Anabaptists aren’t the only ones marking Anabaptism’s 500th anniversary this year. All churches that practice believers baptism share in that heritage.

Mennonites and Baptists from two denominations in northern and central Illinois met to build on common ground Oct. 23 at Lombard Mennonite Church in Illinois.

The idea of the gathering came about when Doug Luginbill, conference minister for Central District Conference of Mennonite Church USA, met Michael Woolf, a co-associate regional minister with the American Baptist Churches of Metro Chicago and an ordained pastor in the American Baptist and Alliance of Baptists denominations.

Luginbill and Woolf both noted the similarities among those Baptist denominations and Mennonites. There is common ground, Luginbill said, “in our theologies, in our perspectives, our hopes for what the church is called to be in this time and place.”

Woolf, senior minister at Lake Street Church in Evanston, Ill., added that American Baptists and Mennonites have a similar “commitment to a non-
hierarchical way of church” and approach to social witness. 

The need for that witness is greater than it was even six months ago, especially in the Chicago area. Woolf has joined nonviolent protests and prayer vigils at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Broadview, Ill., and is among those who have been assaulted by federal and state officers. On All Saints’ Day, Nov. 1, he was shot with a pepper-spray pellet while wearing a clerical collar and walking slowly. 

Federal agents had been active the previous day in city neighborhoods, Evanston and neighboring suburbs, taking people without showing warrants and arresting multiple U.S. citizens, according to local leaders.

Gerald Mast, professor of communication at Bluffton University in Ohio, was the keynote speaker. He attended the Believers Church Conference in Amsterdam in June, which had the theme of “radical renewal.” There, Mast said, “The basic assumption that undergirded every presentation I heard, from Baptists and Mennonites alike, is that the gospel of Jesus Christ has a social shape. Salvation through Jesus Christ is not just a belief that we have but a conviction that we practice. The work of Jesus Christ is to radically renew our lives, our relationships, our communities and our world.”

At that conference and at the event in October, Mast told the story of a merger of an English Baptist congregation and a Mennonite congregation in Amsterdam in the early 1600s. The Baptist leaders had left England for the Netherlands for religious freedom. Some of the Baptists, including leader John Smyth, were rebaptized. Historians disagree about whether he did this due to the influence of Mennonites or merely an awareness of Anabaptism. Mast thinks he decided to receive believers baptism on his own.

Then Smyth and more than 40 Baptists applied to join the Mennonite church in Amsterdam. Some of the Baptists split off, and the Mennonites had a variety of responses. Some of the Baptists returned to England, deciding emigration wasn’t the right response to persecution. 

With “the active participation of all members in the life and leadership of the church,” Mast said, conflict can lead to new relationships even as it also reveals divisions. He sees what happened in Amsterdam “as a story of the movement of the Holy Spirit within a believers church polity that prizes emergent conviction, ecclesial creativity and freedom of conscience.” 

Mast highlighted the 1610 Confession of Faith formed by the Mennonites and signed by the Baptists in Amsterdam. Showing the influence of Baptist leader Smyth’s theology of the work of Christ, it makes a connection between their view of Christ and their ethics: Participating in spiritual warfare of the heavenly king requires setting aside earthly weapons.

Participants noted that Mennonites today rarely talk about spiritual warfare — receiving from Christ “spiritual weapons” to combat “the spirits of evil with their associates upon earth,” as the 1610 Confession describes it. Baptists do commonly.

Among table groups, the 20 people who attended discussed Christology, peace and the new birth based on sections of the Confession of Faith that came out of the 17th-century Baptist-
Mennonite merger and what our theology in those areas means today.

Carolyn Yoder, from Roanoke Mennonite Church in Eureka, Ill., summarized one of the table discussions on discipleship, noting that the demands of following Jesus are different in our time: “It’s not just sharing tomatoes, it’s going and blowing a whistle when ICE shows up in your neighborhood.” Carrying whistles has become a common practice in Chicago and elsewhere to alert people of the presence of federal agents in hopes of preventing their neighbors from being taken.

Michael Ware, pastor of North Shore Baptist Church in Chicago and a board member of Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, sees peace as part of his Baptist faith. He sees Mennonites as having stood against participating in war as part of their discipleship, while Baptists have at times accommodated war and “gotten caught up in the world’s idolatrous stances.” 

It is a struggle for Ware, as a pastor concerned with peace and justice, that two young people in his congregation recently enlisted in the military. He sees conscientious objection as Christ’s work visible in the world.

Jacki Belile, an American Baptist pastor serving a United Church of Christ congregation in Chicago, has Anabaptist roots on her mother’s side. She has been seeking more connections with Anabaptists in recent years. 

“There’s something about the Anabaptist humility, really wrestling with how we’re using power, how we’re seeing our opponents,” that she appreciates in contrast to what she often hears in progressive and mainline Protestant spaces. She finds Anabaptists to be “engaging and wrestling and truthtelling without demonizing.”

During a worship service, Mast preached on 1 Corinthians 3. The Apostle Paul responded to divisions in the Corinthian church with a unity based on the power of the cross being its low status, weakness and shame. 

“The only foundation that we may trust is this weakness that is despised by the world, found in Christ,” Mast said. Today, amid rising Christian nationalism, “we can see that much of the Christian church in the United States is not based on the foundation of Jesus Christ alone.” 

In contrast, the Mennonite-Baptist story Mast recounted is “one example of the interrelated, ecclesial networks of peaceable, even if schismatic, Anabaptist faith communities that have survived and even thrived for 500 years, grounded in a believers church theology that rejects the attachment of Christian faith to a national or imperial political system or to a denominational empire.” 

Beyond an opportunity to learn from each other, the event was a starting point for social action, said Eric Pot­ter, conference minister for Illinois Conference of MC USA and one of the planners. Quoting the late John Lewis, a longtime member of Congress and civil rights activist, Potter asked, “How might we get in ‘good trouble’ together?”