Conference of the Mennonites of Switzerland (Old Anabaptists)

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The Conference of Mennonites in Switzerland ( Alttäufer ) is an association of several alttäuferischen communities.

history

First churches and persecution

Even at the time of the first reformers, the first radical evangelical circles were formed in Switzerland. In Zurich , in particular , there were a number of citizens who felt that Huldrych Zwingli's teaching was not geared enough to the Bible. They included Felix Manz , Konrad Grebel and Jörg Blaurock from Graubünden . Together with others, they finally founded the first Anabaptist congregation in Zurich in January 1525. Although several members of the movement, named Anabaptists or Anabaptists for rejecting infant baptism , were drowned, beheaded, or burned at the stake , their faith continued to spread. In many places between the Jura and Lake Constance , people joined the Swiss brothers . Starting in Switzerland, the movement spread to Tyrol, southern and central Germany and the Netherlands. The individual cities and cantons as well as the Reformed and Catholic Churches met the still young movement with great brutality. The Swiss reformer Zwingli, for example, insisted that the Anabaptists should be beheaded by virtue of imperial rights and called on the city council of Zurich to exterminate the Anabaptists with all available means. Heinrich Bullinger explained with reference to the Anabaptists: We have absolutely nothing in common with them! More and more new Anabaptist mandates legitimized the persecution of the Anabaptists. In Zurich, for example, the Mennonites have almost completely disappeared from the scene due to intense persecution, despite a brief renewed flourishing in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The Mennonites were also completely wiped out in Basel, Schaffhausen and other regions. An Anabaptist Chamber was founded in the canton of Bern , which was supposed to find hidden Mennonites with its own Anabaptist hunters and with the help of bounties. Hundreds of Swiss Anabaptists died martyrs. Many farms and other property belonging to Swiss Anabaptists were confiscated. The Reformed Church in Schwarzenegg , built in 1693 , for example, was also built with confiscated Anabaptist money. The more repressive policy towards the pacifist Anabaptists, with meeting and speaking bans, was in part continued into the 18th century.

Nevertheless, the movement was able to persist in some regions. This particularly affected the Emmental . In order not to attract attention, many Anabaptists accepted the Reformed faith pro forma . However, they continued to hold secret meetings. Anabaptist communities arose in the Jura because the Prince-Bishop of Basel allowed them to settle in regions at over 1000 meters after they were expelled from the Emmental, and so he tolerated the Mennonite farmers despite their beliefs. The ongoing persecution of the Swiss Mennonites was documented, among other things, in the Martyrs Mirror, which first appeared in the 17th century .

emigration

Many Anabaptists emigrated to avoid persecution. In the first few years many fled to Bohemia and Moravia , where the Hutterites from Tyrol had already settled. Many later found refuge in the Swiss Jura , where they were under the protection of the Prince-Bishop of Basel . Others fled to Alsace , the Palatinate and the northern Netherlands . At the end of the 17th century there was a split in the movement. The elders Hans Reist and Jakob Ammann argued about the application of the ban. The latter's supporters founded their own communities, from which the Amish emerged. From around 1720, some Swiss Mennonites and Amish emigrated increasingly to the United States. The first emigrants often went to Pennsylvania , where they could freely practice their faith. Amish began to emigrate to Pennsylvania around this time or a little later, but it was almost exclusively Amish from the Palatinate and neighboring German areas, a total of only about 500 people from Europe in the 18th century. More Swiss Amish took part in a second wave of emigration in the 19th century, although one group that settled in Indiana from around 1840 has retained a Bernese dialect to this day .

Freedom of belief

For the first time in its history, the Helvetic Republic brought the remaining Mennonites freedom of belief . The founding of modern Switzerland in 1848 only brought final freedom . However, in 1963, in the conflict over the formation of the new canton of Jura, there was arson at Anabaptist courts, which was more to do with the fact that the Anabaptists were German-speaking in an otherwise French-speaking area .

See also: History of Bernese Anabaptism , Gerber (Langnau)

The conference

As early as the 18th century, representatives of the individual communities met for an annual conference. In 1810 they took the name of the old Protestant defenseless baptismal people . The name used today has been used by the Swiss Mennonites since 1983.

The conference of the Mennonites of Switzerland today comprises thirteen congregations. These are:

Each community is independent. The oldest congregation at the conference is that in the Emmental, whose history goes back to the Reformation . The youngest community is that in the lower Birstal, which was only founded in 1991. The communities in the Jura (Neuchâtel, Canton Jura and Bernese Jura) retained their German colloquial language into the 20th century. The older parishioners are now bilingual (German / French), while the younger ones often speak better French.

Chapel and library / archive in Le Jean Guy

The Mennonite Conference of Switzerland (Old Anabaptists) has the task of representing the individual congregations externally and coordinating the work of the congregations. There are several thematic working groups within the conference, such as the Swiss Mennonite Mission , the Swiss Mennonite Peace Committee and the Mennonite Youth Commission of Switzerland . The archive commission looks after the Anabaptist archives of the conference in the Jeanguisboden chapel with Bibles, documents and other finds from Anabaptist-Mennonite history. The archive commission also works with the Swiss Association for Anabaptist History , and together with them, in 2005, the association Memoria Mennonitica came into being. Memoria Mennonitica has set itself the task of protecting Anabaptist-Mennonite cultural assets and being able to implement effective protection of cultural assets. The press commission publishes the bilingual magazine Perspektive / Perspective several times a year . The Bienenberg training and conference center trains theological offspring.

The Conference of Mennonites in Switzerland (Old Anabaptists) is connected to other Mennonite community associations via the Mennonite World Conference . In Switzerland it belongs to the Association of Evangelical Free Churches and Congregations in Switzerland .

In June 2004, the Zurich Reformed Church publicly recognized the injustice of persecution. Finally, between 2006 and 2009, the first official dialogue between the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches and the Conference of Mennonites in Switzerland took place under the motto Christ is Our Peace .

swell

  1. ↑ Clarence Baumann: Nonviolence as a hallmark of the community . In: Hans-Jürgen Goertz (Ed.): The Mennonites . Evangelisches Verlagswerk, Stuttgart 1971, p. 129 .
  2. ↑ Common Heritage - Reformed and Anabaptists in Dialogue. Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Zurich, accessed on February 6, 2010 .
  3. ↑ Who are the Mennonites? (PDF) Hans-Peter Jecker for the Swiss Association for Anabaptist History, accessed on December 4, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Data on the history of Bernese Anabaptism. (PDF) Hans-Peter Jecker, for: Swiss Association for Anabaptist History, accessed on December 4, 2018 .
  5. ^ Beat Siebenhaar: The German language islands on the Jura heights of French-speaking Switzerland in Journal for Dialectology and Linguistics, Volume 71, Half 2 (2004), Pages 180-212
  6. ↑ municipalities. Conference of the Mennonites of Switzerland (Old Anabaptists), accessed on December 4, 2018 .
  7. ↑ Common Heritage - Reformed and Anabaptists in Dialogue. Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Zurich, accessed on February 6, 2010 .

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