I have been a part of churches that fall under the banner “Anabaptist” in some form or another all my life. This is true even when the churches themselves identified as “non-denominational.”
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The phrase “Anabaptist” covers a large swath of Christian denominations. Some have even complicated things by identifying themselves as “conservative Anabaptists.”
I’m one of those. I don’t even entirely know what I mean when I use that phrase.
Are we talking about Hutterites? Amish? Beachy Amish? Eastern Mennonite? German Baptist?
Or are we simply using the phrase to differentiate ourselves from those “liberal Anabaptist” who believe in female preachers, same-sex marriage, and higher criticism?
Honestly, your guess is as good as mine.
I’ve had reasonable exposure to various types of Christian denominations, and I willingly self-identify as “Anabaptist” for now. But I’ve had people accuse me of not being “Anabaptist,” and I think they primarily meant I wasn’t conservative enough.
And let’s be honest, while the word “conservative” gets used to mean a variety of things, I think most commonly “conservative” is determined by particular dress and conduct of life. If that’s how we are defining “conservative Anabaptism,” then they are right. I am not “conservative” in that way.
But I also refuse to allow “Anabaptism” to merely speak to dress and conduct of life.
Others wish I would drop the phrasing “Anabaptist” altogether, and I can empathize with them. It’s tough to read through 1 Corinthians or Ephesians and not come away convicted about the way we divide ourselves in the body of Christ. We are not to follow after individuals like Calvin or Simons or Luther. We are to simply follow Jesus.
Not only is this central to Anabaptism, but it’s central to Christianity.
At the same time, part of what causes division is differing perspectives on challenging theological issues. Having language that pin-points the differences can be helpful even in the process of coming together as fellow saints in Christ.
We are no more unified if we continue to hold our perspectives above others… but do it without putting a denominational label to it.
My observation has been that many continue to live with a divided mindset even when they present themselves as not following one particular individual or organization.
In light of all this, for the purposes of clarifying what I am talking specifically about, I don’t mind using “Anabaptist” in appropriate places. And when I use it, I’m generally referring to anyone who comes from a church tradition that..
- Finds their roots in the Radical Reformation
- Seeks to take the Bible at face value and shape their lifestyle around what it says (with emphasis on “lifestyle”)
- Believes in a strong distinction between the church community and the world
- Agrees, for the most part, with the Schleithem Confession of Faith
Part of what makes Anabaptism hard to define is that there is no clearly articulated “Anabaptist theology,” such as we might see with Calvinism or Lutheranism.
Therefore, I’m not going to get too dogmatic on clarifying whether someone qualifies as a “Anabaptist.” If what I have to say seems applicable to your church setting, then the message is as much for your church as it is mine.
To be clear, I appreciate the church tradition I have grown up in. I have been shaped by and will always hold dearly to the biblical value placed on family, community, servanthood, pacifism, believers baptism. I have been shaped by and will always appreciate the cultural values of hard work, modesty, four-part harmony music, and good food.
This article is not being written from a desire to curse Anabaptists, but from a love for the greater body of people and a desire to see us grow to deeper maturity in Christ.
Having said that, the more I live and minister within Anabaptist contexts, the more concerned I am about how little we make lasting disciples.
If we’re not careful, “Anabaptists” will take on a distinctly memorialized position in society, much like the Amish, Old Order Mennonite, or Hutterite colonies.
What I mean is that the children of current-day “Anabaptists” will continue to exit the church tradition until those left will be so far removed from social norms and current-day struggles of society that interacting with them will be like entering a completely different world.
For many, it already is.
To be clear, I am not only speaking of “conservative Anabaptists.” I am also speaking of the more liberal conferences within the “Anabaptist” framework. Many of the MCUSA churches I know are filled with older people. I don’t see a lot of new, meaningfully lasting discipleship happening.
Neither do I see it among the more conservative conferences, including the BMA, which I have been a part of for the last decade.
I fully acknowledge that I am looking at this from a narrow and anecdotal perspective. There are pockets within “Anabaptism” that don’t fully represent what I say here. But I have also heard enough from an array of people throughout Anabaptist denominations that I feel confident that my observations are not unique to my narrowed experience.
Here’s why I say Anabaptists fail to make disciples:
We have focused on outward behavior more than inner transformation by the Gospel being realized in the hearts of people through a discipleship relationship with Jesus
What happens in your church when someone comes to faith in Jesus and is baptized? Are they immediately expected to give up smoking, take off their jewelry, stop playing video games, start wearing modest clothing, put a head covering on (if they’re a woman), or no longer live with their date?
Maybe they aren’t even allowed to be baptized if these things still exist in their lives.
Is Deconstruction Destructive?
The part vividly etched into my memory is the overwhelming feeling that if I actually went down the road of my questions, if I actually began to listen to these other Christians and embrace the faith they held so beautifully, it would completely unravel the life that had been created around the kind of faith I currently embraced.
On the flip side, some conferences within Anabaptism seem to be afraid of even exhorting people to a transformed life. This inevitably breeds the silent question, What’s the point?
Jesus changes people’s lives. But when we put expectation on people arriving at a certain place before them having experienced the inner transformation of Jesus through the Gospel, we are actually manipulating them, not discipling them. And this is true even when the expectation is that they won’t change.
For too many generations, we have created a false dichotomy between belief and obedience. We say things like, “It’s not enough to just believe in Jesus, we need to also obey Him,” giving the impression that it’s even possible to believe His words to be true without obeying Him.
Or, we say belief is what matters most and utterly neglect the volume of scripture that paints a vision of the transformed life that happens in Jesus Christ.
When someone meets Jesus, they will obey Him. Learning obedience may take a process of years. It won’t be easy. But I have tasted and seen too much to continue on with this notion that we must primarily focus on getting people to obey.
But they will obey. Deep in our souls we know something is wrong in this world. We should not let the abuses of misguided notions about sexuality, about the nature of scripture, or anything to prevent us from gently nudging people toward walking in the new life the Holy Spirit gives us when we believe.
This wrong focus has led to the inability to walk with sinners AS fellow sinners. We lack patience and spiritual fervor in grassroots discipleship. We are primarily focused on getting the outward changed or making the person feel liked. Few are actually meeting Jesus.
And when the outward has changed we assume everything on the inside is also perfectly aligned.
Far too often, it’s mass chaos inside. This is true not only of converts coming in, but of our own selves as well.
We have created an ethnocentric culture of ecclesiastical community
First of all, we are not making disciples. It’s hard to create a diverse ecclesiastical community when the primary way we grow is through our own offspring.
Even if we are making disciples, in a church of one hundred people, there may be four or five young believers who come from another background. If there are one hundred adult believers in the church, why are there not at least one hundred people we are discipling?
Secondly, and more crucially, we have made it difficult for anyone to join our church communities. We have stipulated our unique cultural applications of biblical principles as being necessary to require of members. We have been pastorally irresponsible in how we have chosen to flesh out (or not flesh out) theology for dealing with families of common-law relationships, divorce and remarriage, Christians who face same-sex attraction, believers struggling with addictions, and other crucial, pastoral issues.
Does one have to have had a perfect sexual past in order to be able to become a new member of your church?
Can someone become a wholly integrated part of your body if they made previous relationship mistakes?
Is the only way someone of another ethnicity will ever lead in your church by exhibiting the same kind of temperament, personality, and style as yourself or others like you?
A church that perpetuates only a select group of people… might… not… be… a biblical “church.”
It certainly won’t last.
We lack biblical literacy
We may be reading the Bible, but we don’t always know HOW to read it in its proper context. Many mistake “taking the Bible at face value” for our personal conclusions of what is said in English regardless of literary or cultural context. Therefore, we often end up adapting flawed interpretations.
For example, some teach that women should not speak during church.
They cite 1 Corinthians 14:34 and 1 Timothy 2:12 as teaching this. What’s interesting about the 1 Corinthians passage is that it comes three chapters after Paul taught how a woman can pray or prophesy in an honorable manner.
Now some argue that 1Co. 11:1-16 is not referring to the church gathering, since verses 17-18 say, “But in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. For, in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you.”
Nothing about Paul’s usage of “come together” here signifies that he is speaking of a particularly different event than the first portion of this chapter. He is simply pointing out that this is something they are not doing well as opposed to something they are doing well (verse 2).
Through the first ten chapters of 1 Corinthians, Paul has been addressing issues in the church, some that are experienced when they gather and some that simply exist within the ecclesiastical community.
Paul uses the same phrase in chapter 14 verse 26. Does this mean that chapter 14:1-25 is addressing when they are not together? If so, when did they become “not together” for 14:1-25 if they were now “together” in 11:17-34?
But let’s take a closer look at 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2.
In 1 Corinthians 14:22, Paul specifically states that “prophecy” is for “believers,” not “unbelievers.” In other words, prophecy is a gift that will be exercised not when believers are apart, but when they come together. So the idea that Paul’s instruction for women to be covered when they prophesy has to do with prophesying outside of the church gathering makes no sense if prophesy is explicitly for the purpose of the church.
There’s something deeper going on in 1 Corinthians 14 that Paul is addressing when he says “women should keep silent,” (14:34).
Just as Paul was addressing a negative experience of their coming together in 11:17-34, so Paul again addresses a negative experience of their coming together in 14:26-40.
Paul’s letters are like listening to one side of a telephone conversation. We know what he said, but we don’t know exactly what he’s responding to. We don’t have the communication that was given to him which led him to write the letters.
While we don’t know specifically what was going on when the Corinthian believers came together, we know they were divided and not waiting for each other (11:17-34) and it was a rather chaotic experience (14:26-40). Paul hones them in by reminding them that everything they do should “be done for building up” (14:26b).
If someone speaks in tongues, there should be someone to interpret. If there is no interpreter, the person speaking in tongues should be quiet (14:27-28).
“What’s the Big Deal about the Head Covering?”
The tradition of men not covering their heads and women covering their heads serve as signs for remembering and showing honor of each other’s place in Christ, which helps us walk in unity.
Only two or three prophets should speak, and the others weigh what is said (14:29-32).
God is not characterized by disorder, but peace (14:33).
It comes within this context that Paul says women should “be silent in the churches” (14:34).
Paul cites the Law as a reason for why women should be silent. It’s an allusion to Deuteronomy 28:49-50, which says,
The LORD will bring a nation against you from far away, from the end of the earth, swooping down like the eagle, a nation whose language you do not understand, a hard-faced nation who shall not respect the old or show mercy to the young.
In verse 21 of 1 Corinthians 14, Paul had quoted Isaiah 28:11-12,
For by people of strange lips
and with a foreign tongue
the LORD will speak to this people,
to whom he has said,
“This is rest;
give rest to the weary;
and this is repose”;
yet they would not hear.
Given the context and the passages of the Law that Paul refers to, we can tell that there must have been great chaos taking place when the churches came together. In 1 Timothy 2, Paul adds to the context by saying “I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man.” This indicates that this chaos must have involved women who were ignorant of the scriptures trying to speak authoritatively of them even when men who were more educated in the scriptures were present.
It would be presumptuous to say Paul is saying women should never talk in church.
He had just exhorted them to show honor by covering their heads when they pray and prophesy (11:5). While we don’t know precisely why Paul thinks it is important for these women to be silent in order to help bring order to the service, it is clear he is attempting to bring order where chaos exists.
When we carelessly handle the scriptures and render arbitrary interpretations to surface readings of God’s Word, we inevitably turn people away from the scriptures.
The message of Jesus is beautiful.
It is liberating, for men and women.
We must be willing to do the careful work of deeper Bible study if we’re going to teach the scriptures well so that we don’t end up communicating a message about Jesus that ends up demeaning fellow saints.
Let’s not be afraid to change
As I said at the beginning, this article is not written from a desire to denigrate “conservative Anabaptism.” Rather, it’s written from a love for the greater body of people and a desire to see us grow to deeper maturity in Christ.
The process of maturation always involves change.
A child does not come to full maturity without significant changes in his physical features as well as changes in his habits and behaviors. The same is true for our faith journeys. We cannot be afraid to change if we actually want a deeper walk with Jesus.
Sometimes this process involves taking a look at things you have believed without ever really thinking through. Sometimes it involves re-evaluating even the conclusions you came to when you thought through your beliefs at a deeper level.
Holding our beliefs up to the light and looking at them from different angles, testing them against the full scope of God’s Word, is not an easy process.
It’s not a safe process.
Questioning what we’ve been taught all our lives destabilizes our sense of equilibrium. It has the potential of completely derailing our faith altogether. Does that mean we shouldn’t do it? Can it be destructive to deconstruct the teaching we’ve been fed in order to test how true it actually is?
Yes it can be.
In fact, I think it has been destructive for me, at times.
But I know that it would have been far more destructive to not have been given the space to wrestle with my faith. It would have absolutely derailed my faith to have, when asking tough questions, been forced to only find the specific answers my parents and mentors wanted me to find.
Being willing to take second and third looks at our beliefs is a necessary process for developing mature faith in ourselves and those we disciple.
I’ve written an essay on some of my journey in this process. It’s called, Is Deconstruction Destructive? If you would like to read it for yourself, you can do so here.
What are your observations? Do you think a Christianity that lacks biblical literacy, has developed an ethnocentric ecclesiastical community, and focuses on outward behavior instead of inward transformation can last? What other aspects of Anabaptism have led to our lack of disciple-making? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.
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