Caneyville Christian Community

The Caneyville Christian Community is an Anabaptist community, located in Caneyville, Kentucky, living a plain conservative lifestyle, true to the vision of former Old Order Amish bishop Elmo Stoll. G. C. Waldrep classifies them as "para-Amish". Among Anabaptists the community is often simply called "Caneyville".

In 1990 the "Christian Communities" were founded in Cookeville, Tennessee by Elmo Stoll, a former bishop of the Old Order Amish in Aylmer, Ontario. Stoll's aim was to create a church mostly modeled on the Amish, but with community of goods and without the German language and other obstacles in order to help Christian seekers from a non-plain background to integrate into a very plain, low technology Christian life without materialism. He was successful in establishing a community, but without community of goods, and soon many people from Amish, Old Order Mennonite and German Baptist Brethren backgrounds, but also - as intended - seekers joined his community. In addition, the "Christian Communities" soon spread to other locations in the United States and Canada. Elmo Stoll was the charismatic leader of the communities who held them together.

After Elmo Stoll's early death in 1998 disunion started among the "Christian Communities". Bryce Geiser, who has a German Baptist background, replaced Elmo Stoll as the leader of the "Christian Communities", but he could not hold together all the different people from different backgrounds. In 2001 the five congregations of the "Christian Communities" announced that they would disband the Cookeville community and the movement as a whole. That lead in the end to the disbanding of two of the five "Christian Communities", while two others joined the Noah Hoover Mennonites and one affiliated with an Amish group from Michigan.

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