Best I can tell. all you gotta do is click your heels three times and say "I'm Amish." Kinda like be a "reverend" or a "community organizer".
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So you want to join the Amish
One thing that sets the Amish apart from many Mennonite groups, and for that matter most other religious bodies: they don't recruit.
Amish typically neither condemn nor encourage attempts to join. They may seem a bit discouraging towards the idea. If the subject comes up, usually you hear something like 'if you don't grow up Amish, it's really hard to do it.'
Occasionally, you run into an Amish person with a name that just doesn't 'sound' Amish. That's often a clue.
It frequently happens that non-Amish who join stick it out for a little while but leave when the novelty wears off.
I've only met a very few that have joined, and that's out of literally (literally literally) thousands of families met while selling books in their communities.
I regret not having a chance to get down to the nitty-gritty about it with the joiners (What's it like? No, what's it really like? What do you miss most?).
One was a teacher. Another works in a factory. A third, fairly fresh convert raises and sells mums. He supposedly fell for an Amish lass while on a visit to the community.
Asking another 'native' Amishman in his community about the newbie, I was told, almost wink-wink jokingly, that he seems to be doing alright (so far), as if the underlying idea was 'is he gonna make it?'
But this guy, and the other people around him were supportive as far as I could tell. In fact, the outsiders who have joined and 'survived' seem to garner a bit of extra respect.
Apparently, one way it works for interested parties is that you first come to live and get put to work for a certain length of time, just to see if you can hack it on that end.
