What does the 500th anniversary of the start of the Anabaptist movement mean for the unity of the church? | One Body

Jeremy Bergen

Tuesday, March 25, 2025

Woodcut of two men, one reaching down with outstretched arms, the other reaching up to him from a lake.

Woodcut of 16th-century Anabaptist leader and eventual martyr Dirk Willems halting his escape from prison to rescue the guard pursuing him. Wikimedia Commons.

What does the 500th anniversary of the start of the Anabaptist movement mean for the unity of the church?

by Jeremy Bergen

Just over 500 years ago, on January 21, 1525, several adults gathered in a home in Zurich. After prayer and discussion, former Catholic priest George Blaurock asked one of the men present, a university student named Conrad Grebel, to baptize him. After Grebel did so, Blaurock proceeded to baptize the others gathered there.

This group had initially been keen on Ulrich Zwingli’s religious reforms in the city, but were frustrated by its slow pace and the role of the secular authorities in implementing change. The emerging movement of dissenters believed that baptism was exclusively for (adult) believers. They placed an emphasis on a life of discipleship as following the teachings and example of Jesus, and the local congregation as a voluntary community of committed believers who interpret the Bible together. They believed in the separation of church and “state,” and the rejection of the sword. A movement with these commitments emerged in Switzerland, South Germany, and the Netherlands.

This ritual act in 1525 marked the beginning of the Anabaptist movement. It was also illegal. So called “re-baptism” — since each had been baptized as an infant — was a capital crime due to the legacy of the Donatist controversy (the law was included in the Justinian Code of 529). The word “Anabaptist,” literally meaning “rebaptizer,” was a derogatory term. The movement’s adherents did not believe they were administering a second baptism but rather a first, true baptism. Nevertheless, they came to embrace the label. In the first decades of the movement, thousands of Anabaptists were put to death by Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed authorities for heresy or for disturbing public order. The Martyrs Mirror, a famous collection of the stories of Anabaptist martyrs which placed them in a larger narrative with martyrs of the early church and other reformers throughout the centuries, was published in 1660 and remains in print. For the Anabaptists, persecution was a sign of faithfulness.

This group also became known as Mennonites, after one of their key leaders, a former Dutch priest named Menno Simons. While Menno did write sermons and treatises, he was not a great theologian like Luther or Calvin. Rather, his contribution was as a pastor of persecuted churches.

I am a Mennonite myself. I grew up in a Mennonite family whose story is intertwined with centuries of Mennonite history. I was also baptized into the body of Christ in a Mennonite church and am active in Stirling Avenue Mennonite Church in Kitchener, Ontario. I have served in a wide range of Mennonite denominational capacities, and I teach at a post-secondary institution that is sponsored by the Mennonite church. My own part of the contemporary Mennonite landscape (Mennonite Church Canada, and sister denomination Mennonite Church USA, which are both members of Mennonite World Conference) identifies itself with the Anabaptist tradition and is thus facing a significant 500-year milestone. What is the significance of this milestone for those who identify with this tradition, and for the wider Christian church?

In this post, I’m not focusing on the fascinating 500-year global history (two recommendations: this excellent textbook on Anabaptist history by my colleague Troy Osborne, and this online encyclopedia), though I highlight three developments that are important for understanding Mennonites today:

First, because of a history of persecution, Mennonites migrated throughout Europe and to North America, often kept to themselves as a community. Developing particular cultural attributes such as distinct dialects and food, and often marrying within the community, “Mennonite” frequently took on a cultural or ethnic dimension. Many Mennonites in North America might be identified as “Swiss Mennonites” or “Russian Mennonites” (as I am), defined by patterns of migration and distinct cultural practices. Some groups, such as the Amish and Old Order Mennonites, marked separation from the world through the rejection of specific technologies and the embrace of distinct dress, further perpetuating a public perception of Mennonites as a distinct ethnic/cultural group with a religious dimension. The relationship between cultural and religious identity is complicated, though my focus here is on Mennonites as a faith group, a part of the body of Christ which one joins by baptism and not automatically by birth.

Second, beginning in the early 20th century, mission and migration resulted in the planting of many churches around the world, now with full local leadership. Some of the largest populations of Mennonites are in Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, and DR Congo, and globally there are more Mennonites who are persons of colour than who are of European descent. Mennonite World Conference (MWC) is the global communion that includes dozens of national Mennonite groups, with over two million baptized members, though the Amish/Old Orders are not members. MWC seeks to be a faith-based communion of churches, with people of many cultures, open to all.

Third, Mennonites have been cautiously moving into the formal ecumenical arena. In the middle of the 20th century, with the founding of Mennonite post-secondary institutions, Mennonites began to earn doctoral degrees in theology and related fields. As a result, Mennonite leaders began to engage more directly and seriously with traditions such as the Catholic Church, even though a history of persecution and stereotyping of Catholics in particular prompted concern and even opposition within some Mennonite churches.

Two Mennonite scholars made significant contributions in the fields of ethics and peacebuilding that helped to forge significant connections. Theologian John Howard Yoder wrote the influential book The Politics of Jesus (here’s a helpful summary) which broadly reshaped thinking about the distinctive nonviolent peace witness of Jesus and implications for the church. He taught at both the Mennonite seminary in Elkhart, Indiana, and at the Catholic University of Notre Dame, and engaged with theologians across the Christian spectrum. Though his own legacy is highly problematic as I’ll discuss below, he significantly put Mennonite interpretations of Christian ethics on the theological map. Peacebuilding scholar and practitioner of international conflict transformation John Paul Lederach, who also taught at Notre Dame, worked extensively with the Catholic development network Caritas, and wrote dozens of books. Yoder and Lederach epitomize commitments to nonviolence and to peacemaking which have been key to what Mennonites have offered ecumenically.

Ecumenical strides

Starting in the late 1990s, there was an international dialogue between Mennonite World Conference and the Roman Catholic Church, culminating in the report Called Together to Be Peacemakers. While it compared and contrasted the ecclesiologies of both traditions, its most significant contributions were the call for a “healing of memories” by re-reading history together, and articulating shared commitments to the practice of peacemaking. The report suggested that Pope John Paul II’s prayer during the high profile Day for Pardon (March 12, 2000), during which he asked forgiveness for times that Catholics committed sins against the unity of the church and sins committed in service of the truth, should be applied to the Catholic history of persecution of the Anabaptists (#199). A “healing of memories” would require both sides to view a history of animosity, denunciation, and persecution as less about “us” and “them” and more about a shared view of disruption and violence within the body of Christ.

An international Lutheran-Mennonite dialogue realized what the Catholic-Mennonite dialogue only promised, in terms of the exercise of “reading history together.” A remarkable 53 pages of that final report is devoted to a joint account of the very painful history of Lutheran/Mennonite relations, and the actions by some Lutheran authorities, acting on advice of theologians, to execute Anabaptists as heretics.

For the Mennonite and the Catholic traditions, a high view of the distinctive identity and calling of the church is a key basis for practices of peace both within the church and within society at large. Called Together notes this as a convergence:

The Church is called to be a peace church, a peacemaking church. This is based on a conviction that we hold in common. We hold that the Church, founded by Christ, is called to be a living sign and an effective instrument of peace, overcoming every form of enmity and reconciling all peoples in the peace of Christ (Ephesians 4:1-3). We affirm that Christ, in his Church, through baptism, overcomes the differences between peoples (Galatians 3:28). By virtue of their baptism into Christ, all Christians are called to be peacemakers. All forms of ethnic and inter-religious hatred and violence are incompatible with the gospel, and the Church has a special role in overcoming ethnic and religious differences and in building international peace” (#175).

This insight led to a number of Catholic-Mennonite theological collaborations in subsequent years, of which I can highlight just a few examples:

At a scholarly level, Gerald Schlabach, a Mennonite ethicist and theologian who was received into the Catholic Church, brought together Mennonites and Catholics to develop a proposal for peace and security at the international level through the framework of “just policing.” He argued that this framework could render the matter of war no longer a church-dividing issue between the traditions.

At a grassroots level, the Bridgefolk movement was formed among Mennonites and Catholics who recognize in each other a common baptism, and meet together for worship, dialogue, and action. On the Catholic side, the now former Abbott of Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, Fr. John Klassen, OSB, has been a key champion for this initiative.

At the global communion level, Mennonites and Catholics specifically collaborated together to contribute to the World Council of Church’s Decade to Overcome Violence. In 2016, a unique event was held in Rome, coordinated by the global Catholic peace network Pax Christi, and hosted by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Schlabach was a prominent voice in that process, advocating for greater commitments by the Catholic church, including in official teaching, to active non-violent peacemaking. While the Vatican did not officially endorse the conference’s call to reject just war theory, the very terms of the discussion reflect developing Catholic social teaching away from the justification of war and towards the embrace of active forms of peacemaking. Along these lines, Pope Francis’ Encyclical Fratelli Tutti extends the discussion about the dangers of misusing the just war tradition and advocates for nonviolence as essential to just peace.

The book Sharing Peace reflects on many of these developments of working together for peace as a strategy of realizing the unity we have been given in Christ. I marvel at the fact that while the global Mennonite communion has fewer baptized members than some Catholic archdioceses, we are treated as a valued partner in dialogue as well as ministry.

Picking up threads from various bilateral dialogues, an international trilateral dialogue involving Catholics, Mennonites, and Lutherans worked on the theme of baptism. Their 2020 final report, Baptism and Incorporation in to the Body of Christ, the Church, highlights the essential integration of baptism and discipleship, albeit expressed differently in each tradition. It also challenges Mennonites to correct some of assumptions of bad faith we have projected on to traditions that practice infant baptism, and to recognize such baptisms as valid when persons from those traditions seek to be received into Mennonite churches, and not require them to be baptized (again) as adults. Mennonites have long believed that we have gifts to share with other Christians, and through dialogue we have also been rightly challenged to see how we can receive gifts from other Christians.

Anniversaries of Faithfulness or Anniversaries of Division?

One of the challenges with the 500th anniversary of Luther’s nailing of the 95 theses (2017) was whether the start of the Protestant Reformation was an occasion for celebration of something like the “recovery of the gospel amidst darkness,” lament for the fragmentation of Christianity, or some mix of both. During one of the high-profile events of 2017, a joint service in Lund, Sweden, Pope Francis and Lutheran leaders acknowledged the gifts that Luther offered to the wider church while also expressing deep regret on both sides for the division of the church.

A similar question confronts Mennonites with this anniversary. A recent headline in a Mennonite publication said something like this: 500 years ago, Anabaptists showed the meaning of true evangelical faith. Other headlines have suggested 1525 as the origin story for us as Mennonites. I understand these impulses. Anniversaries are occasions to remember, reflect, and celebrate, and we like to remember the positive. But this anniversary should not be understood as vindication or as the celebration of the moment that a group finally got Christian faith right, and it was us. I would even caution my fellow Mennonites not to think of this story as primarily about us.

Rather, I would frame what happened in 1525 as just one small episode in the ongoing 2000-year story of the church – repentance, renewal, reform, mixed in with very human and often sinful impulses of failure to see the good in others and respond with denunciation or violence. The anniversary is an opportunity for us to reflect on these themes of repentance and renewal, not because “we” got it right back then, but because the church is always called to repentance and renewal, even today and tomorrow. To honour the spirit of the Anabaptist reformers is to return to the Bible, to Jesus, and together with others to prayerfully discern the meaning of faith today, and as a result to change what needs to be changed.

When I have been asked to preach at Mennonite churches in connection with the 500th anniversary, I have selected Ephesians 4:1-7 as the key text – Paul’s proclamation of oneness in Christ, together with the exhortation to make “every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (v. 3). The point of the Anabaptist movement should not be about establishing particular denominations (even if that development is understandable historically, and reflects our current situation), but serving all Christians in the task of unity within the bond of peace.

In recent decades, Mennonites have wrestled with forms of complicity to which we once were blind. We have sometimes believed that the call for the church to be “without spot or wrinkle,” (Ephesians. 5:27 – a favourite text of the Anabaptists) meant that we have achieved it, or that we needed to separate from others in order to maintain such perfection. We have begun to acknowledge our involvement in Indian Residential Schools in Canada, and how we have benefitted from settler colonialism and the dispossession of Indigenous lands more broadly. We have begun to wrestle with racism, and the way that white supremacy functions in our churches. Even pointing to the ethnic and cultural diversity of the global Mennonite family, as I did above, might be a way of denying or at least minimizing the reality of oppressive patterns in the church today.

Mennonites have a long track record of identifying and working against violence “out there” such as state violence, militarism, wars, capital punishment, and economic exploitation, but we have not adequately recognized forms of violence perpetrated within our own communities. For example, we have had to reckon with the legacy of sexual abuse that theologian and professor John Howard Yoder, the author of Politics of Jesus, perpetrated against dozens of women over the course of decades, and the failure of Mennonite institutions to hold him accountable.

The challenges facing Mennonites in Canada are not unique to us. The justice, repair, and reconciliation of Indigenous-settler relationships is work that requires cooperation with other Christians. In recent years, the grassroots Mennonite-Catholic Bridgefolk has been working at this together, exploring different histories and different resources each tradition can bring to this necessary work. This was also a major theme of the first two rounds of official Mennonite-Anglican dialogue in Canada. This work is key to the gospel, key to our identity as Christians, and therefore key for how we relate to those of other Christian traditions. Political polarization, climate change, economic disparities — these are pressing challenges for which collaboration among Christians are crucial.

An attitude of penitence is an important place to begin. Even on occasions when others have acknowledged sinful ways of acting towards the spiritual forbearers of Mennonites, I think it is important for us as Mennonites to take seriously what some Mennonites said in response to the Lutherans: “We acknowledge that we have claimed the martyr tradition as a badge of Christian superiority. We have sometimes nurtured an identity rooted in victimization that could foster a sense of self-righteousness and arrogance, blinding us to the frailties and failures that are also deeply woven into our tradition” (Healing of Memories, p. 107). The work of memory is really about who we are today, and who we are called to become. As we acknowledge our responsibility for sins against the unity of the church, I believe we become open to recognizing and receiving the many gifts that other Christians have to offer.

I spoke recently at a Mennonite church about this 500th anniversary and I concluded with this story: A year prior to the 2010 Lutheran Assembly at which they asked forgiveness from Mennonites for the persecution of Anabaptists in the 16th century, Lutheran leaders visited the Mennonite World Conference assembly in Paraguay to announce and prepare for the reconciliation. There was a remarkable moment when the president of Mennonite World Conference, Danisa Ndlovu, embraced Ishmael Noko, the general secretary of the Lutheran World Federation (here’s another photo of those two leaders, on a different occasion). Both leaders were born in Zimbabwe – and yet as authorized leaders of their global communions they were the ones to represent Lutherans and Mennonites at that high point of acknowledging the religious violence of 16th-century Europe. Though these two men did not have family connections to this 16th-century history, as members of the Body of Christ through baptism, they are in fact united with the whole and difficult and complex history of the church, across time and space.

This tells me at least three things. First, who “we” are as Mennonites is much more than our origin story. In fact, while the 500th anniversary puts a lot of emphasis on the European character of the Anabaptist-Mennonite story, it is deeply problematic to see it as the “real thing,” and every else as a pale imitation. In fact, this anniversary should inspire us to learn more about Anabaptists in Zimbabwe (and Indonesia, and Colombia, and many other places).

Second, who “we” are in that scene is not just Mennonites, but Mennonites and Lutherans reconciling. Extend that to Mennonites and Catholics and Pentecostals reconciling. That is the “we” in the embrace of those two leaders, defined by a story that has its origins 2000 years ago in the ministry of Jesus, and of course much before that as well. Whatever we say about this 500th anniversary, it is a moment in a much larger ongoing story which ought to define our identity.

Third, who we are as Christians is marked by baptism. The two leaders on the stage came to represent the Mennonites or the Lutherans because they were baptized into that story. Do we have to vision and imagination to see theirs as one baptism, as baptism into Jesus Christ? The Anabaptists were on to something important in the 16th century when they highlighted baptism as the very centre of the Christian life, which simultaneously makes us part of a faith community — a faith community which is not perfect but seeks to follow Jesus. This is a gift, and a remarkable promise: “one body and one Spirit, … one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:4-6).

Jeremy M. Bergen (PhD., University of St. Michael’s College) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Theological Studies at Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo. He has served as editor of The Conrad Grebel Review and as director of the Toronto Mennonite Theological Centre. He is the author of Ecclesial Repentance: The Churches Confront Their Sinful Pasts, and is completing a book manuscript on Christian Martyrdom and the unity of the church. He has been nominated to join the Faith and Life Commission of Mennonite World Conference in May 2025.