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Who are the 21st century Anabaptists?
LIESTAL, Switzerland—Brother Yun was run out of town. He hid in closets, jumped out of windows. He led worship services outside, at night. He didn’t have a church building. He was beaten, his legs crushed – “That’ll stop you from preaching!” – then thrown into prison. He said, “We’re building the kingdom, not buildings. We want to be true followers of Jesus, not just believers. We don’t care only for our own sheep, but constantly remember those who have never heard the gospel.”
After listening to the testimonies of persecuted Chinese house church leaders and hearing their passionate desire to spread the gospel, our international team of four from the IMA meetings in north Germany drove eight hours south to Bienenberg Bible School in Liestal, Switzerland.
The first day our host, Heike Geist, led us on a hike in the Jura Mountains. From a ridge 1,000 meters up we looked down into the corners of the Baselland and Solothurn cantons.
“The Showalters came from that region,” she pointed into the mist. “This region was a favorite gathering place for 16th century Anabaptists. If Anabaptist Hunters came, the persecuted Anabaptists could flee over the mountain into a neighboring canton. The grain bin in that old farm house down there has a false bottom – a hiding place for hunted Anabaptists.” Later we also visited the Trachselwald Castle where Anabaptists were imprisoned, chained, and tortured.
Our traveling companions with names like Mulandi from Kenya and Chiles from Philadelphia found no trace of physical roots among the Showalters, Wengers, and Landises of Switzerland, but they connected with the spiritual DNA of the Anabaptists.
“The mainline churches threw us out,” Henry Mulandi told the 15 German-track graduate students at Bienenberg. Mulandi is now a mission leader for Christian Churches International, a cluster of 400 churches based in Thika, Kenya – but he was a “Guerilla for Christ” during the Kenyan youth revivals of the 1970s. Mulandi said, “We were Anabaptists, and didn’t know it.”
“Our people, African Americans, were enslaved by the same people who brought us the gospel,” Lawrence Chiles, bishop of Koinonia Fellowship of Churches, told the same class. “We still suffer from the effects of slavery, but when we know who we really are in Christ, we can change the world.”
On the way north we swung off the autobahn and crossed the Neckar River into the quaint German town of Horb. Here in 1527, Anabaptist leader Michael Sattler gained a large following, then was arrested and burned at the stake in nearby Rottenburg. Raising his charred arm heavenward Michael testified that Jesus was with him in the flames. And here in the sleepy green Neckar, Michael’s wife Marguerita was drowned.
The cascading flowers in tidy window boxes and picturesque church towers belie the violent past that killed Anabaptists, banished them to marginal farm land above 1,000 meters, or drove them from the region all together.
I closed my eyes and pondered. Yes, Wenger blood runs in my veins. I’m married to a Showalter with roots in the Emmental of Switzerland. There’s something uncanny about the instant at-homeness I feel here. This is my tribe. These are my people.
But there’s something deeper.
Who are the modern-day Anabaptists – me in my cozy climate-controlled, German-American church or the burgeoning Chinese church that is starting “seminaries” in prisons and mission training schools in underground apartments?
Jesus asked, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? Those who do the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
Would he claim me as a sister?
-Jewel Showalter
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