Anabaptist Origins and Convictions

The Mennonites are a Christian tradition rooted in the Anabaptist movement of the sixteenth-century Radical Reformation. The early Anabaptists, emerging in Switzerland and the Low Countries from 1525, rejected infant baptism in favour of the baptism of believing adults, hence the name Anabaptist, "re-baptiser", holding that the church should be a voluntary community of committed disciples rather than a body coextensive with society.

For this they were fiercely persecuted by Catholic and Protestant authorities alike. The Mennonites take their name from Menno Simons (1496-1561), a former Dutch priest whose leadership and writings gathered and stabilised the peaceable wing of the movement after the catastrophe of the militant Anabaptist kingdom at Munster in 1534-1535. Alongside believer's baptism, the tradition's hallmarks are a commitment to nonresistance and pacifism grounded in the Sermon on the Mount, the separation of church and state, congregational discipline, simplicity of life, and discipleship understood as the following of Jesus in everyday conduct. Scripture, read through the lens of the life and teaching of Christ, holds central authority.