At the minister’s conference in Edmonton, I did something that I’m rarely bold enough to do. I went up to the microphone and asked a question. After hearing about the spiritual path of the early Anabaptists, I asked what we can learn from them about ecumenism.

It set up an easy answer that I could have given myself, that we need not copy everything they did, and certainly our contemporary ecumenical efforts are a way that we’ve improved upon the Anabaptist legacy. I should have phrased the question better, but even then I don’t know if the answer would have been any different.

We had been asked to think how we could apply 16th century Anabaptist spirituality to our 21st century churches. In other words, we were being encouraged to sell our congregations on the Anabaptist legacy. However, part of that legacy is a certain narrow-minded outlook that all of us try to avoid, even if that means we replace it with another kind of narrow-minded outlook. My question was intended to be along these lines. How can we sell our congregants on that spiritual mindset when part of it runs fundamentally counter to the core of our pluralistic society?

Now that I’ve rephrased the question, I’ll try to venture an answer. One might think that the call of Christ (and the Anabaptists) was to be counter-cultural, and so we should oppose the pluralistic element of our society. However, at the time, the Anabaptists weren’t more or less closed-minded than anyone else. It was the Reformation, everybody was calling everybody else the anti-Christ. If you can trace your roots back to a religious group in the Reformation that didn’t get labelled as the anti-Christ, it’s because no one took them seriously. The only obvious difference with the Anabaptists was that they didn’t have state support required to punish “heretics”. (Unless you count Münster, but let’s be serious, those guys were nuts. That’s by far the exception and not the rule.)

The first building point that I see though, is the commitment to peace. Sure, they labelled everyone, Zwingli, Luther, the Pope, the Jews, etc. as antichrists. Sure their ultimate goal was to convert everyone to their side. These are not building blocks for ecumenism. But at least they respected their right to live. There are all sorts of stories of Anabaptists at the gallows evangelising to the executioner as well as to the audience. I’d take evangelism over vengance and seeking retaliation any day.

The second thing is their commitment to authenticity. All the hype around adult baptism was because they viewed infant baptism as insincere by definition. Church membership should be voluntary. All participation in the body of Christ/the church should be voluntary. Micheal Sattler said that if he was forced to fight in the war, he would rather fight alongside the Muslim Turks than join the Christian army, because he would rather help those who didn’t know any better, than join those that thought they were being good Christians simply because they were following orders. In dialogues between churches or between faiths, participation has to be sincere. If anyone involved is simply extending tolerance or open-mindedness because that’s what their supposed to do, it’s doomed to failure. To be true to one’s own belief structure, a little bit of closed-mindedness is necessary. Allowing someone the right to speak, out of tolerance, is simply that, it’s not really listening. Forbearance may be a better word than tolerance.

So the early Anabaptists are not good role models for ecumenical dialogue, but we can still learn something from them. We can however try to embody their peace and sincerity to enrich our work and our discussions with those of other religions and denominational groups.