Posted by:
peculiargifts
(
)
Date: October 22, 2016 02:28PM
Tevai is correct on this. As long as any persons, including children of Amish parents raised in an Amish community, have not been baptized, those people should not be shunned if they choose not to be baptized. I say "should not" because there are a few Amish communities that are more dictatorial than the general run....)
If people choose not to be baptized, they can join another church (often a Mennonite group, but any church is possible, or no church at all). They can own and drive a car. They can marry someone of another faith. And so on, without being shunned. Mom and Dad may be decidedly unhappy about that, but that's a fairly common, individual problem, I am sad to say.
You have to be baptized and then "transgress" in some way, and refuse to modify whatever behavior it is that is a problem in the church's eyes after extensive discussion, in order to be formally shunned. It's normally a process that is avoided if possible.
Even if someone is shunned, in most Amish communities, that person is still able to visit family and friends, and have a basic sort of connection. There are limits on what can be done together, but the person is not cut off totally (in most communities --- there is a great variance in what is acceptable from community to community). So if you go to your parents' house for dinner, you can visit, and eat, but you have to sit at a separate table from the active Amish. You can't pass a dish of food to a baptized Amish person at the meal, but you can set it on the table and let an unbaptized person hand it around. And so forth. You can't sell a horse to a baptized person, but you can usually sell a horse to an unbaptized person as a go-between who will then sell it to a baptized person. And so forth.
I, personally, hate the idea of shunning with a passion. I deeply wish that Paul, or whoever wrote the passages that are used to justify shunning, had just been too tired to write that day. The guy has a lot of nasty things to his credit.
However, shunning is not so extreme as some people imagine --- *in most communities.* And shunning is supposed to be reserved for use only with adults who have already formally agreed, as adults, to follow all of the community/church rules. Not for any unbaptized person, regardless of age or origin.
And, no, during rumspringa, children are not sent out to live in the outside world with no preparation. Children still live at home and in the community, as they personally wish. They (there is a considerable gender difference here, in some communities, so males often get more freedom than females) are simply allowed to experiment with things that would be forbidden to baptized members, as they individually wish to do. Mostly, those things are relatively mild --- and there is a fair bit of community oversight in some communities. Less or none in others. The idea is to let the young people, who are close to adulthood, have enough experience to make a decision about joining the church formally, and of their own free will. It's supposed to be based on personal choice. That doesn't work out so neatly, in some situations, but at least there is some degree, in most communities, of personal choice.