Who Is Behind Anabaptist Perspectives? | Vision, Mission & Future Plans

Lesson Transcript

Well, it's been a bit of a minute since we've done an episode like this. This is a little different than our normal weekly cadence episode, but we want to do one where we— I don't know, what you say— maybe pull back the curtain a bit on who is Anabaptist Perspectives, how do we do the things that we're doing, what is it that we're trying to do, like what's the vision, what's the mission, and so forth.

So throughout this episode we're going to be introducing various ones of the team members that work behind the scenes to make all this stuff possible. Let's start broad, big picture. Marlin, you're the director of Anabaptist Perspectives. Jaren, you're the co-founder and editorial director. And Marlin, why don't you start us off with saying, "Who is Anabaptist Perspectives?" in the broad sense of the word. Who is Anabaptist Perspectives? Just a little history here.

Almost 10 years ago now, it was these two guys sitting on either side of me, and they brought in a few advisors and then very quickly went to a little larger organization with forming a board organized under our local church, but with several outside board members, three from our local church and four from other places around the country, that provides governance. And then I serve as director, and there's a total of six of us on staff, mostly not full-time.

We're about the equivalent of three and a half full-time people between the six of us. And Jaren, why don't you introduce our vision and mission statement? So our vision statement is one that we've had for several years now. It goes, "Using digital media to encourage allegiance to Jesus' sacrificial kingdom." That has been our vision statement, and it remains our vision statement. That is what motivates us. Now, this year we adopted a new mission statement while also keeping our old one.

And so I'll explain a little bit about how that worked. Starting with our new mission statement: "Engage questions, scripture, the Anabaptist tradition, and the global church to better follow Jesus." Now, I said we kept our old mission statement, and here's how that works. We now have something called mission pillars. So we adopted a new mission statement and moved our old mission statement to the mission pillars, which I will share with you.

Mission pillar one: "Engage with questions important for faithful living in ways that are biblically, historically, and theologically informed." Secondly, "Share stories and history, particularly from the Anabaptist movement, as sources of understanding and inspiration for serving the King." The third mission pillar is "Publish content regularly on major platforms, interact with audience responses, and develop an expanding resource library." The mission pillars there you can think of as the main activities kind of

spelled out a little more, right?

So we deal with questions. Our more theological episodes or writings are historical, and we also deal with stories. How did people experience life? And then, of course, publish it as widely as we can. So we started out with the broad of, like, who is this and how it's structured and so forth, and now vision and mission statement. But let's look at each of the various staff that are involved in making this organization function.

So, of course, there's the three of us at this table, but then there's other people that are more behind the scenes, and we'll be having them share here in a minute. But let's start with you, Jaren. Why are you part of this organization, and what is it that you do? Like, what's your role? I'll start with my role.

I am the editorial director, so I am a member of the executive committee, but I work specifically with editorial questions of envisioning, preparing, planning episodes, and also reviewing the work, both essays and episodes, before we publish them. As far as why I do it, I really love my job. I love for the— I love the opportunity to engage with people out of sight, people I can't see.

I try to prioritize relationships around me, the people right around me, locality as, and hopefully encouraging allegiance to Jesus' sacrificial kingdom among them. But I really value the opportunity to interact with people more broadly, people all over the world, and encourage allegiance among them as well. So starting locally, but also just love the opportunity to do so more broadly. Marlin? Why do I do this? The new mission statement sums up a lot of it for me.

It starts with that generic word "engage." You know, engage questions, engage scripture, engage the Anabaptist tradition. But that word matters to me because, one, it means pay attention, right? There's things to learn, maybe things to go look for. There's work to make sure that I'm paying attention and thinking about it.

The opportunity that we have to— to do all of those things, you know, think about history, our history, what do we learn from it, sometimes to do more directly, talk about the Bible, talk about this part of the Bible, this issue. What does the Anabaptist story mean for the global church? What do we learn from this history, either the 500-year Anabaptist story? What do we learn? Even thinking about, you know, more recent Mennonite history. I enjoyed getting involved in a few episodes like that.

And then the global church, both through time and space. You know, we've done a lot of history from the early church, a few things from, you know, later centuries. Reagan has been able to film, for example, a few episodes in Africa, kind of on the front lines of the gospel, speaking with believers who had formerly been in, you know, very dark animistic practice. So that, yeah, that gets me excited.

And then, you know, to do these things to better follow Jesus, what do we learn from these people and from the scripture? And yeah, it's just my hope that, you know, we keep doing this from— we come at it from various angles, and sometimes it's like, well, do we need to talk about this? Do we need to talk about that? Well, you know, it's hard to find the right balance. But again, my goal is, as we approach all of these, that it's— it's a resource for us.

It's a resource for hopefully other people find helpful in, yeah, what does it mean to— to follow Jesus and to do it well. Yeah. And for myself, I am just a really curious person, and so I kind of like asking questions and learning from people that are different than myself. You know, just thinking this year as a sample, getting to sit down with Dean Taylor, and he's explaining who Balthazar Hubmeyer was, right?

A really important early Anabaptist figure whose story doesn't end well and who made some pretty major mistakes and loses his life for those things. I didn't really know that story, and it's like, wow, there's— there's something important there. We should— we should preserve that story, right? And I'm just curious, right? I want to— I want to learn things.

Or another one, you know, Romain Stauffer and her years of research, of her family's story going back to the Revolutionary War and her ancestors and how they survived in a pretty difficult time and the decisions they made and the lessons we can learn from that and the legacy, really, that's been passed down. I just— I'm just really curious about those things. And so I found it a lot of fun because there's such a range of people that you can talk to and stories you can hear and things you can learn.

So primarily, yeah, that's the primary thing that I do, is help with figuring out who do we interview, what do we ask them, you know, how do we coordinate all the filming and the logistics and all of that. That's my primary role with the organization. But there's another person that's really involved, and we're going to switch to more of the behind-the-scenes here. But Carl, who's behind the cameras right now, making sure all this looks all nice, and he's going to edit all these. And you see his work all the time.

So if you listen or watch the podcast, it's Carl's fingerprints all over it. So he's behind the cameras. We won't see him very often, but— We're going to let him introduce himself, but can I show you the studio setup before we cut to his introduction? Yes, please. Yes. And then Carl will come in here in just a second. So— So this is Carl, and this is our cameras and our lights, and Carl runs all of this. It's an impressive setup. So I am Carl. I am the editor they were just speaking of.

Welcome to my basement editing setup. I do the majority of the filming for Anabaptist Perspectives, but actually the majority of my time is spent editing right here. This is the timeline of the episode you're currently watching right now. So I just love the opportunity to do so more broadly. And so a lot of what I do is edit the sound and then do the color grading and then make the cuts, try to make it concise but also natural so it can feel like you're there and part of the conversation. And I really enjoy it.

I especially like the variety. You get to think through a lot of different things. Pretty much every episode that's come out of Anabaptist Perspectives for the last three years or so, I've gotten to watch or had to watch three or four times, which is more than most people need, but I need to watch it that many times for the editing. And so one day I'll be thinking of, you know, someone's personal life story, getting to learn from them.

The next day it might be Anabaptist history or church history of some type, kind of like the Mennonites and the history of Costa Rica. And the next day it might be a theological thing, dispensationalism, atonement theory. And I enjoy listening to those types of things. So I enjoy my job for that reason. There's also a lot of other variety involved, especially right now with Anabaptist origins. I'm doing a lot of publishing, some animation work, and just a lot of other odds and ends here and there.

So I'm thankful for my job. I enjoy it. I enjoy working with the rest of the Anabaptist Perspectives staff. And speaking of the staff, let me introduce you to another delightful fellow by the name of Josh. Well, hello there. I'm Josh with Anabaptist Perspectives. Welcome to my little camper office here. It's really good to have you here. So my role with Anabaptist Perspectives is communications director.

And that means any type of communication with either donors or supporters or the public falls within my realm of responsibility. What does that mean practically? Well, right now I'm working on the latest ministry report. So any type of print publications or mailings, I'm responsible to work with the team. We strategize, we try to come up with the content, and then I'm responsible to design that, pull it together, work with the team to refine it, and then ultimately send it to the press.

So think brochures, any invitations. In addition to the print materials, I'm also responsible for any digital materials that go out. So think emails to either supporters or just general promotional emails, any social posts or graphics that need created or pulled together. I work with the team to strategize and also to create those. Beyond just the print and social, I'm also responsible for the Anabaptist Perspectives website and the Anabaptist origins website.

This involves either updating, changing out pictures and things, or it might involve, like we did with Anabaptist origins, building a new website from the ground up to fit what we're trying to do with it or our use case. So I really enjoy my role here with Anabaptist Perspectives. A lot of the things that I do here are tasks and hobbies that I had when I was growing up: design, working with technology and computers and things, websites. So I really find it a privilege to be able to do these things for the kingdom.

I also really enjoy working with the rest of the Anabaptist Perspectives team. It's a privilege to know each one of them, learn a lot, and yeah, I'm just count it a pleasure and a privilege to be able to labor with them in the kingdom. And another member of our team is Vachelle Miller. She started out with the publishing, all the details that it takes to get everything onto YouTube and Facebook and a long list of other platforms, phone lines, and all those things that we do.

More recently, she has been keeping good track of our finances, the bookkeeping stuff, and also checking and routing our emails. So if you need to send us an inquiry, most likely she's the one handling it on the first round, either taking care of what you need or routing an email to somebody like Jaron to respond to it. So that's a little look at the team behind the operations. Like, you could say, like, the production and publishing, all of the— all of the details that go into this stuff, right?

And that has been amazing to grow the team over the last few years and allows us to take on a lot more ambitious projects than we used to do in the past, including, like, filming in Europe several times and doing more ambitious trips and productions like that. One of the pieces we want to hit next is, you could call it analytics or what you would say the reach, like, how many people actually engage with this material?

I think you had mentioned this in the vision and mission statement as how we want to make it broadly available. And that's something that we've— we've wanted to do from the very beginning. It's not just posted in one place, but easily accessible to as many people as possible. So I'm going to give a couple numbers here. And these numbers would be through the end of September, approximately. So depending on when you're watching this, this obviously will have changed.

But total views and downloads for up to that point in this year, so 2026, is 1,464,725 people that have viewed or downloaded. So like, on a podcast, like, downloaded on the app. The number of countries, it's about 139. It depends on how you do the analytics, but something like that. So it's very global. And I think that's been a neat piece that, you know, back when we were first getting this thing off the ground, that really surprised me.

I didn't think we'd have much of an audience outside of North America, but that has changed. That's been interesting to watch. And then if you want to get more specific by platform, so for example, YouTube this year, again, this is through approximately September, the month of September, so it's not finished yet, but it's over half a million views.

Now, that doesn't mean they watch the whole way through, whoever those people are, but it does mean at least over 500,000 times somebody clicked or watched at least a portion of one of the videos that we published. Interestingly, the most popular one was the one on Islam, Explained by a Former Muslim is the name of the episode, and we got to film that one. Actually, that was one of them we did in Europe. And you can go watch that one. That was interesting.

Another thing that we've prioritized is making this podcast available on the phone line. So like, for some people that don't have internet access, choose not to use the internet, they can dial in on a phone number and listen to it through a phone call, which is a really neat technology. Actually, it's really, really neat that that exists for people like that. And so we post it there on a phone line every week.

And it's something around— it varies, but it's around 30,000 minutes listened every month on that phone line. And then another option, some churches will have very restricted internet access or, you know, maybe not internet access, but they'll allow something called CloudVale, which is basically running on the Telegram app, but allows for certain forms of access for some churches that have, you know, different rules on things like that.

And so that's been really neat to have it available on CloudVale because that's a demographic that, you know, they're not going to use YouTube or they're not going to access the full internet, but they can use CloudVale. And that's kind of like an alternative to the main internet. That one has over 4,000 people following it on CloudVale. And that's been really neat to see that grow because, again, it's this idea of making it broadly available outside of YouTube and Facebook.

And sure, we'll post there too, but you could go to the website and get it, or you could call in on a phone line, or you could get it on CloudVale. And that's always been pretty important to us to do it that way. So just since we've started, since 2017, when we started, actually, I think our first video was the very beginning of 2018, across YouTube for all time is 2,177,175 views. And that's just on YouTube. It's not counting the other platforms. So that's been really neat to see.

There's interest there, is what it's telling us. You know, we don't know who all those people are. I don't know who's on the other side of those numbers. It'd be wonderful to meet more of them, some of them, but definitely not all of them. That's just a gist of the overview, you know, as far as the reach, the impact, the people that listen to this podcast. But maybe we'll transition on here a little bit. What are the things that we're doing on this podcast?

Give us a bit of an overview, maybe some things we've covered, maybe some things we want to do in the future. Well, I'm happy to mention a favorite episode. I love the stories we do. Sometimes the stories are personal stories and testimonies. But I have to think of the episode we did in recent months with Romaine Stauffer about— it was centered on the American Revolution with non-resistant folks and how they experienced that.

I just thought it was a very interesting, compelling story and helpful perspective on how non-resistance has been expressed at various points in the past, including in American history. Marlon, what about you? It's hard for me to pick a favorite because I'm glad we have the variety. You know, I gravitate personally toward the, you know, the careful ideas usually more than the stories. I enjoy them as well, but I don't go there quite as naturally. So something like, you know, recorded a full discussion.

It went along with Anabaptist Origins, but a full discussion with Stephen Russell and Dean Taylor about the Sleightheim Confession. You know, it's a really important document, but they went and walked through, okay, why is this important? Like, why do you talk about baptism? Why do you talk about the ban? Like, why do you talk about those? Why do these matter? So that's something I really appreciated. And something I've really enjoyed with this podcast is the range. You kind of mentioned that, right?

There's a lot of different topics and interesting people. Some of them were theologically focused or biblical studies focused. Other times it's stories, you know, someone's testimony. And also trying to bring in guests from not just here in America. So that's been really neat. Doing some filming in Ireland, in various places in Europe, Africa, you mentioned that, Costa Rica. We had a few people from Costa Rica.

That's been really helpful for me to hear those perspectives because it's easy to get kind of in my own little bubble of this is all that there is. And like, no, there's actually— there's other people out there that have a very different experience than mine, and I want to be able to learn from them. So, Marlon, I have to ask you, where are we going with this? I think people would be curious, well, what's coming next? What's ahead on the road for Anabaptist Perspectives?

So if you're listening here on YouTube, you might think of Anabaptist Perspectives as a YouTube channel. If you're listening through Apple Podcasts, you might think of us as an audio podcast or wherever. So this stream, what we call the podcast, whether it's video or audio, is our core. And we plan to continue on very much the same lines that we have been. We talked about that kind of diversity. But we've also got other projects going. The organization Anabaptist Perspectives is larger than one podcast.

So in addition to this podcast, the big thing the last couple years has been our Anabaptist Origins project, which is currently releasing. Regan, can you tell us a little more about that? Yeah, that's been a lot of fun to pull that together. See, we have this, right, which is a podcast, and it's, you know, you're in a studio, you sit down, you have a conversation. We've been doing that for a while, so it's a pretty consistent thing that we know how to do, right?

But then I had this idea, different ones of us on the team, and what if we did a documentary? And honestly, I didn't really know our own story, the Anabaptist historical story of how did we get from, you know, state and church being fused together and infant baptism and all of that to this small little group that decides to break away from that and that becomes the first Anabaptist all the way up to today. I really did not know that story at all. And it's kind of hard to find good resources on that.

It's a little easier now than it used to be, but they tend to be pretty expensive or out of print sometimes. And we were wondering, well, what if we would tell it visually? Like, actually go to these places, film there, and make it more as a documentary on the very spots where this story happens. So we did. It ended up being a much bigger project than we expected, which I think is great because we ended up getting way more material and were able to tell the story even better than we had initially thought.

So it turned out to be 10 episodes long, 10 documentaries. And those are releasing, I think, as of this date, it's episode 6 just came out of the 10. So we got several more to go yet. And there's actually a lot of what we're calling bonus material, things that didn't make the final episode just because you can only fit so much into these.

And so hopefully, we don't know all the details yet, but hopefully once the main series is over, we can come back to some of those extra pieces and keep releasing it because it is valuable parts of the story of who we are as a people, where did we come from, the choices that were made 500 years ago. So that's been a big one. Been working on that for a number of years. Very exciting to see it out. It's on a separate stream, content stream than this.

So you can go to the website and find it all there, anabaptistorgins.org and so forth. But there's another project being worked on. Jaron, you've been working on one the last few months, I think. Yeah, the specific corner of the Christian church and the Anabaptist stream that we stand in is the Conservative Mennonite Movement.

So this summer I have been working on a six-part series that looks at the origins of the Conservative Mennonite Movement in the mostly centered in the middle of the 20th century, going out a bit more broadly, both directions also. This has involved speaking with people in their 70s and 80s who lived through the early years of the Conservative Anabaptist Movement with the foundation of the formation of new fellowships and conferences.

So I've really enjoyed hearing from them with the history and the stories and look forward to sharing the work with you. Hopefully in the winter, maybe the spring, but a couple months down the road, we'll be editing together that six-part series and sharing it with you. So yeah, we'll be sure to let you know when that comes out. And then, Marlon, there's some things you're involved with as well. First one I'll mention is we do publish some written work with essays, not on a fast scale, but we publish some there.

I've written some. We also are open to considering and reviewing submissions sent in from our audience. These are usually looking for more think pieces. An essay has the goal to think through something. So it's not just an inspirational challenge, but to really dig into a topic. And that's something we want to continue. But also, this is coming up a new podcast, or not entirely new. So we had, over the past years, had what we called our partner program. We recorded some bonus content.

Usually it was Jaron and I, four monthly donors. But it was, you know, accessed through Patreon or behind a paywall on our website or something. And we realized that was not the reason most people were doing a monthly donation. And so that content is now freely available on our website. Not because we don't appreciate monthly donors. We very much do. But because it, from all evidence, you know, being able to log into a website and listen to something was not the main motivation for most of you.

So coming into next year, Jaron and I plan to build on that. So it'll be a separate podcast stream, probably a little more lightweight. We'll do things virtually. We will try to be responsive. Comments, issues that come up with, you know, really any of our content at Anabaptist Perspectives and bring in some guests. So that's still shaping up, but that is in the works for early 2027. So what are ways the audience can get involved? Several ways, but we'd like to name a few to start with.

So these episodes that we publish and the essays and origins, all of our work is free for anybody to listen to. And that is possible because of people who have chosen to support the work financially. So we'd like to invite our listeners to whom this has been helpful to consider a small monthly donation to help the work keep on going and to be a blessing to other people like it's been to you. Some have donated monthly, which we love since it feels like a stable foundation for us to continue on.

Some of our listeners have also chosen to give with one-time donations, which has been a huge and tremendous help in allowing us to continue producing episodes and essays for free to everybody. Yeah, over the years, as I have seen the number of people that, you know, believe that this work is important, that has always been encouraging to me, reflected in financial contributions, many times notes that come with that. One thing I wanted to highlight here is, you know, most of our work is routine.

We're publishing routinely, weekly. And so, you know, most of the donations that come in are for what Anabaptist Perspectives does, and it sustains the routines.

If you have interest in donating to something more particular or more specific, when we've done episodes that have more travel than usual or something like Origins that had a lot more travel, that has come not because of, you know, routine donations, but because somebody has had, you know, a vision to give specifically to support some of these trips with larger travel. You could always, you know, inquire if you're interested in something like that. Or another opportunity, we mentioned the phone line.

And one of the things that is different about the phone line is there's an ongoing distribution cost on YouTube. The cost is in making the video. Once it's up, you know, YouTube and its advertisers take care of distributing it around the world. With the phone line, there's some cost on our end to running it, and it goes up as there's more people listening.

Also, if we want to advertise the phone line to people who are offline and off the internet, we need to do that mostly by advertising in print publications that get mailed out, which also costs money. So if you have a vision for some of this content going out, you know, through the phone line into communities that avoid the internet, yeah, I'd love to hear from you.

You know, maybe you want to donate toward expanding our reach on the phone line or something where there's kind of a different set of costs because there's limits to what we can do with general funds in, you know, print advertising and that kind of thing could be a specific opportunity for someone. Yeah, and another way listeners could get involved is we want to hear from you, from whoever's listening to this, because that actually has a lot of impact on what we make in the future.

Because oftentimes someone will say, well, have you thought about talking to this person? Or what about this topic? I have questions about that. And that can really inform what people are interested in, what they're curious about. And that has been very helpful in the past. And so we'd really encourage that. You can just email us through our website or, you know, reach out on really any of the platforms. Jaron, I know you handle a lot of the interaction from the audience.

That's been really neat to see that feedback come in. And it does influence what we do in the future with what we choose to make and so forth. So I'd encourage that for anybody listening to reach out. We'd love to hear from you. And too, just to say, we wouldn't be able to do this without the audience support. And it has been really neat to see people believe in this. And it allows us to keep everything free and just give it away and share it to anybody who's interested. And that's been significant.

And we don't take that lightly. And we really appreciate that from the audience. So thank you, Marlon and Jaron, for sharing today. And thanks to the listeners for the support.