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.
Menno was not the founder of Anabaptism — he joined it eleven years late, and the Swiss Brethren of Zurich, the South German and Austrian Anabaptists and the Hutterites all predate his involvement. What he did was salvage the Dutch movement after the catastrophe at Munster, where in 1534 and 1535 a militant Anabaptist faction seized the city, declared a kingdom, instituted polygamy and was destroyed by siege. Munster made Anabaptist a synonym for insurrectionist across Europe, and Menno's writing after it is a sustained argument that the true church is unarmed, patient and powerless. He disliked the name Mennonite, or Mennisten, which stuck to his followers in Dutch usage during his lifetime. He died at Wustenfelde in Holstein on 31 January 1561, of natural causes, which almost no Anabaptist leader of his generation managed.
A separation shall be made from the evil and from the wickedness which the devil planted in the world; in this manner, simply that we shall not have fellowship with them and not run with them in the multitude of their abominations.
The Schleitheim Confession (1527), Article IV, Of Separation — trans. John C. Wenger, 1945The article that produced four centuries of Anabaptist argument about how far separation reaches, and the direct ancestor of both Amish Meidung and Exclusive Brethren withdrawal.
The same ground, other faiths
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