In 2011, I declared during a stroll with a friend, “If I am going to call myself a disciple of Jesus, I want it to mean something!” 

I was expressing a concern dear to the early Anabaptists: Rather than merely worshiping Jesus or declaring Christian faith with words, can I try, imperfectly, to emulate Jesus’ life in the way I live? Can we?

My journey to Anabaptism has been circuitous.

I’m told I was baptized Lutheran as an infant (I don’t remember it!). What I do recall, for as long as I can re­member, is a strong sense of God’s presence. 

Even as a young child, I didn’t feel alone when I was alone. 

One Sunday evening, around the age of 6, I marched into the ­kitchen and interrupted my mother’s weekly ­coupon-clipping ritual to declare, “God is Jiminy Cricket!” — not a finger-wagging conscience but a presence, a companion on the journey, a holy spark with us and within us. 

Even at 6, I had an intuition that all people have this divine spark, that God is with all people, connecting us, making us holy. 

I was a weirdly deep little kid. 

I grew up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. My family became Catholic when I was 8, in a diocese where kids who underwent the “Rites of Christian Initiation for Children” received two sacraments for the price of one: First Communion and Confirmation.

I appreciated the parish’s post-Vatican II embrace of lay participation in the Mass. We had a drum set; hymns were projected on a screen. 

Best of all, whenever it came time for the Lord’s Prayer, we stood on the same level, laity and clergy alike, held hands and swayed as we sang “Our Father . . .” 

It felt like the priesthood of all believers — the egalitarianism I now love within the Anabaptist tradition. 

I struggled to square my experience of God’s presence with the Bible stories and liturgical scripts I heard in Mass.

And, despite my yearning for God, I struggled with theological questions.

Was I a Christian? What does that even mean?

“Conversion” came slowly. The heavens didn’t open. A dove didn’t descend.

It was more like thawing a chicken. 

Sometime in 2011, halfway through my master of divinity program, I finally felt like I understood what it meant to be a follower of Jesus. I longed to mark the occasion by being baptized. Again. 

My priest gently said Catholics don’t really do that. 

Now I wonder: Was I spiritually Anabaptist all along? 

How did I discover Anabaptism? 

In 2009, my mother, an avid gardener, fell in love with the Mennonite Central Committee cookbook Simply in Season. She loved the philosophy (as do I) behind local, seasonal eating and living simply so others may simply live.

By chance or by Providence, my mom lived close to Columbus Mennonite Church in Ohio. 

She became an active member, and I accompanied her to worship whenever I was home. The co-pastors at the time, a married couple, became close family friends. They officiated my sister’s wedding and provided my premarital counseling. 

When I moved to the greater Boston area with my husband and young child, this same Mennonite pastor ­couple reached out with a crazy idea.

“The Mennonite Congregation of Boston is looking for an interim pastor,” they said. “You should apply.”

“Um, I’m Catholic,” I replied. “Isn’t that . . . disqualifying?” 

After divinity school, I had been working as a lay Catholic minister for 10 years, serving people of any or no faith tradition, largely through Catholic organizations, as I wrestled with questions about some aspects of Catholic ecclesiology and teaching. 

Kind of like . . . Menno Simons!

It turns out all the earliest Anabaptists were Catholic, at one point. 

In fact, much of early Anabaptist spirituality was deeply rooted in some of my favorite aspects of the Catholic tradition:
— an affirmation of the Spirit as guide for discernment and biblical interpretation;
— an appreciation for mystical, direct experiences of God;
— an almost monastic focus on community as the site of living out one’s faith.

And so, astonishingly, the Mennonite Congregation of Boston didn’t care that I was Catholic.

Or a woman.

They hired me as their interim pastor, installed me as their long-term pastor and will ordain me in May. 

This summer I hope to be rebaptized, along with two of my congregants, making this new Anabaptist part of my life official.

Earlier in the ordination process, when I asked a representative from Mennonite Church USA if I needed to “convert” to the Mennonite tradition, she said, “Well, a Mennonite congregation has called you to be their pastor. So, you already are Mennonite.” 

Surprise!

It has been truly humbling to be chosen; truly freeing to exercise the gifts God has given me, regardless of my sex, in service of a community I get to live and grow with; truly welcoming never to have been forced by Anabaptism to formally repudiate my earlier Catholicism. 

What do I love about Anabaptism that I haven’t already mentioned?

I love the four central values of ­simplicity, community, justice and peace.

I love how Anabaptism has affirmed, over the centuries, the separation of church and state to protect religious freedom and prohibit religious persecution. 

Having grown up in contexts of ­ecumenism and religious diversity, I see in Anabaptism a vital, peaceful witness against Christian nationalism. The earliest Anabaptists knew firsthand the pain that can come when a church uses the strong arm of the state to impose its beliefs and practices. 

I love the fact that, during an online Anabaptist History and Theology course I took, we asked, “What is Anabaptism?” and the scholars we read could not agree. 

As someone who has come from a church with one central teaching body — a church where I worried that disagreeing with the teaching body meant I didn’t really belong — I have found freedom in Anabaptism’s decentralized, congregational autonomy and diversity.

If there is no one way to be an Anabaptist, then might there be room for us all?

Each with our questions and doubts? Each with our circuitous, imperfect journeys? 

Might each person, each congregation, be a patch in a big, beautiful quilt, trying to bring the warmth of Christ’s love to a cold and sometimes aching world?

I hope so!

Kate André has served as pastor of the Mennonite Congregation of Boston since October 2022 and as Mennonite chaplain at Harvard University since September 2023. This summer, she will become the chair of the Ministerial Leadership Committee of Atlantic Coast Conference of Mennonite Church USA. She resides outside of Boston with her husband and young child.