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Celebrating 500 across Canada
While there have been no reports of baptisms taking place in Canadian Mennonite churches on January 21—the 500th anniversary of the first Anabaptist baptisms—Mennonites across the country marked the start of this quincentenary in a variety of ways. Vancouver-area congregations gathered for a joint service at Peace Mennonite in Richmond, B.C., on January 19. The…
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Sorting good from bad without being defensive
I was interested to attend the annual Bechtel Lecture about Anabaptist beginnings at Conrad Grebel University College delivered by Karl Koop, professor of theology and history at Canadian Mennonite University last Friday. He discussed the widespread social upheaval of 1524-25 which surrounded and informed our forebears, noting that the Schleitheim confession that Anabaptists adopted in…
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A sobering, optimistic challenge
Stuart Murray’s Post-Christendom: Church and Mission in a Strange New World is a bold project. Murray is a church planter, founding director of the Centre for Anabaptist Studies in Great Britain and author of The Naked Anabaptist. In this book, he takes on the brave task of naming the time the Western church is in,…
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Bearing witness: Martyr Story of Anna Jansz
Anna Jansz was born in 1510 to a well-to-do family living in the town of Briel on the island of Putten near the North Sea coastline of South Holland. Following her marriage to Arent Jansz, she and her husband accepted baptism in 1534 from Maynaart von Emden, a Münsterite Anabaptist leader who had been sent…
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Adventures in reading the Bible together
With the 500th anniversary of Anabaptism this year, I am looking forward to receiving my copy of the Anabaptist Community Bible. During the winter of 2022–23, I was part of two Bible study groups which were formed in response to a call from MennoMedia as part of this Bible project. The idea was to have…
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The birth of Anabaptism in fire and water
Sometimes, a single act can have enormous consequences. In the religious ferment of 16th century Europe, a small group of Christians in the Swiss canton of Zurich gathered in a home on a wintry January day in 1525. One of them, George Blaurock, asked another, Conrad Grebel, to baptize him. Around the circle they went,…
