The Mennonites

Denomination·Founded 1536 CE·Around 1.44 million baptized members in the 110 national churches that belong to Mennonite World Conference, in about 10,400 congregations across 61 countries, as of the November 2025 census. MWC puts the wider Anabaptist family, including bodies outside its membership, at 2.03 million baptized in 87 countries. Roughly 84 percent of MWC members are African, Asian or Latin American. Baptized members only — children are not counted.

Judaism → Christianity → Catholicism → Protestantism → Anabaptism → The Mennonites

Mennonite World ConferenceMennonite Church USAThe recordMennonite Abuse Prevention

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Overview Belief 3How to Live 1Practice 1Stories & Scripture 1Community 1 You × The Mennonites Discussion

History & overview

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The largest Anabaptist body, and the one that stopped being plain.

Named for Menno Simons, the Dutch priest who joined the Anabaptists in 1536 and spent twenty-five years with a price on his head organising the scattered survivors. Their doctrinal standard is the Dordrecht Confession of 1632; their inheritance is believers baptism, refusal of the oath, and refusal to bear arms. Most Mennonites now are African, Asian or Latin American, wear whatever everyone else wears, and would not be recognised as plain by anyone.

Why it is filed this way

Mennonite covers bodies with almost nothing in common on the surface. Old Order and Old Colony Mennonites drive buggies or live in horse-drawn colonies in Latin America; Mennonite Church USA ordains women and argues about sexuality like any mainline body; the Mennonite Brethren are evangelical and baptise by immersion. What is shared is a confession, a name, and the refusal of the sword.

DeitiesThe Trinity, with a persistent Anabaptist accent: what God is, is shown by what Jesus did, and doctrine that cannot be lived is not doctrine.
Founded1536 CE · Witmarsum, Friesland
FounderMenno Simons
AfterlifeResurrection and judgment; the emphasis falls heavily on the kingdom begun now
TextsThe Bible · The Dordrecht Confession of Faith (1632) · The Schleitheim Confession (1527)

The map

The Mennonites’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →
c. 1000 BCE Judaism 30 CE Christianity 1517 CE Protestantism 1525 CE Anabaptism 1536 CE The Mennonites

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum Enter →
Baptism is a vow, so it cannot be given to an infant. The Anabaptist objection was never mainly about water. It was that a church of everyone born in the parish is not a church, and that a promise made on your behalf before you can speak is not a promise. Baptising adults was a capital crime in the Holy Roman Empire from 1529. Go deeper — context →
Christians do not take up the sword — including for a just cause. Schleitheim in 1527 put the sword outside the perfection of Christ, and Mennonites have paid for that in every century: migration to Prussia, then Russia, then the Americas, ahead of each state that decided pacifism was disloyalty. It is not withdrawal from suffering — Mennonite Central Committee has run relief in war zones since 1920. Go deeper — context & 1 source →

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle Enter →
M Menno Simons — the priest who counted the dead and resigned. A parish priest in Friesland who watched three hundred Anabaptists killed at the Oldeklooster in 1535, his own brother among them, and concluded that he had known better and said nothing. He resigned in January 1536 and spent the rest of his life under an imperial bounty, holding together congregations he could only visit at night. Domain The gathered church, nonresistance, the pastoral care of a hunted peopleStanding The body is named after him and he objected to that in his lifetime Meet them — context & 1 source →

Rites & Ritual

what its people do — and when Enter →
No communion until the congregation is at peace. Before the bread there is a members meeting, and anything unresolved between members is meant to come out in it. In conservative conferences the deacon visits every household beforehand and asks. A congregation that cannot get clear postpones the table rather than take it divided. When Twice a year or quarterly, preceded by a members meeting — an annual cycle in most congregationsWho Baptised members Go deeper — context →

Where next

the museum exit — every door leads deeper in
Christianity — 10 shared ideas, a different faith Sikhism — 10 shared ideas, a different faith Judaism — 9 shared ideas, a different faith Zoroastrianism — 9 shared ideas, a different faith Branch The Mennonites — inherit everything, change what you must The library of ideas — what The Mennonites shares with every other faith A faith at random — somewhere you have never been

Sources

2 cited texts
  1. The Schleitheim Confession (24 February 1527), Article VI, Of the Sword — trans. John C. Wenger, 1945 where it is cited →
  2. The Schleitheim Confession (1527), Article IV, Of Separation — trans. John C. Wenger, 1945 where it is cited →

These citations identify texts used in the linked passages. Follow each passage to read its quotation and context. A tradition’s own texts explain its teachings; historical claims may also require independent scholarship. Translations marked (rendered) are our own plain-English wording, not a standard edition; where a passage matters, read it in a full translation.

Numbers count Panfaith activity only — never real-world adherence.

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