A girl jumps onto first base as Mennonite children play baseball at recess outside their one-room schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. AP/Wide World Photos.

Mennonites

(religion, spiritualism, and occult)

Mennonites are the direct descendants of the Anabaptist movement (see Anabaptists) of the sixteenth century. Followers of the Swiss teacher Menno Simons (c. 1496-c. 1561),

from whom they got their name, they became an important religious force in the Netherlands and Germany, moved to the United States during colonial times, and eventually formed important communities in the prairie provinces of central and western Canada.

Like all denominations, they have suffered divisions over the years, the Amish being their most well known spiritual descendants.

Mennonites are considered to be conservative (see Evangelical) in theology. They practice the ritual of foot-washing, for instance, following the example and command of Jesus at the Last Supper (John 13). They require women to wear a head-covering during worship, following the advice of the apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 11:5). They forbid the taking of oaths, as in a court of law. Also forbidden is the holding of public office. They insist on plainness of dress and practice congregational polity. Each church is autonomous and calls its own minister.

One of the most important aspects of the Mennonite church is its peace witness. Along with Quakers and the Church of the Brethren, Mennonites are known for being pacifists. They forbid military service to their members, substituting civilian relief services overseen by the Mennonite Central Committee during times of war.

On any given Sunday, over one million Mennonites worldwide continue a 450-year-old worship tradition dating back to the time of the Protestant Reformation.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Mennonites

a Protestant sect that arose in Holland in the late 1530’s and early 1540’s as a result of the degeneration of revolutionary Anabaptism into a pacifist sect after the defeat of the Peasant War of 1524—26 and the Miinster Commune of 1534-35.

The name of the sect is linked with Menno Simons (died 1561), a Catholic clergyman who was converted to Anabaptism in 1531 and later reorganized remnants of the Anabaptist sect into a new congregation which was later called the congregation of Mennonites. The doctrines of the Mennonites are defined in the Declaration of the Chief Articles of Our General Christian Faith (1632). The Mennonites consider the most essential features of the Christian to be humility, rejection of violence (even if perpetrated for the common good), and moral self-perfection. They await the “second coming”and the “millennial reign”of Christ. They baptize only adults.

Mennonite communities are exclusive, and individuality is suppressed within them. Shunning modern civilization, the Mennonites adhere to a distinctly old-fashioned form of dress, hair-style, and way of life. From Holland the Mennonites migrated to many countries, including Russia, to which they came in the late 18th century as a result of the recruitment of colonists by Catherine II for settlement in the frontier lands; their numbers in the USSR are insignificant. The greatest number of adherents live in the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, and the Federal Republic of Germany. The total number of Mennonites does not exceed 300,000. The Mennonite World Conference, centered in Canada, has existed since 1930.

REFERENCES

Klibanov, A. I. Mennonity. Moscow-Leningrad, 1931.
Krest’ianinov, V. F. Mennonity. Moscow, 1967.
Smith, C. G. The Story of the Mennonites, 3rd ed. Newton, 1950.
The Mennonite Encyclopedia, vols. 1-4. Hillsboro, 1955-59.

Mentioned in

References in periodicals archive

To play their characters, the actors had access to a Mennonite consultant, who advised them on the culture, the language and the belief system.

'Getting out is the hard part'

Menno Simons, a theologian and the namesake of the Mennonite church, joined the Anabaptist movement as it reached the Netherlands.

The Communal Ethos of the Mennonite Central Committee: Testing the Bounds of Community in Kenya

There is some interest among Canadian Mennonites in the liturgical forms of worship that characterize Anglicanism, say Sharman and Mennonite dialogue co-chair Melissa Miller.

Anglican-Mennonite dialogue begins

Chapter 1, "Narratives of Religious Belief," sets the stage for understanding the ways Mennonite religious identity in North America has been "(re)constructed" and individualized over the course of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Not Talking Union: An Oral History of North American Mennonites and Labour

Susan Kauffman, one of Covenant's founders, grew up in a conservative Mennonite church in Indiana.

A QUIET REVOLUTION: A small Mennonite congregation breaks LGBT barriers

The presumption within the Mennonite Brethren community of growers was not that Cesar Chavez was wrong, but that it was not growers' fault that they had to rely upon immigrant labour.

Not Talking Union: An Oral History of North American Mennonites and Labour

Kent captures Mennonite life with authenticity and warmth; her research with the Mennonite community has paid off.

Once, in a Town Called Moth

After Identity takes as its central premise the enduring premise and just as enduring problem of cultural authenticity; the propinquity with and refusal of cultural separatism creates "the Mennonite Thing," a refusal of not so much of "the beliefs" but, rather, of the beliefs as solitary definition of Mennonite identity.

Robert Zacharias, ed.: After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America

Jamie Pitts, a professor of church history at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, explores similar questions of boundaries and ecclesiology with a probing theological critique of believer's baptism as a "practice" that sharply distinguishes the church from the world.

In this issue

The three part division consists of Neufeld's previously unpublished memoir (My Path of Thorns) of surviving the Gulag (1933-1939), followed by a more general survey of Russian Mennonite life in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (1929-1949) privately published in 1957 as Tiefenivege (Tragic Passages), now in abbreviated English translation; and a sixty-page letter/memoir to his wife completed in 1955.

Path of Thorns: Soviet Mennonite Life under Communist and Nazi Rule

One chapter deals with Mennonite intellectual elites (theologians and historians), another with Mennonite corporate mythology (described as extolling conformity, humility, and deferential obedience), and a third with Mennonite workers' identities and workplace experiences.

Janis Thiessen. Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba

I've always considered it to be a very appropriate name, since the Brandywine River together with its east and west branches was the very epicenter of the Mennonite settlements in North America from 1683-1783.

Brandywine--the river