It was a loosely-affiliated collection of Mennonite conferences based in the United States and Canada, mainly of Swiss and South German origin.The group dated to the settlement of Germantown in 1683 and included 112,311 members in North America in 1997.[1] The polity of the Mennonite Church varied because of influences of various originating groups and settlement patterns.The parts of the Mennonite Church with Amish origin tended to give more authority over doctrine and practice to leaders of local congregations.By the 1990s, most of the conferences participating in Mennonite General Assembly had a pastor for each local congregation and district superintendents or overseers rather than traditional plural ministry, with the significant exception of the strong bishop system in Lancaster Mennonite Conference.
