The January issue ­of Anabaptist World reminded me of the date of the first Anabaptist baptisms 500 years ago: Jan. 21. I realized this was also Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the day after the U.S. presidential inauguration. This made me feel even more strongly that I had to mark the event on that day.

I called Joanna Lawrence Shenk, one of our pastors at First Mennonite Church of San Francisco, and asked, with some urgency: “Is anyone doing anything on January 21? I don’t want to let that day go by without doing something.” She responded: “We can do something!”

Joanna and I planned a communion service for noon on that Tuesday near the Federal Building in San Francisco. We knew it was a workday, and a lot of our members couldn’t show up. But when I announced the event at church, I still wanted to get across how important this day was. The first words that came out of my mouth were: “I’ve been waiting for 2025 for a long time.”

It seemed like an odd assertion. Was it true? It felt true.

I am old enough to remember the 450th anniversary of Anabaptism in 1975. Much of my childhood and adolescence had revolved around the Vietnam War. As Mennonites, we debated how to respond to the draft, and we marched against the war. Our convictions left many of us feeling at odds with our non-Mennonite neighbors.

That war ended in 1975. I wondered if this had engrained in my mind a link between activism and anniversary.

After my announcement that Sunday, another longtime member of our congregation, Karen Kreider Yoder, came up to me and said, “I have been waiting for 2025 for a long time, too.”

As Joanna and I planned the service, we assigned roles to both clergy and laity and invited clergy to wear their stoles, because this was to be a public event, not just for ourselves.

To make clear what we were about, Joanna made a sign proclaiming, “Christians Challenging Christian Nationalism Since 1525.”

We gathered at United Nations Plaza. San Francisco is where leaders from countries from around the world signed the U.N. Charter in 1945. We found a black granite obelisk with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which became our backdrop.

Fifteen people showed up, including a passer-by who joined spontaneously. We sang, prayed and spoke from our hearts. Each administered communion to the person standing to our left.

We reflected on the powerful event that took place half a millennium ago. The description in The Chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren is striking: The group of radical reformers who baptized each other felt abandoned. Their leader until that point, Ulrich Zwingli, had just retreated toward mainstream positions that harmonized with a tighter church-state bond. One of the positions Zwingli abandoned was adult baptism.

Georg Blaurock, Conrad Grebel and others in the group of rebaptizers did not have long to live, but what time they had they used relentlessly — and, seemingly, fearlessly — to spread their Anabaptist Christian convictions.

A special moment for us was the singing of “We Are Here, Now.” Our minister of music, Pat Plude, wrote it for the event on that day. It strengthened and guided us with its melody, its reference to our ancestors and its final words: “We are sowing seeds for a better world.”

Jim Lichti is a member of First Mennonite Church of San Francisco.