funeral sermons are preached, and the conclusion of the first sermon by a Reformed Mennonite minister is the signal for the Reformed Mennonites to depart.