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
Community of The Mennonites

A confession, a name, and almost nothing else in common.

Old Colony Mennonites in Bolivia farm with horses and speak Plautdietsch; Mennonite Brethren in Congo are evangelical and number in the hundreds of thousands; Mennonite Church USA ordains women. Mennonite World Conference is a fellowship, not a hierarchy — it cannot discipline a member church and has never tried.

Add to My Beliefs →
How you joinBaptism on confession, usually in the teens or later, after a membership class
Who leadsCongregationally called pastors, now salaried and seminary-trained in most conferences; conference and area church above that
The unitThe congregation, gathered into conferences that advise more than they command
Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

Mennonite World Conference is a communion of national churches, not a governing body: it holds an assembly roughly every six years, maintains Shared Convictions adopted in 2006, and has no power to discipline or expel. That structure is deliberate and it is why the label covers such enormous variety. The largest single member church is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; the fastest growth is in Ethiopia, where Meserete Kristos Church has grown from a few thousand to several hundred thousand since it was driven underground under the Derg. Meanwhile the Old Colony and Old Order groups that are most visible to North American outsiders are a small and shrinking share of the whole, and the conservative Latin American colonies mostly do not belong to MWC at all.

The same ground, other faiths

claims that share this one's ideas
The SGPC — who holds the keys. Sikhism Go deeper →
Who counts. Zoroastrianism Go deeper →
Chaldean is a name that came with the union. The Chaldean Catholic Church · core tenet Go deeper →
A second Armenian church: bridge or wound. The Armenian Catholic Church · core tenet Go deeper →
The colony divides before it grows large enough to be impersonal. The Hutterites · core tenet Go deeper →
Annual Conference decides, and it has been dividing the church since 1881. The Church of the Brethren Go deeper →

The conversation

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

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Where next

The Mennonites's Community 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.

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