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.
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The shared center — held across the tradition
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.
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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.
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Cosmos & Afterlife
how reality is built, and what follows deathThe nature of reality
A church gathered out of the world by choice, and answerable to Christ rather than to any prince
After death
Resurrection and judgment; the emphasis falls heavily on the kingdom begun now