Editing Leo (section)

=History=


==Other Sources==
<i>The troublesome decade of the 1860s witnessed still another division when the Leo Apostolic Christian Church came into existence in 1862. The Amish who joined this church stated many of the same criticisms that the Defenseless Mennonites were making against the Old Amish church, namely that it was too formal and that it placed insufficient emphasis upon experiential religion. But the Apostolic Church differed from the Defenseless Mennonites in that it greatly stressed sanctification theology and the importance of separation from churches of other denominations. The Apostolic Christian Church had first appeared in Switzerland when Samuel H. Froehlich (1803-57) founded it in the 1830s. He was not a Mennonite nor an Amishman, .... he believed that a new catechism of the Reformed Church contained too much "reasonreligion" and not enough "faith-in-Christ religion," .... Thus he attracted Mennonites who were dissatisfied with the "spiritual life" in their church; they in turn convinced him to embrace their nonresistance position. At mid-century both Froehlich and Benedict Weyeneth, also Swiss, came to America and began to organize Apostolic Christian churches.

The Leo Church began when Weyeneth came from Bluffton, Indiana, in 1862 to organize a congregation with only two converts, Jacob Schwartz and Joseph Conrad—both former Amishmen. Like the other congregations of former Amishmen, the Apostolic Christians originally worshipped in homes. They built a church in 1878 on the site of their present structure just east of Leo. An important early convert to the church was Henry Souder (1846-1924), and by the time the congregation dedicated its first building, he was one of the ministers
                            from  DEVELOPMENT AND DIVISION IN THE MENNONITE COMMUNITY IN ALLEN COUNTY, INDIANA </i>