In the words of Teddy Roosevelt, “Every movement has its lunatic fringe.”
In the 1500s, a militant wing of the Protestant movement overpowered a German city, Munster, and stormed a monastery. The Medieval Catholic Church, in tandem with the state, sent troops to quell these apocalyptic zealots. Three hundred were killed in the conflict. Menno Simons (1496-1561) was devastated. His brother Peter died in the uprising, as did many in his congregation. It solidified his resolve to advocate peaceful measures to bring about needed reform in the church. Menno was formerly a Catholic priest who had never read the Bible. “I had never touched it in my life,” he said, “for I feared if I should read the Bible I should be misled. Behold! Such a stupid preacher was I, for nearly two years.”
While administering communion one day during the Mass, Menno doubted whether the bread and wine turned into the body of Christ. It drove him to the Bible, and he couldn’t put it down. He embraced the Protestant reform, went public with his change of heart, and resigned as a priest. Soon after, he became the leader of a group of like-minded reformers and taught them to separate from the world, to “live quiet in the land.” He urged people under his care to refrain from civil office and adopt a simpler way of life. He was adamant about using nonviolent means to accomplish Christ’s mission.
Although Menno was not a founder of the Mennonite movement, his “followers” derived their name from him—”Menno” added to the suffix “ite” equates to Mennonite. I’ll write more about Mennonites in tomorrow’s post, but I leave you with a table grace that Menno prayed following the meal from his 1567 book, Prayers for Mealtime, published after his death: