Choosing Anabaptism: an Anabaptism at 500 Reflection

January 21, 2025 marks the 500th anniversary of the small gathering of Christians who chose to re-baptise each other, setting off what would become the Anabaptist movement. As a Mennonite, I’m an Anabaptist. So are Church of the Brethren and Brethren in Christ, with whom we often find ourselves teaming up, as well as our cousins the Amish and the more distant Hutterites or the more modern Bruderhof.

In light of this anniversary, I’m writing about my journey to becoming Anabaptist. This is my own story and interpretation, rather than a definitive scholarly source for understanding Anabaptism.

Characteristics of the Early Anabaptists

The movement was born during the Reformation, but Anabaptists are not Protestants. Protestant reformers like Luther and Zwingli and Calvin established churches that became replacements for the Catholic church but maintained the strong ties to the State. This was an era of city-states, dutchies, provinces, etc., as contrasted with modern nation states, so places like Germany and Switzerland were often patchworks of denominations. Two neighboring entities might even go to war with each other, even though both professed Christianity. By contrast,¹ Anabaptists and other Radical Reformers rejected partnership with the state structures of their day.

Like many names that stick to a group, “Anabaptist” actually came from outside the community of believers who called themselves “Swiss Brethren” for another hundred+ years. Rebaptising, after all, isn’t what the movement was about and only applied to those who chose baptism again after having been baptised as infants. The movement’s children would choose baptism (or not) at an age when they were considered able to affirm their own belief.

Drawing from the Schleitheim Confession², I would summarize primary Anabaptist beliefs as:

1. Baptism is part of a believer’s choice to follow Christ and not something to be imposed on infants by parents, churches, or states.
2. The church is responsible for discipline of believers, first in private and then in front of/with the whole community (we’ll come back to this) - culminating in the “ban” if the behavior continues.
3. Full communion (bread and wine both) is for all baptised believers (vs. reserved for priests).
4. Anabaptist believers should keep separate from the states and structures around them.
5. The church shall have (lay) pastors, supported by the church and disciplined if needed.
6. Christians should not use the sword, either as soldiers or magistrates. This is very important on its own, but also gets back to point 2. In section 6 of the Schleitheim Confession, the ban is described as a social alternative to force. This contrasts with the torture and execution of Anabapatists by both Catholic and Protestant leadership. That doesn’t negate the destructive history of the ban’s use, but I value its being put forward as an alternative–that there is a social structure and not merely a “we do nothing.”
7. Speak truth, but be humble and do not swear oaths.

Seeds of My Own Anabaptism

Even though I didn’t even think about becoming a Mennonite until I was 18, the seeds were planted during my childhood.

Some of the seeds were planted by my mother, an Anglican (in Canada) who was never wholly comfortable in my childhood church. She instilled seeds of pacifism in me. Her uncle Charlie became Quaker-ish³ during WWII. Originally hot to fight, he volunteered to join the army as soon as he could. As he went through training, however, he realized that he was an Ohio farmboy among Ohio farmboys and that the people he was being sent to kill were not those in charge of the war but rather German farmboys.

He was only a generation away from WWI and its staggering casualties of ordinary soldiers over tiny pieces of land, which I expect contributed to his thinking here. Mom described what happened next as an act of God. Perhaps realizing his qualms, someone higher up assigned him to drive an ambulance for the unit. Not only did he meet his future wife, a nurse, while working as an ambulance driver, he fell in with the Quaker pacifists who’d felt that alternative service as ambulance drivers, nurses, and medics fell within their conscience. Mom heard these stories in the summers she spent on his farm in the early 50s.

Mom also shared her own struggles with the idea of violent self-defense. As she put it: she believed that if she died, she would go to heaven. And she believed that there were only two categories of people in this world. The first, fellow Christians, were her siblings. Could she kill one? If they were not Christians, was it not an ultimate act of Christian love to not kill them and allow them to have more time on Earth to find Christ? How could she send anyone to hell? Of course it became complicated, as it always does, when she considered what she might do to protect a third person.

Mom was also baptised as a child (not an infant because her parents bounced between churches). As an adult, she had her own conversion experience while living in Canada. The Anglicans accepted her original baptism but when she married my father and joined his church, she asked to be re-baptised. I knew this story from an early age.

Even the conservative, Charismatic church of my childhood planted a few seeds. One of the things I absorbed was that a Christian’s highest loyalty was to their faith and that this came before any state allegiances. This bit stayed with me, even as I turned away from the political project that church stood for.

My church also acknowledged and identified a little with the Radical Reformation itself (especially in the 90s). We practiced believer’s baptism, saw ourselves as needing to keep separate from “the world,” and had lay leadership. During my teen years, we bought a series of 5 docudramas about major Reformation figures. The one that captured my imagination was The Radicals about Michael and Margaretha Sattler (Michael wrote the Schleitheim Confession).

College and Conversion

As a teenager looking at schools, I didn’t really consider that Messiah College, where I ended up going, was Anabaptist. I think I knew it and I felt some kinship for the reasons described previously, but I didn’t think much about engaging with it. They were a Christian school, not too far from my home, attended by some friends including my future brother-in-law, and I had been awarded a major scholarship and a place in the Honors program. Those were the things I focused on.

But by the time I graduated high school⁴ I was done with my childhood church. In fact, I informed my father that I would attend through the Sunday after I graduated from high school, but would not come back again. I assured my parents that I would still go to churches, just not theirs.

When I got to college, I was religiously adrift. If I was going to be a Christian (up in the air), I felt it had to mean something. It had to call us to something other than putting prayer back in schools, putting (white) women back in the homes, putting queer people back into the closet, banning abortion, and waiting for their interpretation of Revelation to bring a bloody end to the world.

During those first two years, I reread the Gospels, taking them in large chunks⁵ and asking what it meant if we took them seriously. I learned from my professors about other ways of reading the Bible, both German higher critism and modern Mennonite approaches like preferencing the Gospels above Paul, as well as above the Old Testament. I also learned about Christian social justice traditions, pacificism, liberation theology, and so many forms of Christianity that differed completely from what I had been raised in.

After reading scripture and theology, taking courses on both, and practicing with people from various faith backgrounds, I decided to attend a Mennonite church and began calling myself a Mennonite. When I was 23, I formally joined Hyattsvile Mennonite Church in Washington, DC.

As I mentioned, my childhood church taught believer’s baptism. I was also the youngest child to be baptised in the church, when I was only 5. But I professed belief and I answered all the elders’ questions correctly. This is still a place I carry tension. At 5, I was acting from a place of fear that incorrect belief would damn me for eternity. That’s not where I am now. I also chose it in a way that most do not choose their infant and child baptisms. I haven’t chosen literal Ana-baptism, but I know it’s an option.

My Own Anabaptism Today

This anniversary has led me to reflect on what it is that I value about being Anabaptist in particular. Being a Mennonite is more than being an Anabaptist and I am also a particular kind of Mennonite⁶, so these are not the sum total of my belief. They are important facets.

1. I value the Anabaptist rejection of submission to the state, church-state association, or finding one’s identity in one’s nation. We do not fly the flag in our building. My college did not fly the flag. Although my nationality is also something I can’t pretend not to have and we may seek to point its direction through voting, we do not put our faith in it.

2. I value the Anabaptist call to follow Christ’s way of peace. This does not confront me as directly as it did my spiritual ancestors. I am unlikely to be drowned or imprisoned or exiled for refusing to serve in a military. But it challenges us to think beyond both a simplistic faith that military action will somehow get it right this time and also to think beyond our courts, since early Anabaptists were as focused on magistrates as anything. I am grateful for examples of creative nonviolence and nonviolent resistance throughout those 500 years even as I know I fall short.

3. I value the Anabaptist precedents of choosing one’s faith, of lay leadership, and of full communion for believers. I am grateful for the ways my churches have sought to practice inclusion.

4. I value the prohibition on oaths. That one’s a little niche, but it’s also one of the longer passages in the Schleitheim Confession. It encourages one to speak the truth but to carefully consider one’s commitments and the limits of human fallibility.⁷

500 years later, in our very different world, I am deeply grateful to these spiritual ancestors for their acts of faith, resistance, and seeking another way to live.