Mennonite Beliefs and Denominations

1. What Mennonites Believe

Mennonites believe that the church is a voluntary community of people who have heard the Gospel, repented, confessed faith in Jesus Christ as an adult or an older child, and been baptized on that confession. Four convictions run through every Mennonite body: baptism follows faith and never precedes it; discipleship means actually obeying the teaching of Jesus, above all the Sermon on the Mount; Christians do not take up arms or return violence for violence; and the congregation is responsible for the moral life of its members through mutual counsel and, where necessary, exclusion from communion. Everything else in Mennonite practice grows out of those four.

Mennonites are trinitarian Christians who confess Jesus Christ as fully God and fully human, hold the Bible as the authoritative word of God read through the centre of Christ's own life and teaching, and expect Christ's return and the final judgment. They keep two ordinances, baptism and the Lord's Supper, and many congregations add footwashing. They have no bishops in the Catholic or Orthodox sense, no sacramental priesthood, and no liturgical calendar binding across the whole tradition. Authority sits with the congregation and with the conference of congregations that a church chooses to join.

The name comes from Menno Simons, a Frisian parish priest who broke with Rome in 1536. Menno did not found the movement. Anabaptism had already begun in Zurich in January 1525, and Menno joined it a decade later, at a moment when the Low Countries wing of the movement had been discredited by the violent takeover of the city of Munster. His achievement was to hold together the peaceable Anabaptists of the Netherlands and north Germany, to write for them, and to give them a theology of the church that outlasted him. Dutch authorities began calling his followers Mennists in the 1540s as a way of distinguishing them from the Munster faction, and the name stuck.

2. Who Menno Simons Was

Menno Simons was born around 1496 at Witmarsum in Friesland, in the north of what is now the Netherlands, and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1524. He served the parish of Pingjum and then, from 1531, his home village of Witmarsum. By his own later account he was an indifferent priest in those years, playing cards and drinking with his fellow clergy and reading very little Scripture, in part because he feared what he might find in it.

Two questions broke him. The first was the Eucharist. Saying Mass, he found himself unable to believe that the bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ, and he began reading the New Testament to settle the doubt. The second was baptism. In March 1531 a man named Sicke Freerks was beheaded at Leeuwarden for having been rebaptized. Menno had never heard of a second baptism and went looking in Scripture for a warrant for infant baptism. He reported that he could not find one, and that consultations with Luther's writings, with Bucer and with Bullinger left him no better satisfied, since each gave a different reason for the practice.

Then came Munster. Between 1534 and 1535 a group of radical Anabaptists took control of the city of Munster in Westphalia, expelled those who would not be rebaptized, declared the city the New Jerusalem, and under Jan van Leiden instituted polygamy and a reign of terror before the city fell to a besieging army. In April 1535 a related group, among them Menno's own brother, seized the Oldeklooster monastery near Bolsward and was destroyed. Menno wrote a pamphlet against Jan van Leiden's teaching and then faced the fact that he was preaching from a Catholic pulpit against a movement whose central conviction on baptism he now shared.

He left the priesthood on 12 January 1536. Within about a year he was baptized, and Obbe Philips ordained him an elder. From then until his death on 31 January 1561 at Wustenfelde in Holstein, Menno lived under a price on his head, moving between the Netherlands and the north German coast, baptizing, ordaining, writing, and holding conferences of scattered congregations. The imperial edict against him made it a capital offence to shelter him.

What Menno Wrote

Menno's major work is the Foundation of Christian Doctrine, first published around 1539 and revised repeatedly. It is a pastoral and polemical book that argues for a church of the regenerate, for baptism on confession of faith, for the ban as the church's discipline, and for a Christianity that shows itself in changed conduct. He also wrote on the ban, on the church, and against the Munsterites, and he corresponded constantly with congregations in dispute. The tone throughout is that of a hunted pastor writing to people who expect to be arrested.

One Doctrine His Descendants Did Not Keep

Menno held a view of the incarnation inherited from the earlier Anabaptist teacher Melchior Hoffman, sometimes called celestial flesh: that Christ took flesh in Mary but not from Mary, so that his humanity came from heaven rather than from his mother's substance. He argued it in order to protect the sinlessness of Christ. Mennonite bodies today do not teach it. Their confessions state the standard Christology of the ancient creeds, that the eternal Son took human nature from the Virgin Mary and is fully human as well as fully divine, which is also what the Catholic Church holds and what the Council of Chalcedon defined in 451. A reader who meets the celestial flesh idea in a sixteenth-century source should know it is a historical position of Menno's, not a Mennonite doctrine now.

3. Believer's Baptism and Why It Divided Europe

Believer's baptism is the Mennonite conviction that baptism is administered only to a person who can personally confess faith in Christ and freely ask for it. Mennonites read the New Testament as showing baptism always following repentance and belief, as in Peter's instruction to "repent and be baptized" at Pentecost (Acts 2:38) and in Christ's commission to make disciples and baptize them (Matthew 28:19). On this reading an infant cannot repent, cannot believe, and cannot be baptized.

Most Mennonite congregations baptize by pouring water over the head of a kneeling candidate, which is the historic Dutch and Swiss practice. The Mennonite Brethren baptize by immersion. A minority of conservative conferences use immersion as well. The mode is a secondary question in the tradition; the timing is the point.

Why It Was a Capital Crime

In the sixteenth century, baptism was the door into Christendom itself. Everyone born in a territory was baptized as an infant and thereby entered both the church and the civil order. Refusing infant baptism and rebaptizing adults dissolved that link, and both Catholic and Protestant governments treated it as sedition rather than as a private theological opinion. The Diet of Speyer in 1529 made rebaptism punishable by death throughout the Holy Roman Empire, reviving an old imperial law against the Donatists. Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat at Zurich on 5 January 1527 by a Protestant city council. Michael Sattler was executed at Rottenburg on 20 May 1527 by Catholic authorities after torture. Anabaptists were killed by Lutherans, by Reformed magistrates and by Catholics alike, and the Dutch martyrology called Martyrs Mirror, compiled by Thieleman van Braght and published in 1660, remains a book in Mennonite homes to this day.

The Catholic Position, Stated Plainly

The Catholic Church baptizes infants, and it has done so from the earliest centuries. The Catechism describes infant baptism as an immemorial tradition of the Church, attested explicitly from the second century and probably present from the age of the apostles, when whole households were baptized (CCC 1252). The theological reason is that baptism is God's gift before it is anyone's decision. Original sin is a condition children are born into, and the Church holds that grace is offered to them without any prior merit or choice, which is what makes it grace (CCC 1250). Sponsors and the family carry the obligation to raise the child in the faith so that the baptism can be personally owned later, which is one of the functions of confirmation.

The disagreement is real and it is not merely about age. It is about whether the church is constituted by God's prior action or by the assembly of those who have responded. Our guide to baptism in Catholic teaching lays out the Catholic case in full, and the guide to Catholic and Protestant differences places it beside the other Reformation-era divisions.

4. The Believers Church and the Two Kingdoms

Mennonite ecclesiology begins from the claim that the church is a gathered body of committed disciples rather than a population. The Schleitheim articles of 1527, the earliest Anabaptist confession, drew the boundary sharply: the congregation is a covenanted people separated from what the articles call the abomination of the world, and its members neither hold civil office that wields the sword nor swear oaths. Menno softened the tone but kept the substance. Membership means a voluntary and revocable commitment, and a church that includes everyone in a territory has ceased to be a church in any meaningful sense.

From this follows the Anabaptist reading of the two kingdoms. God rules the world through civil government, which he permits to bear the sword to restrain evil, and Christians owe that government taxes, honesty and obedience in everything that does not conflict with the teaching of Christ (Romans 13:1-7). God rules the church through Christ, whose way is suffering love. The two orders are both real and they are not to be mixed. The classic Anabaptist conclusion is that the Christian belongs wholly to the second order and therefore does not exercise the sword-bearing functions of the first: no soldiering, no capital sentences, no oath.

The refusal of the oath is a small doctrine with a long practical tail. Mennonites affirm rather than swear in court, which required legal accommodation in every country they settled in, and their historic willingness to emigrate rather than compromise on it is one reason Mennonite settlement maps run from Switzerland and the Netherlands to Prussia, to the Russian steppe, to Pennsylvania, Manitoba, Kansas, Paraguay and Belize.

Separation, Then and Now

Sixteenth-century separation meant distinctive dress, endogamy, refusal of office and physical distance from the surrounding society. Among Old Order Mennonites much of that persists. Among the large North American and European conferences it does not. A member of Mennonite Church USA or Mennonite Church Canada typically dresses like a neighbour, works in an ordinary profession, votes, and may serve in civil office that does not require bearing arms. What survives across the whole range is the conviction that the church's ethics are not set by the surrounding culture and that the congregation has a claim on how its members live.

Church Government

Mennonite polity is congregational with conference oversight. The congregation calls and ordains its own ministers, decides membership, and holds property. Congregations associate in area conferences, which associate in national bodies, which in turn may belong to Mennonite World Conference. Decisions at conference level are advisory in most bodies and binding in some. There is no office corresponding to a Catholic bishop with jurisdiction, though the historic Dutch and Swiss term elder, and in some conservative bodies bishop, names a senior minister with responsibility for several congregations, ordination and the administration of communion.

5. Nonresistance: The Mennonite Peace Position

Nonresistance is the Mennonite teaching that a follower of Jesus does not use violence, does not go to war, and does not take life, because Christ commanded it and lived it. The word is chosen deliberately. It comes from the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says not to resist an evil person and to turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39), and it is broader than the modern term pacifism, which usually names a political programme. Mennonites present nonresistance as obedience to a command rather than as a strategy expected to work.

The supporting texts are consistent across four centuries of Mennonite writing: the command to leave vengeance to God (Romans 12:19), the instruction to overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21), Christ's rebuke to Peter in Gethsemane for drawing the sword (Matthew 26:52), and the pattern of the cross itself, where Christ absorbed violence without returning it (1 Peter 2:21-23). The Schleitheim articles of 1527 stated it early, the Dordrecht Confession of 1632 restated it, and the 1995 Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective devotes an article to peace, justice and nonresistance.

What It Has Cost

The position has been expensive in every century. Mennonites left Switzerland, the Palatinate, Prussia and later Russia partly over military conscription. In the United States during the First World War, conscripted Mennonites who refused non-combatant service were court-martialled and imprisoned, some of them at Fort Leavenworth. In the Second World War the American peace churches negotiated Civilian Public Service, under which conscientious objectors did forestry, farm labour, and work in mental hospitals in place of military service. Mennonite objectors in Canada worked in alternative service camps. In Russia in the nineteenth century Mennonite men served in a forestry service established as an alternative to conscription. The pattern is consistent: negotiate an alternative where possible, emigrate where not, accept the penalty where neither is available.

Peace Work Beyond Refusal

Twentieth-century Mennonite thought moved from refusal to active peacemaking. Mennonite institutions now run conflict transformation programmes, victim-offender mediation, restorative justice training and international peacebuilding. The Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder restated the position for a modern academic readership in The Politics of Jesus, published in 1972, which argued that the ethics of Jesus are directly political and directly binding on the church. Yoder's academic reputation is inseparable from his documented record of sexual abuse of women over decades, which Mennonite Church USA formally acknowledged and apologised for in 2015 after a church-commissioned investigation. Mennonite institutions now teach his work with that record stated alongside it.

6. The Ban, Shunning and Community Discipline

The ban is the Mennonite practice of excluding an unrepentant member from communion and, in stricter forms, from ordinary social contact. Mennonites derive it from Christ's instruction to go first privately to a sinning brother, then with witnesses, then to the church, and to treat the one who refuses the church as an outsider (Matthew 18:15-17), together with Paul's command not to eat with an unrepentant member of the community (1 Corinthians 5:11). The ban is the sanction that makes a voluntary church possible: with no coercive power over anyone, the congregation's only instrument is the withdrawal of fellowship.

Menno taught the ban as a medicine aimed at restoration. The purpose is repentance and return, and readmission on repentance is the expected outcome. He also, under pressure from the stricter Dutch congregations, came to defend a rigorous form of shunning that extended to the marriage bed, and the resulting disputes fractured Dutch Mennonitism into Waterlander, Frisian, Flemish and other parties within a generation of his death. The same argument produced the Amish division in 1693, when Jakob Ammann insisted on strict shunning and the Swiss Brethren ministers would not follow.

How It Works Today

Practice varies enormously by body. In Old Order and conservative conferences the ban remains a live discipline with real social consequences, and members who leave without transferring membership may be avoided by family. In the large assimilated conferences, formal discipline is rare, and membership review is more likely to look like pastoral conversation than exclusion. The disciplinary conflicts that have actually divided North American Mennonite conferences in recent decades have concerned the credentialing of pastors and the blessing of same-sex marriages, which led a number of congregations and area conferences to withdraw from Mennonite Church USA and from Mennonite Church Canada during the 2010s and 2020s.

Catholic readers will recognise the structure of the ban, because the Catholic Church has its own version. Excommunication in canon law is a medicinal penalty, aimed at the repentance of the one penalised, and it is lifted when the person repents. The Catholic sacrament of confession supplies what the Mennonite system leaves to the congregation: a private, confidential and repeatable route back, with absolution given by a priest acting in the person of Christ. Mennonites locate the power of binding and loosing in the gathered congregation rather than in an ordained confessor.

7. Worship, the Lord's Supper and Footwashing

Mennonite worship is centred on the preaching of Scripture and on congregational singing, and it is deliberately plain. The historic meetinghouse had no altar, no images, no candles and no instruments, and singing was unaccompanied and often in four-part harmony from a shared hymnal. Old Order Mennonite worship still looks like that. Assimilated congregations have added instruments, projected words and contemporary music, and a service in a Mennonite Church Canada congregation now resembles a moderate Protestant service anywhere.

The Lord's Supper is one of the two ordinances. Mennonites understand it as a memorial and a communion: bread and cup are signs through which the congregation remembers Christ's death, gives thanks, and declares its unity with him and with each other. Mennonite confessions do not teach that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, and there is no consecrating priesthood to effect such a change. Communion is typically observed several times a year rather than weekly, and it is preceded by a preparatory service in which members examine themselves and reconcile outstanding disputes, since taking communion while at odds with a brother or sister is understood to profane it.

Footwashing

Many Mennonite congregations wash one another's feet at communion, following Christ's action and command at the Last Supper (John 13:14-15). The Dordrecht Confession of 1632 lists it as an ordinance, which is why it is most consistently kept in the conservative and Old Order bodies and in the Amish, all of whom hold that confession. Assimilated congregations often keep it once a year or on Maundy Thursday. Catholics will recognise the rite from the Mass of the Lord's Supper on Holy Thursday, where the celebrant washes the feet of members of the congregation.

Other Practices

The head covering for women in worship, drawn from 1 Corinthians 11, is universal in Old Order and conservative bodies and largely discontinued in the assimilated conferences. Anointing with oil for the sick, from James 5:14, is practised in many congregations. Ordination is to the ministry of a particular congregation. Most large Mennonite conferences ordain women; conservative and Old Order bodies do not. Marriage is a covenant blessed by the congregation and not counted a sacrament, which differs from the Catholic teaching set out in our guide to Catholic marriage.

8. The Mennonite Confessions of Faith

Mennonites have confessions rather than a magisterium. A confession is a statement adopted by a body of congregations that says what they hold, and it can be revised or replaced by the same body that adopted it. Three documents matter most, and knowing which one a given Mennonite group holds tells you a great deal about it.

The Schleitheim Articles, 1527

Adopted at Schleitheim in Switzerland on 24 February 1527, and generally attributed to Michael Sattler, the Schleitheim articles are the first Anabaptist confession. Seven articles cover baptism on confession of faith, the ban, the breaking of bread among the baptized, separation from the world, the office of shepherd in the congregation, refusal of the sword, and refusal of the oath. The document is short, uncompromising, and written under persecution; Sattler was executed within three months of the meeting. It set the agenda that later confessions worked from.

The Dordrecht Confession, 1632

Adopted at Dordrecht in the Netherlands on 21 April 1632 by Dutch Mennonite ministers, this confession runs to eighteen articles and is the confession still held across the plain Anabaptist bodies. It covers God and creation, the fall, the promise of Christ, the incarnation, the law and the Gospel, repentance, baptism, the church, ministry, the Lord's Supper, footwashing, marriage, civil government, revenge, the oath, the ban, shunning the separated, and the last judgment. Alsatian Anabaptists adopted it in 1660, and it crossed to Pennsylvania with the German-speaking migration in the eighteenth century. Old Order Mennonites, conservative Mennonite conferences and the Amish all hold it. Its Article 17 on shunning was the fault line of the 1693 Amish division.

Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, 1995

Adopted in 1995 by the General Conference Mennonite Church and the Mennonite Church, the two bodies that would merge into Mennonite Church Canada in 2000 and Mennonite Church USA in 2002, this confession has twenty-four articles and is the standard contemporary statement for the assimilated North American conferences. It restates believer's baptism, the church as a covenanted community, discipleship, the Lord's Supper and footwashing, and it gives full articles to peace, justice and nonresistance and to the church's mission. Each article is followed by commentary and by the biblical references behind it. Congregations that left Mennonite Church USA and Mennonite Church Canada in recent years generally continue to hold it.

The Mennonite Brethren maintain a separate Confession of Faith of their own, reflecting the evangelical and Pietist strand in their origin. It is treated in section 11.

9. The Mennonite Bodies Today

Mennonites are a global church, and the majority of Mennonites now live in Africa, Asia and Latin America rather than in Europe or North America. Mennonite World Conference, founded as a periodic global assembly in 1925 and now a permanent communion of national conferences, is the main international body, though a number of Mennonite and Amish groups belong to no international structure at all.

Source: Mennonite World Conference publishes a periodic global census of its member churches, which reports baptized membership across the communion in the region of one and a half million, with the largest national churches including Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, the United States and Canada. Any figure for the wider tradition depends on whether unbaptized children are counted and on whether Amish, Hutterite and independent conservative bodies outside Mennonite World Conference are included. The distribution here follows Mennonite World Conference's own reporting.

North America

Mennonite Church USA and Mennonite Church Canada are the largest assimilated bodies, formed by the 2000 and 2002 mergers of the Mennonite Church with the General Conference Mennonite Church. Both hold the 1995 confession, ordain women, run colleges and seminaries, and support relief and peace work. Both lost congregations and area conferences during the 2010s and 2020s over the credentialing of pastors in same-sex marriages, and some of those congregations formed or joined newer alignments while others joined conservative conferences.

The US Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches and the Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches are the second large North American stream, evangelical in style and treated separately below. The Evangelical Mennonite Conference and the Evangelical Mennonite Mission Conference in Canada descend from nineteenth-century renewal movements among the Russian Mennonites. Conservative Mennonite conferences, including the Conservative Mennonite Conference and a range of independent fellowships, keep plain dress and the Dordrecht Confession while using cars, electricity and English. Old Order Mennonites, described in section 12, keep horse-drawn transport or restrict car use.

Latin America

Mennonite colonies in Mexico, Paraguay, Bolivia and Belize were founded by Russian and Canadian Mennonite migrants from the 1870s onwards, and the largest movements followed Canadian school legislation in the 1920s and Soviet expropriation in the same decade. The Old Colony Mennonites in Mexico and Bolivia are among the most separated of these, speaking Plautdietsch, farming, and running their own schools. Alongside the colonies there are substantial Spanish-speaking and indigenous Mennonite churches, particularly in Paraguay among the Enlhet and Nivaclé peoples, and in Colombia, Honduras and Guatemala.

Africa and Asia

The largest Mennonite churches in the world are African. The Meserete Kristos Church in Ethiopia grew from a small mission congregation into the largest single Mennonite World Conference member church, expanding sharply during the years the Derg regime closed and confiscated its buildings, when it operated through house fellowships. The Mennonite communities of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, gathered in three national churches, are the other major African concentration. In Asia, Mennonite and Mennonite Brethren churches in India, chiefly in Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, date from nineteenth-century mission work, and there are Mennonite churches in Indonesia descending from Dutch Mennonite mission work on Java that began in 1851. Our guide to Christianity in Africa gives the wider context for the African growth.

Europe

European Mennonites are now a small population. Dutch Mennonites, organised in the Algemene Doopsgezinde Sociëteit, descend directly from the congregations Menno Simons himself gathered and are theologically liberal. German Mennonite congregations include both long-settled churches and larger congregations of Aussiedler, ethnic German Mennonites who emigrated from the former Soviet Union after 1970 and who are generally conservative and evangelical. Swiss Mennonites, the original Swiss Brethren line, remain in the Jura and Emmental. France retains congregations in Alsace and the Doubs.

10. Mennonite Groups Compared

The table below sets the main Mennonite streams side by side on the questions that actually distinguish them. Each row states what that stream holds in its own terms.

Positions are summarised from each body's own confessional and descriptive documents: the Schleitheim Articles of 1527, the Dordrecht Confession of 1632, the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective adopted in 1995, the Mennonite Brethren Confession of Faith published by the US and Canadian Mennonite Brethren conferences, the published polity of the Groffdale and Weaverland conferences, and the member-church profiles published by Mennonite World Conference.

11. The Mennonite Brethren

The Mennonite Brethren are a Mennonite body founded on 6 January 1860 in the Molotschna colony in southern Russia, in what is now Ukraine, when eighteen men signed a document of secession addressed to the elders of the colony's Mennonite churches. They are the second largest Mennonite stream in North America and one of the most international, and they differ from other Mennonites chiefly in baptismal mode, in worship style, and in the weight they place on personal conversion.

Why They Separated

The Russian Mennonite colonies were closed societies in which church membership followed birth and baptism at a set age, and by the 1850s a group of members had come to regard the colony churches as spiritually dead. Two influences shaped the protest. The first was Pietism, transmitted through the preaching of Eduard Wüst, a Lutheran Pietist pastor serving a nearby Separatist congregation, who pressed conversion, assurance of salvation and personal devotion. The second was contact with German Baptists, from whom the new group took baptism by immersion. The secession document accused the colony churches of admitting the unconverted to communion and declared that the signers could no longer break bread with them.

The colony authorities treated the secession as a civil as well as a religious matter, since the Mennonite colonies had legal standing under Russian law, and the early Mennonite Brethren faced expulsion, loss of land rights and imprisonment before the Russian government recognised them in 1866. An early phase of exuberant enthusiasm in the movement, remembered as the Froehliche Richtung, was checked by the group's own leaders within a few years.

Where They Went

Mennonite Brethren joined the Russian Mennonite migration to Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas in the 1870s, and a much larger wave came to Canada in the 1920s after the Russian Revolution, the civil war and the famine, settling in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. A further wave followed the Second World War, much of it to Paraguay and Brazil. Mennonite Brethren mission work from the late nineteenth century onward founded churches in India, in the Congo, in Panama and in Colombia, and those churches are now larger than the North American conferences that started them.

What They Hold

The Mennonite Brethren hold believer's baptism by immersion, the Lord's Supper as a memorial, the authority of Scripture, salvation by grace through faith in Christ, and a strong emphasis on evangelism and personal conversion. They maintain their own Confession of Faith, which retains the Anabaptist peace position while framing it in language recognisable to other evangelicals. Worship in a typical North American Mennonite Brethren congregation is indistinguishable from that of a mainstream evangelical church, and the conference runs its own colleges and a seminary. Internationally the Mennonite Brethren conferences are linked through the International Community of Mennonite Brethren, and the national conferences are also members of Mennonite World Conference.

Source: the 1860 date, the secession document and the early history are documented in the Mennonite Brethren conferences' own published histories and in the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, maintained by Mennonite World Conference member bodies and Mennonite historical societies. Relative size of the North American and international conferences follows the reporting of the US and Canadian Mennonite Brethren conferences and of the International Community of Mennonite Brethren.

12. Old Order and Conservative Mennonites

Old Order Mennonites are the branch that declined the nineteenth-century innovations of Sunday schools, revival meetings, English-language preaching and, later, the automobile. The main division came in 1872 in Indiana under the minister Jacob Wisler, and similar separations followed in Ontario, Pennsylvania and Virginia through the 1880s and 1890s. Old Order Mennonites worship in plain meetinghouses, keep plain dress and the women's head covering, use Pennsylvania Dutch or German in worship, run their own parochial schools, and practise the ban.

The division outsiders notice first is over transport. In 1927 the Groffdale Conference, often called the Wenger Mennonites after Bishop Joseph Wenger, kept the horse and buggy, while the Weaverland Conference, often called the Horning Mennonites after Bishop Moses Horning, permitted the automobile, historically with the chrome painted black. Both continue in Pennsylvania and beyond. Groffdale families use steel-wheeled tractors in the field so that the tractor cannot double as road transport, which is the kind of boundary-keeping rule that recurs across all plain communities.

Conservative Mennonites are a distinct and larger category. They keep plain dress, the head covering, the Dordrecht Confession and active church discipline, and they use cars, electricity, telephones and English. Many run mission programmes, print shops and voluntary service agencies. A reader who sees a plainly dressed family arriving at church in a car has most likely met conservative Mennonites rather than Old Order Mennonites or Amish.

13. Relief, Service and Mennonite Central Committee

Mennonite Central Committee is the relief and development agency founded in 1920 by North American Mennonite groups to send food to Mennonites starving in the Ukrainian famine that followed the Russian civil war. It outlived that emergency and became the tradition's main channel for disaster relief, development work and peacebuilding, operating in dozens of countries and drawing support across the Mennonite, Amish and Brethren in Christ constituencies that fund it.

Service of this kind carries theological weight in Mennonite thought. If a Christian refuses to bear arms, the refusal is understood to entail a positive obligation: to serve the neighbour, including the enemy neighbour, at cost to oneself. The relief meal, the disaster response crew, the mediation programme and the volunteer year are the visible form of that obligation. Mennonite Disaster Service sends volunteer crews to rebuild after floods, fires and storms in North America. Mennonite Economic Development Associates works in enterprise development. Christian Peacemaker Teams, now operating under a different name, placed unarmed observers in conflict zones.

The Catholic parallel is direct. The Church teaches that the works of mercy are obligatory, that the poor have a claim in justice as well as in charity, and that solidarity is a virtue with public consequences. Our guide to Catholic social teaching sets out the principles, and the practical overlap between Catholic Relief Services and Mennonite Central Committee in the same disaster zones is one of the places where the two traditions cooperate without any doctrinal agreement being required first.

14. Called Together to Be Peacemakers

Called Together to Be Peacemakers is the report of the international dialogue between the Catholic Church and Mennonite World Conference, held in five annual sessions from 1998 to 2003 by delegations appointed by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and by Mennonite World Conference, and published in 2003. It is the first formal theological conversation the two communions have ever held, and it remains the reference document for the relationship.

What the Dialogue Covered

The delegations worked through three areas. The first was a joint reading of history: the sixteenth century, the medieval background each side inherited, and the way each community had told the story of the other to its own people. The second was theology, specifically the nature of the church, baptism, and the Eucharist or Lord's Supper. The third was peace, where the Catholic just war tradition and the Mennonite peace church position were set beside each other and beside the shared conviction that peace belongs to the Gospel.

What Mennonite World Conference Brought to It

Mennonite World Conference is a communion of national conferences that exercises no teaching authority over them, so its delegation could speak for the tradition without binding any congregation to a result. The dialogue's stated purpose was to help the two communions overcome the prejudices and misunderstandings inherited from four centuries of separation, and its main product is a jointly written account of the sixteenth century rather than a doctrinal agreement. The Mennonite participants acknowledged that their own tradition had preserved and sometimes hardened an image of the Catholic Church formed in the years of persecution, and that Martyrs Mirror had been read in ways that fixed a sixteenth-century enemy in place for four centuries. Catholic participants expressed regret for the persecution Anabaptists suffered at Catholic hands. Our guide to Anabaptist beliefs and churches covers that healing of memories in full, together with the Jubilee Year 2000 liturgy in which Pope John Paul II asked forgiveness for sins committed by members of the Church.

What Remains Open Between Rome and the Mennonites

The report settles nothing doctrinally, and it says so. Baptism is the sharpest difference, because the Catholic Church baptizes infants and regards that baptism as valid and complete while Mennonites hold that baptism requires a personal confession of faith, which is why the recognition between the two bodies runs in one direction only. The Lord's Supper remains divided by the questions of ordained priesthood and real presence. Ecclesiology remains divided by the question of whether the church can be a territorial and sacramental body or must be a gathered and voluntary one. On peace the dialogue found convergence on the goal and no agreement on the means. Our guide to Catholic ecumenism and what it does and does not concede sets out the framework such dialogues operate within, and the wider pattern of institutional wrongdoing and repentance is treated in the guide to Church scandals.

Source: Called Together to Be Peacemakers, Report of the International Dialogue between the Catholic Church and Mennonite World Conference 1998-2003, published by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and by Mennonite World Conference.

15. A Catholic Response to Mennonite Teaching

The Catholic Church regards Mennonites as baptized Christians in a real though incomplete communion with the Catholic Church, and it treats Mennonite congregations as ecclesial communities in the language of the Second Vatican Council. The Council taught that those who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are put in a certain, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church (Unitatis Redintegratio 3), and that people born into separated communities today cannot be charged with the sin of the separation (CCC 818). A Mennonite is a brother or sister in Christ, and the Catholic obligation is to say what is true about the differences without pretending they are smaller than they are.

Where Catholics Can Learn

Mennonite practice has three strengths that Catholic writers themselves acknowledge. The first is the seriousness with which the Sermon on the Mount is taken as directly binding on ordinary Christians rather than as counsel for a spiritual elite. The second is the assumption that the congregation has a real claim on the moral life of its members, which is a discipline Catholic parishes have largely lost. The third is that the peace position has cost Mennonites something in every century, and a doctrine people emigrate and go to prison for deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms. Catholic teaching praises the witness of those who renounce violence (CCC 2306), and the Catholic peace tradition from the early martyrs to Dorothy Day is closer to the Mennonite position than most Catholics realise.

Where Catholic Teaching Says Otherwise

Four differences remain, and none of them is cosmetic.

On baptism, the Catholic Church holds that the sacrament confers grace and incorporation into Christ by God's action, that it is rightly given to infants, and that this practice is apostolic in origin (CCC 1250, 1252). Mennonites hold that a sacrament administered to someone incapable of faith is not baptism at all. The Catholic Church nonetheless recognises Mennonite baptism of adults as valid, so the recognition is one-directional.

On the Eucharist, Catholic teaching holds the real presence of Christ and the sacrificial character of the Mass, both requiring an ordained priesthood in apostolic succession (CCC 1400). Mennonites keep a memorial supper with no such claim.

On the church, Catholic teaching holds that Christ established a visible, hierarchically ordered body governed by bishops in communion with the successor of Peter, and that the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church (Lumen Gentium 8). Mennonite ecclesiology locates the church in the gathered congregation. Our guide to the papacy covers the office at the centre of that difference, and the guide to no salvation outside the Church treats what the Catholic claim does and does not mean about people outside her visible boundaries.

On the use of force, Catholic teaching holds that legitimate defence can be a grave duty for those responsible for the common good, subject to the strict conditions of the just war criteria and to the primacy of peace (CCC 2308-2309). Mennonite teaching holds that a Christian may never take life. The 2003 dialogue found real convergence on the goal and no agreement on the means.

16. Related Topics