Anabaptist

The radical Reformation — believers' baptism, a disciplined community, and historic non-resistance.

Mennonite, Amish, Hutterite, Brethren in Christ, Church of the Brethren, Apostolic Christian.

The radical Reformation's heirs — Mennonite, Amish, Hutterite, Brethren — who staked everything on a voluntary church, a disciplined community, and refusing to kill.

Heritage

Zurich, 1525: the first adult believers' baptisms in defiance of the city council, and the Schleitheim Confession two years later. Menno Simons gathered the persecuted movement in the Low Countries; Jakob Ammann's 1693 division produced the Amish; the Hutterites carried full community of goods from Moravia eventually to the Dakotas in the 1870s. Anabaptists began settling Pennsylvania at Germantown in 1683, and the Church of the Brethren descends from the 1708 baptisms at Schwarzenau, blending Anabaptist and Pietist streams. The family also includes the Brethren in Christ and the Apostolic Christian Church.

Theological family

Believers' baptism; discipleship — following Jesus concretely — as the test of faith; the church as a visible, disciplined, voluntary community distinct from the world; and nonresistance drawn straight from the Sermon on the Mount.

Who decides what

Congregational and communal: congregations under their own elders, bishops or ministers depending on the stream; church discipline historically ordering common life; conferences that serve rather than rule; and for the Old Orders, the church district as the real unit of authority. No headquarters anywhere.

What a first-time visitor would find

The widest worship range of any family its size: Old Order Amish worship in homes, in Pennsylvania German, without instruments; Hutterite colonies keep daily communal services; plain meetinghouses ring with four-part a cappella singing; and many Mennonite congregations worship like their evangelical neighbors. Foot washing and love feasts survive in several streams.

What it has always cared about

The peace witness and conscientious objection; mutual aid, from barn raisings to Mennonite Central Committee and Mennonite Disaster Service; simplicity; communal discernment over individual autonomy; and the martyrs remembered — the Martyrs Mirror still sits in Amish homes beside the Bible.

Its gift to the wider church

The free-church principle itself — a church of volunteers rather than subjects — for which Anabaptists died and which most of American Christianity now simply assumes; the peace-church witness that kept Christian nonviolence alive between Constantine and Gandhi's Christian readers; and public grace like the Amish forgiveness at Nickel Mines in 2006, which preached to the whole country without a pulpit.

Commonly confused with

With the Plymouth Brethren — unrelated; the bare string "brethren" cannot tell the families apart. The Amish with the Mennonites — related and distinct. And the Apostolic Christian Church with "Apostolic" Pentecostal bodies, another pure name collision.

Range of views inside it

From horse-and-buggy Old Orders to fully contemporary congregations; technology, dress, head coverings and political engagement all vary by stream and district; what does not vary is believers' baptism and the peace commitment.

A note from the mapmakers: Old Order congregations meet in homes, publish nothing online, and are systematically under-represented in our data — absence from the map is not absence from the county. Nothing here may be asserted of a specific congregation or district. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Anabaptist congregations typically…" and yield to each community's own practice.

Sources: Concise Encyclopedia of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites (Donald B. Kraybill, Johns Hopkins University Press) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)

Where Anabaptist churches are on the map

1,098 Anabaptist congregations appear on The Church Map, across 45 states.

Bodies and networks in this family

Moments that formed this family

  • 1681–1683 — Penn's holy experiment

    William Penn received the charter for Pennsylvania in 1681 and opened his "holy experiment" to all who confessed God — Quakers first, and soon Mennonites, German Baptist Brethren, and other persecuted groups from across Europe. Germantown, settled in 1683, became the American cradle of the Anabaptist churches.

    Pennsylvania was the first American place where traditions that disagreed deeply chose to live side by side on purpose.

  • 1688 — The Germantown protest against slavery

    Four Quakers and Mennonites in Germantown, Pennsylvania signed the first recorded protest against African slavery by a religious body in the English colonies, arguing that people who fled oppression could not practice it. The petition was tabled — and kept — and its argument never went away.

    The conscience of the American church against slavery spoke first from its smallest peace churches, two centuries before the nation listened.

  • 1946 — Church World Service and the relief table

    Seventeen denominations pooled their postwar relief work into Church World Service in 1946 — "help where help is needed, without regard to creed" — and the CROP hunger walks that followed put Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics and Mennonites on the same country roads carrying the same signs.

  • 2015–2022 — The Mennonite realignment

    Mennonite Church USA — itself a 2002 union — lost a substantial share of its congregations through the 2010s over sexuality and authority: Lancaster Mennonite Conference, the largest and oldest conference in American Mennonitism, completed its withdrawal in 2018 and now relates congregations nationally as LMC, and the Evana Network formed in 2015 from the same current.

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