Menno Simons 1496-1561
Menno was a Catholic priest who was born in the village of Witmarsum near the North Sea in the Dutch province of Friesland. In 1536 he joined the Dutch Anabaptists. As a writer, preacher, and administrator he became the leader of the peaceful wing of the movement and in time his followers became known as "Mennonites.'
tament times. They conceived such a church or body of believers
to be one thoroughly persuaded of its faith, and willing to stay by it at all costs. They found no precedent for infant baptism in the New Testament, and they did not consider infant baptism of the Catholic Church or the other state churches to be valid for mem
bership in the true church. They called for rebaptism and hence were called "rebaptizers" or "Anabaptists."
But the matter of baptism was really a mere starting point and was by no means the extent of the differences that marked off
the Anabaptists from followers of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. The Anabaptists held further that the true church was sure to be a despised and persecuted group of believers. While other reformers believed that the state and church could work in close harmony and without serious conflict, the Anabaptists did not hold to such an optimistic view, for they saw the program of the state to be hostile in many ways to the freedom which their Christian con
science desired. Anabaptists held the state to be ordained of God, even as was the church, but the functions of the two were so different as to call for a separation of church and state. The affairs of each are to be carried on without dictation from the other.
