Anabaptists like to stake a claim on “community.” It’s “the center of our life,” we say in a popular threefold confession (along with claiming Jesus as the center of our faith and reconciliation as the center of our work).
As an Anabaptist distinctive, though, “community” falls short of true distinction. Doesn’t every church or small town claim to be a “tight-knit community”?
Strong bonds alone don’t make Anabaptists special.
The uniqueness of Anabaptist community lies in how it mixes with other beliefs and traditions to produce a peculiar (in a positive sense, we hope) form of Christian faith and life.
Anabaptist diversity offers opportunities to learn from others’ ways — like the Old Order practice of “taking counsel” that Joseph S. Miller describes in our February issue. Twice a year before communion, members are asked if they’re abiding by the community’s expectations. Are they at peace with God and neighbors? This act of self-examination, Miller says, creates “a rhythm of surrender woven into the fabric of spiritual life.”
The principle of taking counsel resonates with Anabaptists beyond the Old Orders. In Christian Leader, the U.S. Mennonite Brethren magazine, Connie Nicholson, an MB pastor in Fresno, Calif., connects taking counsel with discerning God’s will through “interpretive reading of Scripture under the inspiration of the Spirit in the context of community.”
This kind of counsel is more than giving and receiving advice. It’s a search for divine wisdom. “Discerning the will of God is a delicate process of listening and preferring one another, knowing our primary calling is to love God and love others,” Nicholson says.
Taking counsel might sound like taking medicine. Usually, we would rather be our own boss. But just as there’s strength in numbers, often there’s wisdom, too. Scripture is an example of crowd wisdom.
Yet we can’t always count on a crowd to be wise. Christian pacifism wouldn’t stand a chance against Christian nationalism in a large-scale popularity contest. But in a smaller crowd — a faith community — peculiar (in the positive sense) beliefs and practices can become normal.
Old Order Anabaptists are living proof. Humility and self-denial undergird Old Order life. It’s the way of Gelassenheit — yielding, or submitting, to the community and to God’s will as they understand it.
It’s the opposite of imposing one’s will on others. It’s the reverse of the amoral worldview that’s ascendant in the United States today. After U.S. forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Stephen Miller, one of President Trump’s closest advisers, defended U.S. imperialism by appealing to unbridled power: “We live in a world . . . that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” (See page 43 for further comment on Miller’s words.)
In an era when many American Christians admire political leaders who exercise power without constraint, the noncoercive Old Order way stands out as profoundly countercultural.
Old Order communities require surrender of personal freedom, but only for those who have freely chosen to do this. They cherish the principle of uncompelled faith. “We don’t want anyone to be coerced to be a member,” says an Old Order man in Horse-and-Buggy Mennonites (Penn State Press, 2006). They discourage pinpointing a moment of childhood conversion, believing salvation is a gradual project. Decisions about church membership often extend into young adulthood.
A commitment to baptizing mature believers — who understand what it means to die to self and rise to new life in Christ — supports the indivisible threefold Anabaptist confession (Jesus, community, reconciliation): Without Jesus at the center, a community is just another close-knit group.
A Jesus-centered community follows Jesus’ noncoercive way. Not only did he refuse to compel belief, but his nonviolence set the ultimate example of rejecting the world’s “iron law” of force.
Embodied in a faith community, Jesus’ law of love is compelling (2 Corinthians 5:14, NIV) in a positive sense: admirable and attractive.
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