Early Anabaptism in Global Perspective
Session 9
Thursday, July 24, 2025 • 8:30–10 a.m.
A. Papers: Anabaptism and the Search for a Useable Past
Nineteenth-Century Mennonites Reading Martyrs Mirror: Identity, Renewal, and a Useable Past
Andrew V. Ste. Marie
In early nineteenth-century America, Mennonites struggled to define their identity and their direction in a world far different from that inhabited by their early Anabaptist forebears. As different Mennonites felt drawn to differing paths in search of spiritual renewal, they found various uses for their shared remembrance of their Anabaptist past. Although mediated through comparatively few sources, such as Martyrs Mirror and the writings of Menno Simons, nineteenth-century Mennonites used the Anabaptist past with dexterity and creativity, finding a “useable past” for their current needs.
Three specific writers, representative of different uses of the Anabaptist past, are examined here. Benjamin Eby, author of Kurzgefasste Kirchen Geschichte und Glaubenslehre, presented an account of Mennonite origins to explain the group to outsiders as well as to Mennonite youth. His work is an example of using the past to explain and define the boundaries and characteristics of the group, with both in-group and out-group audiences in mind. Jacob Stauffer, author of Eine Chronik Oder Geschicht-Büchlein, represents a different approach—using the Anabaptist past to critique the mainstream Mennonite church as a fallen church, one which had not remained faithful to its roots. In writing the Chronik as a justification of the origins of his own sectarian splinter group, the Stauffer (or Pike) Mennonites, Stauffer, like Eby, uses Anabaptist history as an exercise in group definition for both insiders and outsiders, but in Stauffer’s case, both groups are Mennonite. Melchior Brenneman, author of Auslegung der Wahren Taufe, represents a third use of Anabaptist history—an apologetic use. Writing in response to German Baptist criticisms of Mennonite baptismal practices, Brenneman uses Anabaptist history to defend Mennonite legitimacy.
Whether used for explanation of Mennonite identity to outsiders and youth, criticism of Mennonite religious laxity, or apologetic use in conversation with other religious traditions, nineteenth-century Mennonites found a “useable past” in their sixteenth-century roots and are illustrative of the fact that a group’s present is always impacted by its past, and that historical memory has a remarkable capacity to adapt itself to the perceived needs of the hour.
Andrew V. Ste. Marie is founder of Sermon on the Mount Publishing and has authored or coauthored four books, including Grounded Upon God's Word: The Life and Labors of Jakob Ammann. He has been published in numerous periodicals, including Mennonite Quarterly Review, The Pilgrim Witness, and Plain Things. He lives with his wife, Juanita, in Michigan and is a member of Lenawee Mennonite Church.
The Ingrafting of a Tradition: Why Baptists Hold an Interest in Anabaptism
Brian C. Brewer
At first glance, both to new students of Christian history as well as to the direct theological descendants of Anabaptism, the Baptist tradition’s long-held interest in and, at times, claims of shared theological heritage with the Anabaptists seem curious. After all, modern Baptists most directly trace their heritage from English Puritanism and subsequent Separatism and only appear to parallel Anabaptists in some aspects of theology and ecclesial practice, with minimal historical interaction and thus apparently negligible ecclesial inheritance. Yet some researchers in the recent past, especially a circle of 20th-century Baptist historians, have so accentuated Baptist parallels so as to count the tradition as among the direct heirs of Conrad Grebel and Balthasar Hubmaier—with a few such historians even tracing an historical “Baptist witness” from the Anabaptists all the way back to the apostles of Scripture! However, like so much of history in general and church history in particular, connections are often much more complex. In this case, the theological relationship between Anabaptists and Baptists defies simple explanation. Yet representatives from both streams of early British Baptists—the General Baptists of Gainsborough and Spitalfield and the slightly later Particular Baptists of Southwark and Kettering—indeed found their way to Amsterdam and forged some form of Mennonite relations in the seventeenth century, and these Baptists ultimately propagated significant ministries upon their return to England, reflecting significant similarities to but also incongruities with continental Anabaptists. Thus, whether Baptists are siblings, cousins, or stepchildren of European Anabaptism, Baptist theology and practice was once—and arguably still is—significantly shaped by the radical reformation which preceded it.
Brian C. Brewer is Professor of Christian Theology at the George W. Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University, where he teaches and researches the Protestant Reformation. He is the author of A Pledge of Love: The Anabaptist Sacramental Theology of Balthasar Hubmaier (Paternoster, 2012), and editor of the T&T Clark Handbook of Anabaptism (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2021) and Distinctly Baptist: Proclaiming Identity in a New Generation (Judson, 2011). Currently, he is writing the volume Anabaptist Theology in the Doing Theology Series (T&T Clark).
Mennonites in Eastern Pennsylvania Engage an Anabaptist Past
Joel Horst Nofziger
Early Anabaptist history has enjoyed prominence in Mennonite intellectual circles as a tool for building a global ecclesial identity. However, the impact and importance of the Anabaptist past for the believers who fill Mennonite meetinghouses is less clear. To what extent does the history of early Anabaptists provide meaning to this general Mennonite population? One avenue to investigate whether early Anabaptist history creates meaning in local ecclesial identity is to examine vernacular histories produced or endorsed by congregations. Indeed, when considering the folk histories of congregations in Eastern Pennsylvania—largely comprising the former Franconia Mennonite and Eastern District Conferences—early Anabaptism appears more as a void than as a resource for identity. For example, of the thirty-two congregational websites that include a history section, only seven of them even mention Anabaptism. The same paucity of discussion exists among printed congregational histories. This modern state is far removed from the colonial Mennonite worldview of ministers Heinrich Funk and Dielman Kolb, who had felt such a connection to early Anabaptism and such a special love for Martyrs Mirror that they sponsored the German language translation at the Ephrata Cloister.
This paper will examine how modern histories originating among Mennonite congregations in eastern Pennsylvania treat, or fail to treat, sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Anabaptism. This will be based on a close reading of texts produced over approximately the last fifty years, both print and digital, in the oldest Mennonite community in North America. This case study seeks to determine whether this community takes early Anabaptist history as a landmark of identity. Beyond allowing us to meaningfully ask what early Anabaptism means to a contemporary North American Mennonite community, this will also help us understand how Mennonite intellectual production filters down into congregational life and thought.
Joel Horst Nofziger is the executive director of the Mennonite Heritage Center, Harleysville, Pa., and a postgraduate researcher at the Centre for Anabaptist Studies at Bristol Baptist College. He has a BA in History and Peacebuilding & Development from Eastern Mennonite University and a MA in Religion from Eastern Mennonite Seminary. His current research focuses on vernacular history and geographies of memory among Mennonites in Eastern Pennsylvania.
B. Papers: Migration and Its Consequences: Community, Family, Language
Hutterite History as a Refugee Story
Emmy Barth Maendel
Anabaptism can be thought of as a pilgrimage—both physically, as its adherents migrated across the globe, as well as temporally, through the centuries. Again and again, as the world around them changed, they had to decide whether to change with it or hold on to proven ways. Often holding on to their beliefs meant uprooting and starting over in a new land. This paper explores these themes by focusing on the Hutterites’ 500-year history and the Bruderhof’s 100 years, and drawing on the two Hutterian Chronicles and Bruderhof sources, including my books An Embassy Besieged and No Lasting Home.
Emmy Barth Maendel is a member of the Bruderhof communities and a senior archivist for the Bruderhof’s historical archives. She is the author of An Embassy Besieged: The Story of a Christian Community in Nazi Germany (Cascade, 2010); No Lasting Home: A Year in the Paraguayan Wilderness (Plough, 2009); and translator and coeditor of Jakob Hutter: His Life and Letters (Plough, 2024).
Mennonites’ Adjustment to Life in Colonial Pennsylvania through Family Stories
Tanya Kevorkian
Mennonites migrated from the Holy Roman Empire and Switzerland to Lancaster County, Pa., and surrounding areas starting in the 1710. Many families transmitted stories of life in Pennsylvania in the decades after their arrival. This paper uses those stories for clues about how Mennonite immigrants and their descendants adjusted to life in colonial Pennsylvania. One recurring theme is how they lived their nonresistant faith in a new environment. Stories relate individuals threatening or (in one case) murdering Indigenous people, competing in footraces, and responding to bullies. Another theme is financial success that would have been unattainable in Europe: having teams of six horses or building log homes of durable woods, such as walnut or locust. A third theme is work with the land: clearing, planting, harvesting, etc. Dozens of these stories had been published in family histories, newspapers, and elsewhere by the 1930s. Except for John Ruth (The Earth is the Lord’s) and I. Daniel Rupp (early nineteenth-century histories of several counties), historians have not used these stories, and no one has studied them systematically. The large number of the stories and their variety, geographic distribution, frank accounts of deeds that violated Mennonite theology, scarcity of other sources on such themes, and the relative reliability of their transmission make it worthwhile to examine them.
Tanya Kevorkian (PhD, Johns Hopkins University) is a professor of history at Millersville University. Her specialties are early modern Germany, colonial Pennsylvania, and environmental history. She is working on a book about the environmental history of the Lancaster County area since the 1300s.
Language Maintenance and Shift in Early Anabaptist Communities
Mark L. Louden
An investigation of the verbal behavior of Anabaptists in Germanic Central and Northwestern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveals through lines between the sociolinguistic situations of present-day traditional Anabaptist groups and those of their spiritual ancestors some 500 years ago. When early Anabaptists migrated into a region in which a language variety was spoken that differed from their native idiom, they either continued to speak their heritage language while acquiring the majority tongue (to some degree), or they assimilated completely to their new linguistic environment. Whether language maintenance or shift occurred depended on several factors, a main one being whether migrants merged with existing Anabaptist communities or not.
In this presentation, I will discuss what is known of the sociolinguistic history of the early Anabaptist groups from which contemporary Amish, Old Order Mennonites, Old Colony Mennonites, and Hutterites descend and identify the external conditions that promoted either the maintenance of an ancestral language or the shift to a new one. For example, I will account for why some Anabaptists who migrated northward from Switzerland either continued speaking Swiss German or adopted a new Germanic variety. As I will show, the Palatinate region played an important role in early Anabaptist history as both a destination and a way station for migrants of Swiss background. I will also examine the linguistic effects of migration on Mennonites originally from the Low Countries, the ancestors of today’s so-called Russian Mennonites, and on the Hutterites.
I will conclude the presentation by showing how early Anabaptist patterns of language maintenance and shift have continued to the present day, paying special attention to the diverse experiences of Amish subgroups, including the Swiss Amish and Milverton (ON) Amish. A distinctive feature of the culture of highly traditional Anabaptist groups in the twenty-first century is the use of a German-related vernacular language alongside a form of standard German for devotional purposes. Although Amish, Old Order Mennonite, Old Colony Mennonite, and Hutterite communities form language islands (Sprachinseln)—or more precisely, language archipelagos—in the countries in which they now reside, bilingualism is the norm, an example of their ability to, as Donald B. Kraybill has described it, negotiate with modernity.
Mark L. Louden is the Alfred L. Shoemaker, J. William Frey, and Don Yoder Professor of Germanic Linguistics and director of the Max Kade Institute for German American Studies at UW–Madison. He is the author of Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), for which he received the Dale W. Brown Book Award for Outstanding Research in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies.
C. Roundtable: Why Teach Early Anabaptist History Today?
Moderator: Jamie Pitts Panelists: Danang Kristiawan, Elizabeth Miller, and David Y. Neufeld
Many Mennonite educational institutions have prioritized the teaching of early Anabaptist history, for instance by requiring courses in the subject. The assumption behind this pattern is that early Anabaptist history is of particular importance for the formation of Mennonites today. There are at least three present challenges to this assumption. First, historiographical developments since the 1970s have disrupted the sense that there are simple lines connecting early Anabaptism to present-day Mennonites. Second, several Mennonite educational institutions in Europe and North America are losing Mennonite students. Third, while Mennonite educational institutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America often continue the pattern, there are questions about the extent to which that is sufficiently sensitive to contextual realities. Panelists in this roundtable discuss what they see as important about teaching early Anabaptism today in contexts including Canada, Colombia, Indonesia, and the United States.
Jamie Pitts is Professor of Anabaptist Studies at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Indiana. He is also the director of Institute of Mennonite Studies, editor of Anabaptist Witness, and author of Organizing Spirit: Pneumatology, Institutions, and Global Imagination (T&T Clark, 2025).