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

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History & overview · every faith gets one

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.

The founding

Menno Simons was a Catholic priest in Friesland who began doubting transubstantiation in 1525 and infant baptism in 1531. What finally moved him was the massacre: in April 1535 some three hundred Anabaptists, his own brother among them, were killed at the Oldeklooster near Bolsward after seizing it. He wrote that he saw sheep without a shepherd and that their blood was on him because he had known the truth and kept his post. He resigned in January 1536, was rebaptised, and for the next twenty-five years travelled the Low Countries and the Baltic coast under a standing imperial bounty, writing and ordaining, and died in his bed at Wustenfelde in 1561.

Its founding is bound to Menno Simons — 1536 CE.

What it holds

Reality. A church gathered out of the world by choice, and answerable to Christ rather than to any prince.

The divine. The Trinity, with a persistent Anabaptist accent: what God is, is shown by what Jesus did, and doctrine that cannot be lived is not doctrine..

Death and after. Resurrection and judgment; the emphasis falls heavily on the kingdom begun now.

The line

descent is public here — where it came from, what left it
Judaism — c. 1000 BCE Christianity — 30 CE Catholicism Protestantism — 1517 CE Anabaptism — 1525 CE The Mennonites — 1536 CE

Keep going

Back to the overview — the living page: elements, discussion, the web The Belief room — the claims themselves, with sources and context Branch The Mennonites — inherit everything, change what you must

Numbers count Panfaith activity only — never real-world adherence; the global following above is a stated estimate, not a Panfaith count.

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