Mennonites

• 1. Fifteen Believers in Zurich

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  The Mennonites trace their beginning to a small meeting in Zurich on the 21st of January 1525. Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz and George Blaurock gathered with twelve others and baptized one another. That act marks the start of the Anabaptist movement. Today Mennonite communities exist in 87 countries on six continents. Some congregations are hard to tell apart from their neighbors, while others hold to plain clothing and horse-drawn travel. How did a handful of adult baptisms in one Swiss city grow into such a scattered family? Why did governments across Europe try to wipe these believers out? And why does a people defined by refusing to fight now run disaster relief, thrift shops and peace teams?

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• 2. Rebaptism and Fire

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  Their persecutors called them Wiedertäufer, a German word meaning re-baptizers, and the insult pointed straight at the movement's most distinctive feature. Almost every infant in western Europe was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church. Rejecting that rite therefore carried political weight as well as religious meaning. Some followers of Huldrych Zwingli's Reformed church had already begun to doubt it. They felt that membership from birth did not match the New Testament example. They wanted a church fully separate from government, joined only by people willing to publicly declare their belief in Jesus.

  Other voices of the Radical Reformation pushed in stranger directions. Some preached against hierarchy, and others on sexual freedom, ranging from utter abandon to extreme chastity.

  Catholic and Protestant leaders alike judged voluntary church membership dangerous. For some of them, reports of the Münster Rebellion, led by a violent Anabaptist sect, deepened the alarm. They joined forces against the movement, using banishment, torture, burning, drowning and beheading. By 1530 most of the founding leaders were dead because they refused to renounce their beliefs. Many of the survivors believed God did not condone killing or force for any reason, so they would not fight even to save their own lives. The Batenburgers, another Anabaptist group, were eventually destroyed by this same unwillingness to fight. Out of that experience grew a conviction that Jesus taught people to forgive and never to strike back.

  In the Low Countries, a Catholic priest named Menno Simons heard about the new movement and began to rethink his faith. He questioned the doctrine of transubstantiation but hesitated to break with Rome. Then his brother, who belonged to an Anabaptist group, was killed when attackers fell on him and his companions and they refused to defend themselves. In 1536, at the age of 40, Simons left the Roman Catholic Church. He soon became a leader of the Anabaptists and stayed wanted by the authorities for the rest of his life. Born in 1496, he died in 1561 and lived in the same era as Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. Scattered nonviolent Anabaptist groups, which he helped organize, took his name.

  The memory of the killing later filled a book. Martyrs Mirror, published in 1660, records accounts of more than 4,000 burnings, along with stonings, imprisonments and live burials. For many Mennonites and Amish it remains the most important book after the Bible. Persecution still continued in parts of Switzerland until 1710.

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• 3. Confessions and Ordinances

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  On the 24th of February 1527, the Schleitheim Confession set down one of the earliest statements of the faith in seven articles. They dealt with the ban, meaning excommunication, and with communion, called the breaking of bread. They also covered separation from the world and from the Roman Catholic Church, baptism for believers, pastors, and the renunciation of both the sword and the oath.

  A longer statement followed on the 21st of April 1632, when Dutch Mennonites adopted the Dordrecht Confession of Faith. Alsatian Mennonites took it up in 1660 and North American Mennonites in 1725. It affirmed "the baptism of believers only, the washing of the feet as a symbol of servanthood, church discipline, the shunning of the excommunicated, the non-swearing of oaths, marriage within the same church". It also affirmed nonresistance, and a Christianity centered on obeying Christ. Many Mennonite groups have followed it for centuries.

  Many traditional churches teach seven ordinances: "baptism, communion, footwashing, marriage, anointing with oil, the holy kiss, and the prayer covering." The lovefeast gathers footwashing, the holy kiss and communion into one meal. Old Order and Conservative groups still place heavy weight on headcovering, sharing possessions and nonconformity to the world.

  Not every tradition stayed fixed. In 1911, the Mennonite church in the Netherlands, known as the Doopsgezinde Kerk, became the first Dutch church to authorize a woman pastor. Her name was Anne Zernike.

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• 4. Refuge and Plain Living

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  Before anyone crossed the Atlantic, European Anabaptists had split into camps. The Dutch and North German group first carried Menno Simons's name. A Swiss and South German group adopted it later. A third group, from south-east Germany and Austria, gathered around Jakob Hutter and became the Hutterites.

  Rulers often welcomed these newcomers because they were honest, hardworking and peaceful. Then their practices would upset a powerful state church, or a new monarch would take the throne, and the exemption from military service would be withdrawn. The Mennonites would flee again, usually leaving everything behind except their families. Sometimes they were invited onto poor soil that nobody else could farm.

  The Netherlands offered relative tolerance, but with strings. The land still needed tending, so the ruler passed laws to keep the Mennonites in place while limiting their freedom. Churches had to face onto back streets or alleys, and services could not be announced with the sound of a bell.

  Out of these pressures came a strong sense of community, which still marks Mennonite churches. People who often gave up possessions to keep their freedoms learned to live simply. Their homes, clothing and church buildings were plain. Their music was usually simple German chorales sung a cappella, and many Mennonites hear in it a reminder of a persecuted past.

  In 1693, a leader named Jakob Ammann pushed to reform the Mennonite church in Switzerland and South Germany. He wanted shunning included and communion held more often. When talks failed, Ammann and his followers broke away and became known as the Amish. Further splits among the Amish produced the Old Order Amish, the Swartzentruber Amish and the Conservative Mennonite Conference, among others. Many divisions ran along family lines, with each extended family backing its own branch.

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• 5. Russian Steppes

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  In the 1770s, Catherine the Great of the Russian Empire won land north of the Black Sea after the Russo-Turkish War. Her officials invited Mennonites living in the Kingdom of Prussia to farm the Ukrainian steppes, which Tatar raids had emptied of people. In return they were offered religious freedom and exemption from military service. These Mennonites descended from Dutch Anabaptists who had started settling around Danzig and in West Prussia around 1530. There they lived for roughly 250 years.

  Colonies in the south-west of the empire began in 1791. In 1854, a new invitation brought settlers to the Volga region, at the Am Trakt Colony, and later to the Neu Samara Colony in Orenburg Governorate. Their ethno-language was Plautdietsch, a Germanic dialect with some Dutch mixed in. The farmers and businesses prospered. By the early 20th century, many owned large agricultural estates, and some had become industrial entrepreneurs employing wage labor.

  Between 1874 and 1880, some 16,000 of roughly 45,000 Mennonites left Russia. About nine thousand went to the United States, mainly Kansas and Nebraska, and seven thousand to Canada, mainly Manitoba. In the 1920s, Russian Mennonites from Canada began moving to Mexico and Paraguay.

  The revolution of 1917 and the civil war that followed broke the Russian colonies. Farms and enterprises were expropriated, whether by local peasants or the Soviet government. Mennonites suffered severe persecution at the hands of workers, the Bolsheviks and the anarchist Makhnovshchina of Nestor Makhno, who considered them privileged upper-class foreigners. Hundreds of Mennonite men, women and children were murdered. Once the Bolsheviks controlled Ukraine, people who openly practiced religion were often imprisoned, which drove a wave of emigration to the U.S., Canada and Paraguay.

  When the German army invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, many Mennonites saw the soldiers as liberators from communism. Many collaborated with the Nazis, including in rounding up and exterminating their Jewish neighbors, though some resisted. When the war turned, many fled west with the German army and were accepted in Germany as Volksdeutsche. The Soviet government believed the Mennonites had "collectively collaborated". After the war, many were forcibly relocated to Siberia and Kazakhstan, and many were sent to gulags. Those living farther east were deported even before the invasion.

  In the 1990s, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine let these people emigrate, and the vast majority went to Germany. Those arrivals outnumber the pre-1989 Mennonite community there by three to one. Meanwhile, the most conservative Mennonites in the world are the ones affiliated with the Lower and Upper Barton Creek Colonies in Belize, where neither group uses motors or paint.

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• 6. Pennsylvania and Canada

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  In 1683, one Mennonite family and twelve Mennonite-Quaker families from Krefeld, Germany, settled in Germantown, Pennsylvania. William Penn had recruited settlers for his new colony from among Quakers and Mennonites living under discrimination in Germany. Among them was William Rittenhouse, a lay minister who owned the first paper mill in America. Jacob Gottschalk served as the first bishop of the Germantown congregation.

  In 1688, four members of that early group signed the first formal protest against slavery in the United States. They were Francis Daniel Pastorius, Abraham op den Graeff, Derick op den Graeff and Garret Hendericks. The treatise was addressed to slave-holding Quakers, in an effort to change their ways.

  In the early 18th century, 100,000 Germans from the Palatinate emigrated to Pennsylvania, where they became known as the Pennsylvania Dutch. French armies had repeatedly overrun their homeland, and Queen Anne had invited them to the British colonies. About 2,500 of them were Mennonites and 500 were Amish. They chose cheaper land farther west, in the Lancaster area. The oldest Mennonite meetinghouse in the United States is the Hans Herr House in West Lampeter Township. One of this second wave, Christopher Dock, wrote Pedagogy, the first American monograph on education.

  In colonial times, three things set Mennonites apart from other Pennsylvania Germans. They opposed the American Revolutionary War, in which other German settlers fought on both sides. They resisted public education, and they disapproved of religious revivalism. In 1778, Bishop Christian Funk's support for the revolution led to his excommunication and a separate group called the Funkites.

  Canada received its Mennonites in two streams. Swiss and South German Mennonites came by way of Pennsylvania and settled in southern Ontario in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Dutch and North German Mennonites came by way of Russia, and a large group reached southern Manitoba in the 1870s.

  During World War II, Mennonite conscientious objectors in the United States could join noncombatant military service or enter Civilian Public Service. More than 95% chose the civilian path. From 1941 to 1947, 4,665 Mennonites, Amish and Brethren in Christ were among nearly 12,000 objectors in 152 camps across the United States and Puerto Rico. They worked without wages, and their congregations and families covered the cost. In Canada, 63% of the 10,700 objectors were Mennonites. The American camp workers contributed to forest fire prevention, erosion and flood control, medical science and reform of the mental health system.

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• 7. The Plain Spectrum

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  A series of Old Order schisms between 1872 and 1901, in Ontario, Pennsylvania and the U.S. Midwest, began as conservatives pushed back against American revivalism. The Horse and Buggy Old Order Mennonites came out of them. Most allow tractors for farming, though some insist on steel wheels so the machines cannot be used on roads. One earlier branch, the Stauffer or Pike Mennonites, formed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1845 after conflicts over disciplining children and spousal abuse by a few church members. They began splitting almost at once.

  The Automobile Old Order Mennonites parted ways with their horse-and-buggy brethren in the early 20th century. They began using cars in 1927, but the cars had to be plain and painted black. Their largest group is still called the Black Bumper Mennonites, because some members paint their chrome bumpers black.

  The Church of God in Christ, Mennonite, often called the Holdeman Mennonites after founder John Holdeman, formed in a schism in 1859. They stress evangelical conversion and strict church discipline. They avoid television, cameras and radio, and had 24,400 baptized members in 2013.

  The Reformed Mennonite Church formed in the very early 19th century, the first division in the original North American Mennonite body. It was the church of the mother of Milton S. Hershey. It is also remembered for the long and bitter ban placed on Robert Bear, a Pennsylvania farmer who rebelled against what he saw as dishonesty and disunity among the leadership.

  The moderate end of the spectrum looks different. Moderate Mennonites have no special dress and no restrictions on technology, and they follow no formal liturgy. They mix singing, scripture reading, prayer and a sermon. Congregations support themselves and appoint their own ministers. Members take part in the wider community as "salt and light" rather than living apart. Their emphasis falls on peace, community and service.

  The Mennonite Church USA shows how fast the numbers can move. It fell from about 133,000 members before the merger of 1998 to 78,892 in 2016, after the Lancaster Mennonite Conference withdrew. By May 2021 its website claimed about 62,000.

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• 8. A Church Grown Global

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  The Mennonite World Conference was founded at a meeting in Basel, Switzerland, in 1925 to mark the 400th anniversary of Anabaptism. In 2025, it counted 111 member denominations in 61 countries, with 1.45 million baptized members in 10,180 churches. It makes no binding decisions for its members. There is no central authority that speaks for all Mennonites, and independent churches range from as few as fifty members to as many as 20,000.

  The center of gravity has moved far from Zurich. As of 2023-84% of baptized members in conference member churches were African, Asian or Latin American. Africa grows by 10% to 12% every year, especially in Ethiopia, where the Meserete Kristos Church had 295,500 members in 2017. African membership rose 228% in the 1980s and 1990s, drawing thousands of converts in Tanzania, Kenya and the Congo. South African Mennonite groups, held back under apartheid by the government's distrust of foreign pacifist churches, have grown substantially since 1994. The conference held its 2003 assembly in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Europe, by contrast, has seen decline since about 1980.

  Peacemaking became an organized mission. Mennonite Central Committee was founded on the 27th of September 1920 in Chicago, Illinois, and provides disaster relief and long-term development worldwide. In 1972, Mennonites in Altona, Manitoba, started the MCC Thrift Shops. Mennonite Disaster Service sends volunteers after hurricanes and floods in the U.S. and Canada. Some groups also helped found Christian Peacemaker Teams and Mennonite Conciliation Service.

  Settlement has had a darker side across Latin America. Mennonite farmers have cleared large areas of wilderness, more than the size of the Netherlands, in places like the Gran Chaco, the Chiquitano and the Amazon rainforest, often for soybeans and cattle. The Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project identified over 7,000 hectares of rainforest lost in Peru between 2017 and 2023 after Mennonite settlers arrived. In July 2018, Mexican Mennonites were fined $500,000 for unauthorized logging on 1,445 hectares in Quintana Roo.

  The community has also entered literature and film. Miriam Toews wrote the novel Women Talking, which became an Oscar-winning film. Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, is himself of Russian Mennonite descent. In 2007, Mexican director Carlos Reygadas made Silent Light, the first feature film ever shot in Plautdietsch.

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