History & overview · every faith gets one
No force in religion, no creed but the New Testament, and the full love feast.
Radical Pietists who in 1708 baptised each other in the river Eder at Schwarzenau and took Anabaptist practice with a Pietist warmth attached. They immerse three times face-forward, keep a love feast of examination, feetwashing, a full meal, the holy kiss and then bread and cup, anoint the sick with oil, and decide everything at an Annual Conference that no bishop can overrule. Almost all of them emigrated to Pennsylvania by 1740, and the church has split repeatedly ever since.
Why it is filed this way
The Brethren are Anabaptist in practice and Pietist in temperature, and historians class them under both. They did not come out of the Swiss Brethren; they came out of the Reformed church by way of the radical Pietist conventicles and then adopted Anabaptist baptism and discipline deliberately, from reading.
The founding
Eight people — five men and three women — met at the river Eder in the summer of 1708. They drew lots for who would baptise first, since none of them had a baptism they considered valid; the unnamed man chosen baptised Alexander Mack, and Mack then baptised the other seven. They kept the name of the first baptiser out of the record on purpose, so that nobody could found the church on a person. Within thirty years persecution and poverty had moved nearly the whole body to Pennsylvania, where the first American congregation was organised at Germantown in 1723.
Its founding is bound to Alexander Mack — 1708 CE.
What it holds
Reality. The New Testament read as a practicable rule, with no creed permitted to stand between the reader and it.
The divine. The Trinity, invoked by name three times in the baptismal formula — the candidate is immersed forward once for each person..
Death and after. Resurrection and judgment, with a long-standing minority hope that all will finally be restored.