Who are the Anabaptists?

‘The left wing of the Reformation’, Historian Roland Bainton called them in the 1940s. ‘Mad dogs’, Martin Luther described them. The 16th Century Anabaptists are the spiritual ancestors of the Mennonites (including the Amish, a Mennonite breakaway group), Mennonite Brethren and Hutterites.

One of the most famous modern descriptions of the Anabaptists comes from Harold S. Bender, historian, president of the American Society of Church History in 1943 and a Mennonite church spokesman. Bender delivered the talk ‘The Anabaptist Vision’ to the American Society of Church History in the middle of WWII, while mainstreet Mennonites explaining their non-participation in war to often unsympathetic American and Canadian neighbors.

Bender says that although the seeds of the modern religious liberty were planted by the Anabaptists, it wasn’t their goal. Rather, ‘Anabaptism is the culmination of the Reformation, the fulfillment of the original vision of Luther and Zwingli, and thus makes it a consistent evangelical Protestantism seeking to recreate without compromise the original New Testament church.’\


Anabaptist Beliefs.	Kill an Anabaptist for Christ!


Menno, the Organizer	Myron Augsburger & The Radicals