Celebrating A Movement Few Of Us Would Join

 

"If I want kinship with my Anabaptist ancestors, I know where to look: in prison."

- title of an article by Melissa Florer-Bixler in the January 2025 issue of The Christian Century

This month marks the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Swiss Anabaptist movement to which Mennonites and related groups who practice voluntary believers baptism trace their origin. Along with promoting non-violence and a refusal to engage in warfare, it led to the the spread of the freedom of religion we take for granted today.

Ironically, few of us celebrating the January 21, 1525, gathering in which radical young revolutionaries received adult baptism would be willing to put their own lives at risk in the way some 4000 or more Anabaptist ("rebaptizers") did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of these were disciples of the Zurich reformer Ulrich Zwingli, who himself had considered some of the very views he found himself too cautious to implement without gaining the consent of the Zurich city council.

Thus two church movements emerged in Zurich, the state supported Swiss Reformed (Protestant) church that met in beautiful sanctuaries like Zurich's Grossmünster Cathedral, and an underground movement that met in homes, barns, caves, and other places to avoid detection and arrest. The former were able to enjoy a relatively safe and prosperous life, the latter were subject to arrest, torture, imprisonment, deportation, disenfranchisement and execution for their faith. Since the baptism of infants was also a form of registration as citizens of the state, undocumented residents were often unable to hold title to property and frequently had their children taken from them to be baptized and raised as members of the state church in their jurisdiction, whether Reformed, Lutheran or Catholic.

Most of us would be inclined to quietly go along with the majority of our fellow citizens in order to keep ourselves and our families safe.  And for the most part, North American Mennonite and other religious groups have been able to do just that for the past several centuries, by becoming "the quiet in the land."

In Melissa Florer-Bixler's recent article in the Christian Century she quotes from the Martyr's Mirror the words of Anna Jansz, who in the face of her execution for her faith wrote the following words in a letter she left for her young son. Her spiritual descendants need to hear and heed them as well:

But where you hear of a poor, simple, cast-off little flock, which is despised and rejected by the world, join them; for where you hear of the cross, there is Christ. . . . Honor the Lord in the works of your hands, and let the light of the Gospel shine through you. Love your neighbor. Deal with an open, warm heart your bread to the hungry, clothe the naked, and do not tolerate having two of anything, because there are always those who are in need.

We should all pray for the courage to be a part of the kind of "poor, simple, cast off little flock" of Jesus followers who, like their Master, gave their all for their faith. Or we can remain comfortable mainstream members of congregations that are more like the established and respected churches that opposed them.