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

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

Sheep without a shepherd, and a priest who had known.

Menno wrote that after the Oldeklooster he could no longer bear the sound of his own preaching. The story Mennonites tell about their founder is not a conversion in a flash of light but a slow, shameful arithmetic — that he had been right for years and comfortable for just as long.

Add to My Beliefs →
Where it is toldMenno's own Reply to Gellius Faber (1554) and every Mennonite history since
Who appearsMenno Simons; the Anabaptists killed at the Oldeklooster
What it teachesThat silence in a safe office is itself a verdict
Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

Menno told this story about himself in the Reply to Gellius Faber of 1554, which is the closest thing to an autobiography he wrote. The sequence he gives is unflattering by design: he doubted the mass in 1525 and kept saying it; he read the New Testament and found no infant baptism and kept baptising infants; a man named Sicke Freerks was beheaded at Leeuwarden in 1531 for being rebaptised and he was merely startled; and only the killing at the Oldeklooster in April 1535 moved him, because his own brother was among the dead. Mennonite preaching uses the story against complacency rather than for inspiration. The point is the nine wasted years, not the resignation.

The same ground, other faiths

claims that share this one's ideas
Remonstrate. Confucianism · precept Go deeper →
Stay if you can. The Chaldean Catholic Church · precept Go deeper →
Reopen it, and say Mass in it. The Syriac Catholic Church · precept Go deeper →
Hanuman leaps the strait. Hinduism Read it in full →
The alms round. Buddhism · rite Go deeper →
Asteya — and the merchant's word. Jainism · precept Go deeper →

The conversation

argument stays attached to the claim it is about All discussion →

Sign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.

Where next

The Mennonites's Stories & Scripture roomback up one layer Propose a change to this passageone button — it routes to the review pool

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

Built on Hatchable