Anabaptists
I sometimes get asked where I “fit in” with today’s religious labeling. Are you a Protestant? Non-denominational? Are you even a Christian?
Resisting labels to a fault, I do sometimes, however, cave in and describe myself as living within the Anabaptist tradition. Below is a brief summary of these origins and some links for you to explore further.
The Anabaptist movement came out of the radical reformation which challenged the foundations of the church and state. One recent post I read summed it up well: “Was Anabaptism about doctrine, about lifestyle, about traditions? Was it all about a new way of doing church? Was it any of those? The defining trait of historical Anabaptism was really not any of those. Anabaptism was not about a new system, a new institution. Rather, Anabaptism was a label given to those radicals, those people who refused all power systems of the world.”
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On the evening of 21st January, 1525, less than eight years after the start of the Protestant Reformation, a group of Christians met in a house in Zurich, Switzerland, to talk and pray together. They had been associates of Ulrich Zwingli, minister of the main city church in Zurich, who was taking steps to reform the Swiss churches. But they were now deeply troubled by his seeming unwillingness to follow through on teachings of the Bible on a number of issues. This was the beginning of what became known as the Anabaptist movement or Nonconformist Christianity which separated the church from state coercion and systems of power.
This movement developed as a broad coalition of groups in various parts of Europe, with different points of origin and some different theological and spiritual emphases, but also with much in common. There were four main groups of Anabaptists, although there were many other smaller groupings. The subsequent history of Anabaptism over the next four centuries is a story of sporadic persecution, flight and relocation. From North Germany and Holland they fled east into Poland, Moravia, Russia and the Ukraine, then across the seas to Canada and the USA; from
Switzerland and Austria/South Germany they fled west to the new American colonies. Anabaptists left in Western Europe survived either by retreating into quietness and avoiding further confrontation, or, in the more tolerant Netherlands, by becoming respectable and mildly nonconformist.
Their modern descendants include the Mennonites (who are now spread worldwide and are especially active in areas of conflict resolution, mission and social ministry), the Church of the Brethren, and the communal Hutterites. Baptists are divided as to the extent of the influence of Anabaptists on their origins, but there is persuasive evidence that English Baptists (especially the General Baptists) are indebted to their influence.
Anabaptists have been described as ‘step-children of the Reformers’ and they clearly owed much to the Reformers. But the Anabaptists were, in fact, neither Catholic nor Protestant, but the heirs of an alternative tradition that had maintained a witness throughout the centuries since Constantine. Frequently regarded as heretics and persecuted, with few definite links to each other, these ‘old evangelical brotherhoods’ kept alive many beliefs and practices which the official church ignored or marginalized.
For more visit http://www.anabaptistnetwork.com/
