The Anabaptist Anachronism . . . maybe.

Can I use that word here??

It was a weekend with many occasions calling for the word, Anabaptist, a shibboleth of sorts signaling a body of faith and understanding that need no longer be enunciated. Values that are assumed. A standard on which the thought and conversation at the Mennonite Church Canada Assembly leaned heavily. We were Anabaptists, and we all knew what that means.

Well, what does it mean? Semantically, it’s a 16^th Century designation tacked on to a growing sect of radical reformers, a group that came to be distinguished as those who discard their infant baptism and “re-baptize” (or ana-baptize) each other as adults capable of making the thoughtful choice to follow Christ. We still baptize our members as adults, but there’s more to the cloud that is Anabaptism than that: we don’t bear arms (most of us), we preach salvation as an individual matter and we believe that service to our neighbours and those in need is central to the Christian walk. We abhor and eschew physical violence as a solution to disagreement (most of us). Although our sense of community has been eroded by currents in popular culture, it’s not dead yet. The future will tell whether or not this consciousness can survive.

There are some of us, of course, who wonder about the efficacy of identifying as Anabaptists in a post-modern, post-Christian milieu. For one, the word is an anachronism conveying little anymore without explanation. Not like the word Christian, although that word too means different things to different people, different denominations.

In a sense, names—although chosen by us—belong to others. They are the means for identifying where and with whom we belong. They satisfy a need in people to categorize one another. Lutheran, Mennonite, Swedenborgian, Mormon, Catholic. Knowing which category one belongs to provides some knowledge—supposedly—of the person with whom we’re dealing. Like ethnicity and nationality: Canadian, Aussie, Latvian, Jewish, Indigenous. “Oh, he’s Filipino! That explains it!”

A downside of bearing and clinging to a name is called “labeling,” that is the making of judgments about people based on their membership in a category. We can be proudly “Canadian,” or “Mennonite,” or “Anabaptist,” and although that answers a need for belonging, it also narrows down the possibilities when we go abroad, meet strangers, apply for jobs, etc., etc. Churches wishing to draw members seem to have more success if their names don’t include old and familiar labels: “Gospel Chapel,” or “Pinecrest Community Church,” for instance, are less likely to convey the message that this is a specialty congregation, therefore meant for a special group. “Mennonite” carries the burden of the automatic raising of images of buggies and kerchiefs even before anything else is known about a church, say, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

I confess that I feel little kinship with Anabaptists of the 16^th Century in South Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Adult or child baptism is not an issue with me; I see little to persuade me that one has merit over the other. A demeanour of kindness, insistence on justice, a listening humility provide much clearer signposts of genuine faith than the timing of a symbolic rite. 

Neither would I categorically eschew the use of force; there are occasions when it’s necessary to protect innocent life. So am I an Anabaptist? And if I insist that I am, will that make of me a type of Christian willing to uphold a tenet like adult baptism to the point of martyrdom? Hardly.

Granted, the insistence on adult baptism wasn’t in and of itself the making of Anabaptism. Martin Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and Grebel found the gospels to demand reforms in the church politic that reached far beyond ritual. And although they broke with each other on questions like faith vs works, the Reformation’s scope was broad and led to changes that were far overdue, that signaled a sea change in the understanding of the gospel as applied to both the individual human heart and to the collective we call the church.

Modern Anabaptists, and particularly post-modern Children of Anabaptism, on the whole feel little need to be categorized by their neighbours as being different from them because they are Mennonite, or Anabaptists, or Rotarian, or Evangelical, etc. The trend in world culture is opening for us an opportunity to see ourselves as world citizens as opposed to nationally, provincially, ethnically identifying ourselves. It’s time for the world-wide gospel folk to wake out of their stupor, their categories, their navel-gazing habits and be the salt and the leaven in a chaotic, violent, needy world. 

In crises, aid organizations band together to get the feeding of the hungry done because they’re motivated by purpose, not by subtle doctrinal differences. Let this be our model. We are not either Catholic or Protestant, not Evangelical or monastic, not Anabaptist or Reformed. We were always meant to be purpose-oriented, an orientation that in this day could also provide a sure escape from the malaise we find ourselves in.

We don’t live beside the world; we are the world. Let’s join hands to rescue ourselves from our self-inflicted pain.

Heaven is visualized as having many mansions, (John 14:2) but I’m guessing none of them has ANABAPTISTS ONLY painted above the door.