Nearly 500 years ago, there arose many groups and branches of Anabaptism which can be boiled down to roughly three main types. One was the peasant revolutionary kind, which mixed aspects of Anabaptist faith (minus the pacifism) with violent rebellion, like the cult that briefly took over the city of Muenster, Germany. To this day, most Europeans know only of this kind of Anabaptism, and shudder at the very word. The government crackdowns upon such groups were more like police actions than persecution.
There were also isolated, highly individualistic, “Spiritualist” Anabaptists, who so emphasized inner, privatized, personal experience and enlightenment, that they saw little need for covenant nor accountability in doctrine or conduct, and hence, for a gathered church. In fact, they tended to look down their noses at the “unenlightened” literalists who made up the membership of any church. These Anabaptists experienced little persecution because they so kept to themselves that they were not only nearly impossible to find, it was pointless to hunt them down; they posed no threat to the state/church system.
Unlike the peasant revolutionary type, the third kind of Anabaptists took the example and teachings of Jesus seriously enough to reject violence and to love, rather than fight, their persecutors. Unlike the intensely private “Spiritualists,” this group also took Christian doctrine, conduct, worship and relationships seriously enough to gather in covenant communities for worship, accountability and mutual support. That combination made them seem a threatening alternative to the powers-that-were, as well as being easier to find and to persecute.
Logically, then, this most visible and vulnerable kind of Anabaptism should be the group least likely to survive. Yet they alone not only survived, they have continued to grow and spread into other cultures, countries and continents. From this stream of Anabaptism come all member denominations, churches and persons of Mennonite World Conference, including our Mennonite Church USA. It is also the stream of Anabaptism from which Zion Mennonite Church is descended.
To explain the counter-intuitive survival and growth of this most visible and vulnerable kind of Anabaptism, we must look beyond this world and its conventional wisdom, to the promise, the presence and the person of Jesus, who said, “On this rock [of Peter’s confession, “You are the Christ,” ] I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Mt. 16:18).”
There’s another reason for the surprising and counter-intuitive survival and spread of these most visible and vulnerable Anabaptists: survival was not their primary concern. God’s kingdom and God’s honor were their main concern, and they believed that the survival and spread of those things were already assured by God’s power and grace. They saw neither themselves, their churches, nor their name and identity as ends in themselves, to perpetuate for their own sake, at all costs. They consecrated themselves in service to something and Someone greater than themselves, for which they and their group could live or die, depending on whatever best serves God’s kingdom and honor.
As we at Zion Mennonite Church celebrate 125 years of this congregation’s life and history, we do well to look not only at our own past, but before Zion’s founding, at what, and Who, brought our spiritual ancestors through the least likely paths of survival, so that their witness and communities could spread to places like Hubbard, Oregon. We also do well to look forward in time, and ask ourselves, What do we inherit from the past that will best serve the spread of God’s Reign and God’s honor?
For whenever we pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” we are not praying for our own survival, nor that of our church, as much as I hope we love it, and that it does survive and thrive. If anything, we pray every Sunday for the day when every church and denomination, including our own, will render up their lives to the coming one new temple of heaven and earth for which we labor and pray. Ironically, that consecration to something and Someone greater than our own survival is what has done the most to ensure Anabaptism’s survival and spread to this day. That’s also one of many valuable reminders and contributions that we contribute to the wider world church. It’s another reason that I hope, pray and labor that there may always be a Zion Mennonite Church and Mennonite/Anabaptist churches all throughout the world for as long as the Lord tarries, until “heaven and earth are one” church. Until then, may we ever live, love, worship, witness and serve in bold, costly and Christ-like ways to a King and to a kingdom that outshines and will outlive any label we affix to ourselves.