What Tradition/s Can Teach Us: Personal Reflections on Anabaptism at 500

[Editor’s note: Among many Anabaptist congregations marking the 500th anniversary of the beginning of Anabaptism in January 1525, Bethel College Mennonite Church in North Newton, Kan., set aside two Sundays, Jan. 26 and Feb. 2, to focus on the topic. For Jan. 26, worship coordinator Dorothy Nickel Friesen invited two BCMC members, John Thiesen, Newton, Kan., and Ardie Goering, Albuquerque, N.M., and Goessel, Kan., to share stories and/or reflections. “I asked for identity markers as an Anabaptist in 2025 rather than a ‘celebration’ of the 500th year,” Nickel Friesen said. “How do we relate to history? Your reflection is a ‘testimony’ – a way to share your faith perspective in this era. How should our congregation claim Anabaptist/Mennonite values now?”]

Ardie Goering

As a child growing up in church, I do not remember the exact moment I learned I was a Mennonite. Perhaps it was repeated often in church settings and it was probably told to me by my parents. I may have absorbed it, it was so subliminally present. It was clear that my family, my church and my community were all Mennonite.

In the course of my lifetime, the naming of our beliefs and practices has often changed or expanded into the word “Anabaptism.” One reason is the desire to combat the excluding instincts of any close-knit community. In particular over my lifetime, that has meant moving from a church defined by family trees and church histories to a community of people who choose to be Anabaptist.

The nature of community, and all of its inherent tensions, is one answer to what I think “Mennonite/Anabaptist” means.

From regular attendance in a congregation, driving to Camp Mennoscah in the summers, signing up for short-term Voluntary Service in high school, participating in a binational meeting of the General Conference Mennonite Church, and finally attending Bethel College, I was aware that my group was part of a wider network of similar people.

Within that context of a community was both the opportunity and obligation to speak up individually. Adult baptism, and entrance into official church membership, was only possible after a statement, or individual testimony of faith. Mennonites are a priesthood of believers, a manifestation of the power of community discernment and the individual conscience.

Secondly, Anabaptism means to me a call to discipleship, the commitment to following Jesus daily. We are not Sunday-morning Christians, where everything you do all week long is put aside for a redeeming Sunday worship service. We try to follow Christ, with all of its inherent tensions, in how we work, how we treat people, how we solve conflicts, how we build communities and all the dozens of decisions we make each week.

When Wynn and I got married in 1983, we chose to live in the small community of Goessel and attend a traditional Mennonite church there, in ways that were not totally expected of people like us. One reason is that we valued the interconnectedness of its traditions and culture and believed those were worth perpetuating. Similarly, we have lived for many years in New Mexico, a state with rich and long-standing cultures of Native and Hispanic peoples. Even though those are obviously not our traditions, we like living where tradition is valued and cultivated.

All traditions demand critical discernment. Nothing is good just because it has been done before. But traditional communities have, by definition, a practice of repetition. They do things over and over. I think this practice of repetition is an important part of discipleship.

The Bethel College Mennonite Church is a place where much has changed in the last decade or two, but it is still a place with people doing the same things they have done in the past: serving on committees; baking cookies for a funeral; volunteering in the community. People here show up.

Showing up is both ordinary and extraordinary. It is doing something that is not always expected, something more than the least expected or the minimum of obligation. Showing up in these examples implies something of a physical presence. Your body shows up. Indeed, showing up in person is the opposite of “phoning it in,” a phrase that used to be common and meant doing something halfway or halfheartedly.

Which leads to an obvious question, how do we show up in 2025, where large chunks of our lives are lived through phone lines and all the subsequent communications technology?

I am not dismissing virtual church. I am not dismissing technology. We live in a time of great promise and great peril. I am wondering how we proceed in the midst of enormous change that we struggle to understand and articulate.

I feel the tectonic plates shifting, the plates of what we do know and what we do not know, grinding into each other. I am more overwhelmed than enlightened at this point.

And yet, the Holy Spirit endures. People keep showing up, in so many wondrous and merciful ways. As Anabaptists, 500 years of history is a lot to keep pushing us forward. And that is a good thing.

John Thiesen

I have in mind a Low German saying that I got from the Canadian novelist Rudy Wiebe: Daut wia soo lang tridj, daut es meist nijch meea soo (That was so long ago that it’s almost not so anymore).

I understand my task this morning as personal reflections, not some kind of mini-history lesson. I’m not sure that I’m the right person to be doing this. I realize that I’m a logical choice, given that I’ve been involved in Mennonite historical activities for decades. But that involvement has included a lot of negativity and toxicity within denominational structures. I have found that Mennonite Church USA, at certain levels, is desperately afraid of the past. And I found that I didn’t belong.

But Anabaptism at 500, of course, isn’t only about MC USA. It’s a Mennonite World Conference project, among many other things. What work does a historical anniversary do for us? Or is that too utilitarian a way to look at it? Mennonites tend to be pretty utilitarian. It seems that when individuals haven’t figured out how to integrate and incorporate their past experiences, both negative and positive, into their present lives, it leads to problems. I tend to think that also applies to groups of people and organizations, beyond just individuals. Do anniversary commemorations help do that work?

I’m pretty ambivalent about these kinds of events. There’s a focus on numbers divisible by 10, or at least by 5. Why not pay attention to the stories of the past at other times? If we used binary numbers more instead of decimals, like computers, we might celebrate 512 years, which would be a 1 followed by 9 zeroes – a nice round number. Nevertheless, an anniversary commemoration offers an invitation or an opportunity to notice, to pay attention to something besides our immediate present day-to-day experience.

Another way that I’m ambivalent about these kinds of events is that we tend to default to the use of the word “celebrate,” which I’ve already used, if you noticed. There is a temptation (or even a desperate need) to look for in the past only what you admire or sometimes only what you hate. People often cherry-pick the past to support their current ideological agendas. “Hagiography” is an old word that originally referred to medieval biographies of saints, but by analogy has expanded to mean idealizing something in the past – covering up aspects that we might consider bad and remembering only what seems to be good. Anniversary celebrations very much lend themselves to hagiography. In more recent times, we also need an antonym to hagiography. There isn’t one in common use but some have suggested the word “hamartography,” from the Greek hamarto, meaning erroneous or sinful. It seems more and more common for some to emphasize only the failings of the past in order to highlight their own present-day assumed ethical and moral superiority.

The “Old Mennonite” way of doing Anabaptist history, associated with Harold S. Bender in the 1940s, was that Anabaptism had to be a certain way. There was a need to define who was in and who was out, a need to exclude those whose stories are uncomfortable to us in the present. Who are the “real” Anabaptists? Historians mostly got over that about 40 years ago, and a few of them never bought into it in the first place, but that idea of boundary-drawing is still pretty common in the sort of “general public” way of thinking.

If we think of history as a conversation with the past, it requires translation, openness and curiosity, as we would ideally approach a conversation with someone in the present. It doesn’t work well to coerce people to say what you want them to say, and it doesn’t work to coerce the people of the past into being and saying what you want. The past of 500 years ago was radically different. There’s a real danger of projecting our 21st-century understandings onto people of the past who would have had no comprehension of how we think.

I’m maybe a little at arm’s length from Anabaptism because of having been exposed to the Roman Catholic world growing up. I didn’t grow up in a Mennonite bubble, and certainly not an Anabaptist bubble, although I grew up in a Mennonite church. I doubt that I even heard the word Anabaptist before I was a teenager and began to be interested in church history and theology. I don’t think I would have been an Anabaptist in the 16th century. I might have been an Erasmian (which might make Dale Schrag happy), remaining in the official church but also sympathizing with reforms. None of us in the present day would question that it’s possible to be a good person without belonging to one of the Anabaptist-descended churches. Wouldn’t it have been possible to be a good person in the 16th century without being an Anabaptist? Couldn’t a person in the official church at that time love their neighbor?

I am, and we are, connected to many different stories. Some of those stories are very alien or distasteful; I do have my own sense of what fits my own moral and ethical superiority. The stories are all complex and messy and contradictory. An occasion like Anabaptism at 500 offers an invitation to look at a subset of those stories to which we are connected. I hope we can do that in a way that isn’t shallow and hagiographic, or shallow and hamartographic, but curious and open to learning something new.