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KOSCIUSKO COUNTY – Police arrested 46-year-old Darrin Ray Gibbs at his home in rural Warsaw Thursday after they say he exposed and touched himself in front of several Amish children at a school located just southeast of Nappanee, in Kosciusko County. According to police, Gibbs pulled up to the school in his van and took off his pants last Friday at around 8:30 in the morning.

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“There are two ways to leave the Amish — one is through life and the other through death,” writes author Saloma Miller Furlong, who grew up in an Amish community in Ohio. “To leave through life, one has to deliberately walk away.” Furlong tells how she made this difficult break in her memoir, “Why I Left the Amish,” she will tell her story on PBS’ upcoming “The Amish,” which is part of its “American Experience” series. The show premieres Feb. 28, at 8:00 p.m. EST/ 7 p.m. CST.

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When I met the Lord as a young Amish girl and was finally able to come out of the Amish some years later, it was a hard and difficult thing to walk through the mine field of explosive emotions and feelings I had during that time. Sometimes the pain and anger would explode inside of me so quickly, it was like stepping on a mine.

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In many ways the Miller family is as Amish as the people they left back home in Wisconsin 10 years ago, carrying on the traditional ways. Father Harley, 40, is a master carpenter who has constructed the sprawling, ski-lodge-style house the family now lives in. Mother JoAnna, 40, with the help of her nine children, ages 8 through 21, cooks, sews, tends a garden and the family's large flock of goats and teaches the younger children their school work. But in so many other ways the Miller family is helping to define a new generation of Amish people who dress in regular clothes, work outside the home, use computers, cellphones and DVDs and drive cars.

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While Dr. Patrick Quillin cautions that his book Amish Folk Medicine is not intended to replace the personal care of a physician, he says he was simply looking for wisdom from people who historically have lived closer to nature and done well. He found that aboriginal groups kept record of helpful natural remedies out of the need for survival, and it obviously worked for them.

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MAYFIELD, KY. — On Jacob Gingerich's farm in Western Kentucky, there is no phone or electricity for his family of 12 children. He even sees putting an orange safety triangle on their black horse-drawn buggy as as violation of the simple and pious life his Amish faith requires. He and other Amish men in rural Graves County have become scofflaws for not using the reflective signs, ignoring state law, disobeying orders from a judge and even going to jail for not paying fines.

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CLEVELAND — A breakaway Amish leader charged in beard-cutting attacks on fellow Amish complained Monday that the government is trying to demonize him to keep him locked up, but a judge again rejected pretrial release. The attorney for Samuel Mullet Sr., 66, told the judge that the government is trying to invoke the memory of a deadly 1993 Waco, Texas, standoff in opposing Mullet's release. U.S. District Dan Aaron Polster responded with a brief order rejecting the defense request to reconsider release on bond.

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Miriam Jones doesn't waste time analyzing how an Amish girl in long skirts and bonnets went on to become the owner of a salon in the heart of Echo Park's hipster enclave. In her first 30 years, in addition to starting a business, she's butchered large farm animals, killed snapping turtles with a crossbow, sewn her own clothes, grown and canned her food, learned to fly a helicopter and raised a 12-year-old daughter.

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Wally the Walmart horse is looking for a new home. That's the nickname given to a 9-year-old standardbred horse that a humane society says was left at a northeast Ohio store by an Amish teenager more than two months ago.

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2011 Amish in the news

Lydia Miller is a new volunteer with Mission to Amish People who received Christ after reading one of the Bible Club lessons that MAP sends out. She started receiving the Bible Club lessons when her sister-in-law, Esther, sent her name in. While reading the second lesson, she realized that knowing about sin and knowing about Christ dying for her sins was not enough. She must make it personal by receiving Jesus Christ into her life. That was in February 2010. She still continues to receive the Bible Club lessons. “They are encouraging, and they help you to grow.”

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HARLINGEN — Emma Gingerich reached the age of 15 without ever having used a computer or talking on a telephone. She never studied history or geography; for her, the earth was still flat. The life she faced, she said, would be simple: a minimal education, which stopped at eighth grade, and little contact with those outside her immediate community. Her purpose in life, she said, would be to raise children and continue the static traditions that were passed down to her from previous generations in the Amish culture...

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Moses Gingerich doesn’t mind fielding the tough questions. Do you go to church now? (“No.”) Do you still believe in God? (“Yes.”) Do you think you’re going to hell? (“Probably.”) He gave the last answer on national television. He was feeling a little vulnerable when he said that, Gingerich admitted over a cup of coffee on a snowy January morning in Columbia...

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"Why I Left the Amish," shows a smiling second-grader with bright dark eyes. The story she tells, however, is anything but a simple tale of a happy childhood...

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As a young child I was taken to the neighbor minister to be "brauched" (powwowed) on. This was done for such things as sore throat, earache, canker sores etc. As a child growing up I had an extreme fascination and attraction to these types of things...

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You mentioned that you don’t read in the Bible about “ordnung.” Well, probably a lot of it is tradition, but history teaches us over and over that when people leave the church, their children, or maybe more often their grandchildren will not belong to any church...

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I was born into the Amish and lived most of my life in Michigan. When I was 15 my father passed away on December 22, 1997. Then on May 20, 2005 my brother passed away in a farm accident. I always thought the Amish church worried more about the rules than people. The night of my brother’s funeral proved that to me. The Bishops came and ex-communicated me, that night, because I knew my brother had a stereo and we had gone to visit my ex-Amish sister. The day after that, they announced it in church. I was eventually allowed back in but was constantly at odds with the leadership over various rules...

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Danny Stutzman, a 9-year-old son of an Amish family from Dalton OH. No cause of death was determined, due to the condition of the body. Many believe his father killed him. Eli Stutzman Jr. never was convicted of killing his son, only of illegally dumping the body. He was in prison for 18 months....

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I left an abusive Amish family and lived in Joe and Esther Keim’s apartment for a while before moving in with my now, ex-boyfriend. Based on my abusive childhood, I picked a guy who became verbally and emotionally abusive during my pregnancy. After we moved in together in 2008, he became physically abusive, always blaming me for his abuse. Before I took the Life Skills classes, I thought I needed to have a guy in my life to be happy. All my Amish girlfriends had boyfriends, so I was competing with them...

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The Amish are avid believers in the practice of shunning, which, in many cases, means expulsion from their Amish community for violating religious guidelines. It may sound harsh to non-Amish, but Dr. David Weaver-Zercher, professor of American religious history at Messiah College in Grantham, said shunning is seen by the Amish as a way to get someone's attention in hopes that the person will repent and return to the church...

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Staring blankly into space, the 41-year-old man's eyes begin to look bloodshot as they fill with tears. Fighting back his emotions, he looks toward the floor. "Be good to go back home some time," he says as he nods his head in agreement with himself. "But you can't go back." Matthew knew the decision he made so many years ago would have its consequences. He knew that leaving the Amish faith behind would change his life forever...

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We lived in New York until I was 13 years old when we moved to a Wisconsin settlement with only five families. My Dad bought an 80 acre farm. About a year later, I started work milking 80 cows for our neighbor. I began to listen to Christian radio and heard the gospel. Living an Amish life, I had never heard the true gospel. The only gospel I had heard was you have to do this, that and the other in order for you to go to Heaven. Well, the true gospel was very new to me. I tried to argue and prove the radio ministers wrong by reading the Bible. Can you guess my surprise when I found out what they were saying was true?

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After years of living in an Amish community, Anna Dee Olson said she had to leave or commit suicide to stop her depression. Although Olson dreamed of attending college, the sect didn't allow it. At age 24, she left the community in Wisconsin knowing she'd have no support. Her mother's beliefs also shadowed her departure - the year was 1992, and based on her mother's Biblical calculations, the world would end by 2000.

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I was born a typical Amish boy in central Michigan. Growing up, my brothers and I did what normal Amish boys do. Since my dad did construction, and we only had a 1½ acre farm, we got bored a lot. I have 2 brothers, one just older than me and one just younger than me. I’m sure we caused mom quite a few gray hairs, trying to keep up with us mischievous little guys. We had goats for milk, so often times we rode goats, led them around, hitched them to sleds in the winter time, chased cats, climbed trees, rode wagons.

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I grew up in the Amish and I was getting ready to be a church member and when I found out all their church rules and I felt like there is more to being a Christian than following the Amish church rules. So, finally I came to the point where I had to make a change in my life.

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This is a response to what you wrote about covenant breakers. Do you realize that you are no longer with the church you were raised in? Did your father and his father use the chainsaw or the tractor as some Amish churches are using? How are these people obeying what their parents taught them? Did I miss something? How is going from a windup watch to a battery watch any different than going from a buggy to a car? I know your forefathers didn't approve of those things, and yet many Amish feel ok to condemn us who convert to an (English) church because that is not what our parents taught us. Look deep into your hearts and ask yourselves, have you always done everything that your parents said to?

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I left the Amish in 2008, at age 17. I left with my friend. We stayed in a barn for the first night and the next morning my cousin Sam from Canada came and picked us up; he helped us get clothes and get us on the bus to go to Iowa.

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Most of you have promised to remain faithful to the church, and if you now leave the church and join another one you are covenant breakers, and this is just like leaving one wife and marrying another in God’s eyes.

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I still remember those sleepless nights wondering where Daddy was. We finally got the news they had found him. He was in detox then. Then he was in rehab from March until September.

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When I was 18 years old I left the Amish to have more fun and live my life however I wanted to. I always thought English have more fun and when I hung out with my English friends I always felt happier. In the Amish, I was at the age to get baptized and I didn't want to be baptized Amish so I left.

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