Mennonite
- Grew from
- Anabaptist
- From
- 1536 AD
- Origin
- The Netherlands and north Germany
- Confession
- Dordrecht Confession 1632 AD
Named for Menno Simons, a Frisian priest who joined the Anabaptists in 1536 and spent twenty-five years as a hunted man giving the scattered movement a settled and explicitly non-violent shape — work that mattered because the Munster rebellion of 1534 had left every authority in Europe treating Anabaptism as sedition. Migrations carried Mennonites to Prussia, the Russian steppe, and then the Americas, where most now live.
What marks it out
Believers' baptism, congregational discipline, and refusal of the sword: military service, and usually the oath, on the ground that Christ's teaching binds in public life as well as private. Practice varies more than in most traditions, from Old Order groups in plain dress travelling by horse and buggy to congregations outwardly indistinguishable from their neighbours. Disaster relief and conscientious objection are the common thread.
Bodies that grew from it
Figures
- Menno Simons
1496–1561
Giving the Anabaptists a non-violent shape
Alongside it
Also from Anabaptist.
In the record
-
1525 AD Reform
The Radical Reformation
Anabaptists rejected infant baptism and state churches, and were persecuted by every established party.
-
1607–1750 AD Migration
Migration to the Americas
Puritans, Quakers, Catholics and Anabaptists carried their divisions across the Atlantic, where the absence of an established church let them multiply.
This body appears in the history but does not carry recorded doctrinal positions here, so it is absent from the comparison panels.