| First Mennonite Church is a member of Mennonite Church USA |
| All Christians are rooted in Jesus Christ. The early church opened its doors to Gentiles at the Jerusalem Council in 49 A.D. and began an era of missionary work and expansion. But for over 250 years Christians were a persecuted minority because of their insistence that Jesus was Lord, not Caesar. When Emperor Constantine officially began tolerating Christianity in 313 AD, Christians joined the mainstream and became supporters of the Roman Empire, the Emperor, and his wars. The Christian church became rich and politically powerful. Christianity became the official religion of the Empire, and all babies were “Christianized” through baptism. Differences of opinion between western Roman church and the eastern church centered at Constantinople led to the division of the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church in 1054 A.D. The mutual excommunications of these two groups stayed in place into 1965. Throughout the church’s history there were reformers and prophets who questioned the church's adoption of political power and worldly wealth. In 1517 in Germany , Martin Luther publicly questioned the church’s practice of requiring people to pay for God’s forgiveness (the sale of “indulgences.” ) His emphasis on the authority of Scripture over tradition and on salvation “by grace through faith” sparked the Protestant Reformation. In Zurich, Switzerland, Ulrich Zwingli also led a reforming movement in his church, the Grossmunster. When he slowed down his reforms to wait for the blessing of the Zurich City Council, some of his young radical followers lost patience with him. Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, and Georg Blaurock believed that the church should be free to follow the Scriptures and the Spirit of God and should not be under the control of government. In direct violation of the order of the Zurich City Council, Grebel, Manz, Blaurock and others met for Bible study on January 21, 1525. They baptized one another, and the “free church” was reborn. Like the church of the first 300 years, it was a persecuted and minority church, made up only of those who dared to follow Jesus as Lord in all of life, and who dared to make public that commitment through adult baptism. Their enemies called them “Anabaptists”—re-baptizers. Thousands were tortured, burned at the stake, drowned for their rejection of the territory-based church groups around them, both Catholic and Protestant. When the movement spread north to the Netherlands, a Catholic priest named Menno Simons joined the movement. Because of his leadership, group members came to be called “Mennists”—later “Mennonites.” Because of ongoing persecution, especially in Switzerland, Mennonites retreated to the countryside and most became farmers. For several centuries they were “the quiet in the land.” But beginning in the late 1800’s Mennonites regained a vision for mission, so that today there are more Mennonites in Asia and in Africa than in North America and Europe. |
| Back to the beginning... |
Christianity, Anabaptists, and the Mennonite faith.
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