Anabaptism: Fully Alive in 2025

It's a delight to be with you and to be with you as a church family, but also to see friends and family here that we don't get to connect with on a regular basis. I do wish you God's grace and peace, and that He would minister that to each one of our hearts throughout this day.

Three men, Conrad Gribble, Felix Mons, and George Blaurock, came together to talk earnestly about matters of faith and obedience. Getting to know one another over the course of days, they, quote, "in the fear of God, agreed that from God's word one must first learn true faith, expressed in deeds of love, and on confession of this faith receive true Christian baptism as a covenant of good conscience with God, serving Him from then on with a holy Christian life and remaining steadfast to the end, even in times of tribulation."

One day, as they were meeting, and this was January 21st of 1525, the account says that fear came over them and struck their hearts. They fell to their knees before the Almighty God in heaven, and they called upon Him who knows all hearts. They prayed that God grant it to them to do His divine will and that He might have mercy on them. Neither flesh and blood nor human wisdom compelled them. They were well aware of what they would have to suffer for this.

After prayer, George Blaurock stood up and asked Conrad Gribble in the name of God to baptize him with true Christian baptism on his faith and recognition of the truth. With this request, he knelt down, and Conrad baptized him, since at that time there was no appointed servant of the word.

Then the others turned to George in their turn, asking him to baptize them, which he did. And so, in great fear of God, together they surrendered themselves to the Lord. They confirmed one another for the service of the gospel and began to teach the faith and to keep it. This was the beginning of separation from the world and its evil ways.

Our text today comes from Psalm 78. It is a historical psalm, one that recounts the faithfulness of God to His people. It also speaks about the faithfulness of God's people to God.

The faithfulness of various people to both receive from previous generations and to recount to successive generations the kindness and care of God. Many of you are probably familiar with the account that I have just read to you, and it is considered the beginning of Anabaptism all the way back there in 1525.

I do want to be clear that Anabaptist does not mean Anti-Baptist. That has been misheard at times. This is A-N-A, not A-N-T-I, Anabaptist, which in the language of that time meant a rebaptizer, one who was supposedly going against God's word. It was actually an epithet. It was an offensive term. Somebody who was rebaptizing an individual who had already been baptized into God's kingdom, according to their understanding of it.

And so it's a word that was given to the people that were doing this by their adversaries. And for many years, the Anabaptists tried to clear themselves of that epithet, and in the end, it remained. During the religious upheaval of the 1500s, when Martin Luther was seeking to bring reforms into the Catholic Church, you may recall that he also ended up developing a Reformation movement, which became known as the Reformation, out of which came the Protestant churches, largely what we see today, if I understand correctly.

But in the midst of that Reformation, there was another Reformation called the Radical Reformation or the left wing of the Reformation that resulted in this group of people that today we call the Anabaptists. And probably most of us consider ourselves to be part of the Anabaptist movement. In light of this momentous anniversary starting in 1525, and now here it is in 2025, the title of the message is

Anabaptism: Fully Alive in 2025.

Now, when I say fully alive in 2025, I'm not saying that everything is perfect with Anabaptism in every area and corner of the Anabaptist world. But I'm also saying or not saying that Anabaptism is on life support and just about to pass off the scene. I believe there are a lot of good things happening in the Anabaptist world, and it is well for us to be aware of that.

If you look at the text that we have here in Psalm 78, I've chosen the first eight verses for us to look at. The psalmist says, "Give ear, O my people, to my law. Incline your ears to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable. I will utter dark sayings of old, which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children, telling to the generation to come the praises of the Lord and His strength and His wonderful works that He has done.

For He has established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which He commanded our fathers that they should make them known to their children, that the generation to come might know them, the children who will be born, that they may arise and declare them to their children, that they may set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments, and may not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation that did not set its heart right and whose spirit was not faithful to God."

The construction crew that I work on is all River Brethren people, and they would trace a lot of their influence to the Anabaptists as well. Although the Brethren folk are a bit of their own type of people, and I come from somewhat of that background, the Brethren in Christ were the people that I grew up in.

There is a lot of Anabaptist influence in the Brethren world, Church of the Brethren, River Brethren, Brethren in Christ, and so on.

And so some time ago, I was talking to my coworkers. We have a relatively young crew. There's an older man that's older than me, and then three other young guys that are very early twenties, hardly out of their teens.

But the subject came up over our lunch break about the upcoming anniversary of Anabaptism. And the older man was not there that day. But the other young bucks, so to speak, were completely unaware that there was anything special on the horizon for Anabaptism. In fact, my one coworker that just turned 20 jokingly said, "You could have told me that it was 93 years old, and I would have believed you."

Well, I'm not trying to reflect ill on my coworker. In fact, his response made me stop and think about my own thoughts on Anabaptism. And I was actually in my mid-twenties before I started to wrestle with and realize the implications and the value of the Anabaptist movement.

And so I'm going to cut you a little bit of slack, those of you that are younger in your teens, but I'm planting seeds in hopes that you also will wrestle with what does this mean to be an Anabaptist or a Mennonite person?

As I thought about the anniversary year, the 500th anniversary this year, there were a number of things that I contemplated. But the main question I asked myself is, is this really a milestone worth celebrating?

What does it have to do with our life? Should it make any impact at all on who we are as a people? Should it matter at all to the youth in our congregations?

Should it really make much of a difference? It's a question I wrestled with for a period of time, a number of weeks. And as I contemplated, there were a number of things that came to my mind. I believe that there are some elements that really are worth celebrating here in this milestone because there are some really beautiful things that comprise what we call Anabaptism.

And that's a very broad spectrum, of course, Amish, Mennonites, River Brethren, and others. I'd like to share five of those facets with you today, and that's why we have the word alive here in capital letters, A-L-I-V-E, as an acronym, each letter representing something that I find beautiful and beneficial.

Now, I recognize in a group like this today, there are a variety of people here. Probably a lot of you are what I would call cradle Anabaptists. You might not have heard that term before, but in the Brethren in Christ, we talked about cradle Bicks. Those were people who grew up in the Brethren in Christ.

And so a lot of you probably have grown up in the Anabaptists, your cradle Anabaptists. But then there are others here. You come from, quote, "the outside," or more charitably, non-Anabaptist background. As the argument has been made, we all come from the outside. We all have to come to God through Jesus Christ, whether we were born in Anabaptism or not.

But there are, of course, the insiders who grew up cutting their teeth on Menno Simons and perhaps playing Dutch Blitz. It's a card game for those who aren't aware, fast-paced, loved by some, and completely dismissed by others.

If you're from a non-Anabaptist background, it's possible you feel like a bit of an outsider. And I don't want you to feel like that at all. As you've embraced us, we embrace you, and you are one of us.

And it's possible that there are some here who feel like no-siders. You haven't really taken a position yet. You're not sure, am I for or against this thing of Anabaptism? And that's all right. It's really good to take some time to evaluate, what is this all about? And is it something that is worth me committing my life to?

No matter what your position is today, insider, outsider, no-sider, I think you can benefit from some of these elements that we want to look at. My main thought today is simply this. I really believe that you should choose, and I'm taking a position here, fairly strong position, but I really believe that you should choose the conservative Anabaptist way of life because it is possibly the closest representation of credible kingdom living in the world. I know that's a long thought, so I'll say it again, but that is my main thrust this morning. If you don't agree with me, that's fine. We can still be friends and love one another.

But my main thought this morning is simply this. You should choose the conservative Anabaptist way of life because it is possibly I'm putting that qualifier in there. It's possibly the closest representation to credible kingdom living anywhere on Earth.

So what are some of the practices, principles of this movement that, in my mind anyway, make it so attractive and so beautiful and, very importantly, credible? The first one that I would draw your attention to is what I'm calling amenability.

That's a huge $20 word. And what makes it even more confusing is that it can be pronounced in at least two different ways. It could also be pronounced with a long E, amenability. And to be candid with you, in the Anabaptist world, there are times when we do have a mean ability.

We have the ability to be mean. It's not nice. It's not right. It's not Christ-like. I have been on the receiving end of that amenability. And sadly, I have been on the giving side of that as well. So I prefer to pronounce it amenability.

What does it mean if somebody is amenable? The definition is willing to accept a suggestion or submit to authority, responsible to higher authority.

It carries the idea of being yielded, of willing to give up one's rights, the idea of approachability. And I'm especially glad to use this word because my German background brother-in-law is here. It's the idea of Gelassenheit. And Brother Heinrich will explain that to us later, perhaps.

Gelassenheit, you're familiar with the word, I'm sure. Donald Martin in his book, Joy and Submission. How many of you have seen this book before? About two. Great. I love to recommend new books written by an older Mennonite man from Southern Ontario.

In this book, he says, we define Gelassenheit as a voluntary submission to the scriptures and to the brotherhood. That's huge. It goes along with the Sunday school discussion on what does it mean to take up our cross daily. Further on, he says, to the Anabaptist, the joy in submission, which is the title of his book, the joy in submission was a virtue or a principle which became the Anabaptist way of life or walk of life. Submission as a walk of life is motivated by love where self has been displaced.

He says, those who obey church standards out of compulsion or because they have to are deprived of the joy one receives by voluntarily submitting to one another. So

Gelassenheit as simply joy in submission.

I really do believe that a willingness to cultivate within our families and within our brotherhoods a yieldedness is a huge issue. It's huge, especially in this culture in which individualism and self-expression are so strong. And so this concept of amenability and how the Anabaptists over the centuries were able to work that into the pores of their people so that it flowed out of us as a natural result because of all these, can we say, arbitrary things that we don't really shouldn't have to do? Can't scripture and book and chapter it. Can't scripture text it. We just do it because it's a wholesome thing to do. That has a way of working in us a certain mindset, a yieldedness, a receptivity.

And so one of the things that Heather and I have wrestled with in parenting, and we're in the midst of the wrestling, so cut us a little slack, please. But we are very intent that we want our children to learn respect. We want them to learn to yield. We want them to learn to give in. And it's really an important lesson for all of us. We cannot have brotherhood without the willingness to be yielded and to do so joyfully, joyfully submitting, not because I have to, because I get to. I get to be part of this brotherhood.

Cultivating receptivity in ourselves and in our children and in one another. This is huge. It's huge for any sort of lasting expression of the faith. Now, in our text, you'll notice that the psalmist opens by pleading for amenability.

He's pleading for his people to be yielded. He says, give ear, O my people, to my law. Incline your ears to the words of my mouth. And then he proceeds to close out that section there in verse eight by decrying the people who are not yielded, those who are stubborn, those who are resistant.

He talks about a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation that did not set its heart right and whose spirit was not faithful to God. It's no accident that Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount by saying, blessed are the poor in spirit.

It's them. They are the ones who will receive the kingdom of heaven. Who are these people? They're the renounced in spirit. They're the yielded ones. They're the receptive. They are the amenable.

So in a society where authority is being ripped to shreds and accountability is non-existent, existent, the presence of a group of people who demonstrates both yieldedness to authority and to one another is a beautiful reality. It's very beautiful.

I find it very attractive.

And I believe that the way that we carry out church expectations in practice has a definite way of working receptivity into our DNA.

If brotherhood makes a decision, we do not have to have a personal conviction before we choose to live it out. That's not what we see in scripture. Now, if it's opposed to scripture, of course, we need to talk about that. But if we're talking about a wise way to live, doing the best that we know with the things that we have, that's a very different understanding of what much of the church world is experiencing today.

We do it because the brotherhood decided, not because our people are arbitrary, but because we recognize the wisdom of elders. We recognize that there's value in going back in time and asking, what wisdom did they gain?

And I know this is frustrating, but frankly, Anabaptism is a lot like learning to play the Anabaptist card game, Rook.

How many of you know how to play Rook?

Probably about 60.2% of you. Great. I sort of know how. I'm going to guess that most of us who learned how to play Rook basically learned how to play it by doing it. Is that right? You probably didn't sit down and read the directions.

It's a bit of a complex game. And some people are really good at it, and they can count all sorts of things in their head, and they know how much Trump is out there. And they've got it figured out.

In many ways, I think Anabaptism is like that. There's a sense in which we have to live it in order to understand how the, quote, game is played. I'm not trying to diminish Anabaptism to a game level, but it's as we engage in the practices that oftentimes we start to learn the value and the wisdom of why we're expected to do those things.

We understand how it works, and we appreciate why the rules are what they are, just as it is in the game of Rook.

Now, these attitudes and practices can seem very weak. You think about this thing of amenability. It looks like it's hardly going to last from one generation to the next, but it actually does have some strength to it. And it actually does contribute to a second lovely element, which I appreciate about Anabaptism, and that is longevity.

Longevity might be counterintuitive, might be paradoxical, but obviously, Anabaptism has been around for a little while. One of my favorite birthday quotes says that birthdays are good for you. The more you have, the longer you live. Have you found that to be true?

Incidentally, it's my wife Heather's birthday today and Brother Harvey. So when you see them, wish them a happy birthday. Birthdays are good for you. The more you have, the longer you live. And that's, of course, mixing a bit of the cause and effect there.

But however it happens, it is notable that Anabaptism has been around for half a millennium.

Now, depending on how you look at it, 500 years is a long time. If you are 21 years old today, you've been around for 4.2% of Anabaptist history.

You're still pretty new to the whole movement.

If, however, you are like Dad Martin, John D. Martin, and you're 79, you've lived 15.8% of the entirety of Anabaptist history. So a little bit longer there.

Now, that's looking at it from that angle.

I do think that the reason to celebrate this movement is something pointed out by Joe Overholt, which Dad has mentioned different times. He said, the Anabaptists are a bridge to the early church. So when you look at it from the angle of how old I am in relation to the overall scope, I've only experienced a very small part of it. But then if you think about Anabaptism as being 500 years old in the scope of church history, 500 compared to how much of church history, approximately how much church history?

One fourth. One fourth. Okay. So 2,000 years of church history, 500 years of Anabaptism. So 500 years isn't that long when you look at church history overall. So what is the benefit or value of celebrating 500 short years, you might say, in the scope of 2,000 years?

The value is what Joe Overholt said. The Anabaptists, not because they got everything right, but because they were a bridge to the early church, and they now continue on to this day, are worth our consideration. And I would say, yes, even our celebration.

Of course, from the time of the fourth century up through to the 1500s when Luther was doing his reforming, there were individuals and groups who were constantly and faithfully following God, but they didn't last as far as we know. We don't know of any single group that we can trace all the way back to the church that Jesus founded, although there were faithful ones all the way through.

I don't know of any that continue to this day, except perhaps for the Church of the East. I'm not as familiar with that one. Perhaps Brother Melvin Lehman could fill us in more on it. But the Church of the East does come from a very long lineage.

And I also realize that just because Anabaptism has been around for quite a while doesn't mean that it's worthy of being celebrated either. Lots of things continue on for a long, long time. Cults and false beliefs persist that really aren't worth celebrating.

But I think that what is so special in what we have here is related to how Anabaptism has sought to maintain credible kingdom witness. And to that extent, the longevity is a really beautiful thing. I appreciate how purposeful this movement has been about things that matter, namely knowing and obeying King Jesus.

That's huge. That's huge.

And then, of course, demonstrating some sort of kingdom life here on this earth. I realize that just because something is a tradition doesn't mean that it's worth keeping. But there are a lot of traditions that are really valuable.

This is a Greek Orthodox writer. Joshua Gibbs said that traditionalists favor what has lasted, not what happens to be around. Just because something has been around a long time doesn't mean that traditionalists are all in favor of it. He says, traditionalists prize things that last simply because most things don't. And when something does not last, they know that it usually is the thing's fault.

Gustav Mahler is attributed with saying, tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. It's not the worship of ashes, but is the preservation of fire. So we celebrate the longevity of the Radical Reformation.

One of the main reasons, I think, is when we think about how much the adversaries of that reformation, what great length they went to to stamp it out.

Story after story of persecution, torture, death. I'm sure other groups have been targeted for extermination, but the Anabaptists really were a special focus for eradication from the face of the earth.

And yet she survives and thrives to this very day.

It is from that long history that we receive so many of our inspiring stories, the people who wrestled with these things, who were faithful. It's through the traditions, the habits, and the artifacts of this movement that we have been knowingly or unknowingly shaped.

We are being shaped in many ways. One of the artifacts, if you will, of Anabaptism is this book called Martyr's Mirror. Looks like a doorstopper. 1,158 pages long. How many of you have a copy of this book in your home?

Excellent. I'm going to guess about 69.3%. How many of you read a little bit out of this book? Okay. Similar percentage. Very good. How many of you have read the entire book?

Okay. It's daunting. I'll tell you what. It's just got a lot of stuff in there. You're familiar, of course, with the fact that this large book recounts the faithfulness of those, particularly the author was interested in including people who took a stand on non-resistance. They would not shed blood, and they believed in believers' baptism, that you had to be of an age to understand what you were doing before you were baptized.

There's an older man who has gone on to his eternal reward now. And this is according to Brother Edsel. This man used to insist that he could tell if a person had read the entire Martyr's Mirror because he felt like that person had something that marked him by engaging in that text.

And that's a very intriguing thing to think about.

To me, it illustrates the power that the body can have on the soul. There's a book just releasing today by Justin Whitmer Early. He's not an Anabaptist. He's a missionary. Now he's a lawyer, and he's also an author. Something to the effect, the title of the book is The Body Teaches the Soul. And he's arguing that the habits that we engage in actually do form our spiritual life and vice versa. We can't have a one-way street. Some people want to think it's all spiritual, and what the physical is doesn't matter. He says, no, no.

The physical and spiritual must be kept together. We're not going to split them apart like the Gnostics did. But we expect, and we need to recognize that the things we engage in, even our reading material, has a way, physical reading material has a way of influencing our spiritual soul and influencing us. And that's for good or for bad.

From our text there in Psalm 78, verses 2 and 3, we see that longevity happens because faithful listeners received and passed on what they had heard. He says, I will open my mouth in a parable. I will utter dark sayings of old, which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us. And frankly, I haven't really brought the Martyr's Mirror out for my family at this point. Hudson was just looking at it a little bit ago in the pew, and he was asking me questions. Why is there this lion coming after this man in the arena? And I thought about these pictures he's looking at in here. And we've got something that rivals Halloween here.

This is some really scary stuff. I'm sort of tongue in cheek. I think that if we introduce our families to this book and to these pictures, it could actually help to inoculate them against the false wickedness and vileness of events like Halloween.

There's actually a purpose in all of this goriness and awfulness that we see in the Martyr's Mirror.

So it's our responsibility to pass it on, to provide for this longevity. Another thing I really appreciate about this movement is the identity. The identity. We all want to belong to something. We need to. We've been designed to. If I might use a double negative, we cannot not follow somebody.

We're going to follow somebody. We will. We will. It's just a given.

And so in this context, I am very grateful for how the conservative Anabaptist element, and there's a wide range of Anabaptists, very conservative, very progressive, but I'm speaking specifically of the conservative Anabaptist element, have been very purposeful about developing and maintaining an identity. And by conservative, I mean conservative in theology and conservative in practice.

And it's odd, but true that progressivism in practice typically leads to progressivism in every area of life. Strangely enough, you start letting down on those practices. After a while, you start letting down on the beliefs too. It illustrates how inextricably linked the body and the soul are.

And it also tends to leave people unsure about who they are and who they should be. I can give you account after account. I was just talking to a minister yesterday, and he said, I can hardly get my people to show up for three out of four Sundays, my church.

We might have 40 people. And the churches in my group are on the verge of shutting down. They're on the verge of dying.

It's going to identity, folks. It's going to identity. And when we start playing around with certain things, we will find out that we will get the results that the churches who have gone down that road continually, continually get. This thing of identity, knowing who I am, knowing who I should be, is huge.

Because when I start losing that, then other things begin to shape my identity. I'm going to start looking to my phone, my peers, and social media to tell me who I should be.

So when I think about the conservative element, and it doesn't matter if it's conservative Baptist, conservative Pentecostal, those are the groups that are growing. The progressive groups consistently diminish and die.

So I'm celebrating the careful anti-worldly identity that conservative Anabaptists have championed for centuries, coming out from the world, being separate from them, not wanting to be engaged with things that would lead me to the world or to worldliness, being very careful about sin.

I think our identity probably can be boiled down into three big words that we like to use, and they're very helpful: non-resistance, non-accumulation, and non-conformity. Or if you want to be positive about it, as Dad Martin has presented them, the ideal resistance, the ideal accumulation, and the ideal conformity.

And when it comes to identity, there are a few things that are more identity shaping than these: our views on war and our practices, our views on money and our practices, our views on music and our practices, and our views on clothing and our practices.

At our congregation here, we have said that we expect our men to wear a long sleeve button-down shirt for church and a button-down shirt the rest of the time. I think that's a great practice. I think it has a way of cultivating an identity within us that is not going to happen any other way. And you sisters are carrying a lot of the identity-forming, identity-shaping clothing in how you live your life. Thank you for doing that.

It's a positive thing. It's a beautiful thing. Clothing is so hugely formative because it's probably the only thing that we interact with more regularly than our cell phone.

And if you have a smartphone, how many of us have a smartphone? Let's just be honest here. All right. I'm going to guess 80.3%, maybe more than that. If we have a smartphone, that device has been designed to disciple you and to disciple me.

And unless we're very, very intentional, we will become disciples of the smartphone, the internet, and social media. That's the designation. And the minister gets about 45 minutes or an hour on Sunday to try to curb all of that influence. Now, I'm speaking in Protestant terms here.

But you see how it's always there. The pressure is always on. The worldliness is pressing in. And we have to decide what we're going to do. The power of a clear identity.

Novelist Flannery O'Connor once said, push as hard as the age that pushes against you. And I would add, push where the age is pushing against you. We're getting pushed in some interesting places. And if we're not going to push back, we'll get pushed around and molded into the identity of the world.

Unity is more than uniformity. I agree.

But it does require a basic measure of uniformity for any sort of ongoing credible witness of separation from the world. And it's ironic because I've heard people deride uniformity. Oh, they're just all doing the same thing. And then go on to decry the divisions in the conservative Anabaptist world.

You can't have it both ways. You can't have it both ways. You have to build the kingdom within a cultural context. Not a single one of us can live culture-free. We were part of a church group that experimented with that. And you know what happens?

You end up with a church that feels like it's culture-free, but it's a culture-free culture. It's impossible to live without a culture because where two or three are gathered together over the course of time, there will be culture.

How we do things, how we experience things, what we expect, culture arises in families, in schools, in churches, no matter where you look. And so unity is much more than uniformity, but it will never have less than a basic uniformity of some sort, especially at the brotherhood level. Every church willing and able to govern themselves on practical matters.

I really think we saw this demonstrated in such a beautiful and tremendous way last Sunday when Harmony came and sang for us. Did they show uniformity? Really, a lot of uniformity. I mean, it was uniform. But it was beautiful uniformity. In fact, if you were not here, I encourage you to go to our YouTube channel and check out the video titled Faithfulness, Harmony of Praise from October 2025.

That's a beautiful picture of what's possible when there is unity and uniformity working together.

Eric Mason's, I don't know who he is. Probably not an Anabaptist, made this comment. He said, most of us like what God says until we're called to action.

There are so many areas where our identity is powerfully shaped: money and wealth, the cars that we drive, how we relate to enemies, marriage and divorce, and so forth.

My encouragement, my challenge for you this morning is this: you should choose the conservative Anabaptist way of life because it is possibly, I'm leaving room for lots of people and places out there I don't know about, but it's possibly the closest representation of credible kingdom living anywhere in the world. I don't think I'm overstating my case. I'm open to the fact that there are groups of people in Asia and Africa and maybe even South America that I don't know about who are living faithful credible kingdom representation.

But what I'm aware of and what's beautiful in my mind is the conservative Anabaptist element that is across the world. A fourth element that I really appreciate, and this might seem like a paradox, variety might seem like a paradox with what I've been saying about identity.

While we do talk about shared values, shared ideals, shared practices, the lovely reality is that Anabaptism has a variety of expressions. And that's a beautiful thing. I don't find that difficult to embrace at all. I recognize that our text here in Psalm 78 doesn't specifically address variety. But we do remember that the tribes that he's talking about and to whom he is writing, even though they were part of one nation of Israel, they were 12 tribes.

And they weren't all the same. There was variety in those tribes. Two and a half of those tribes chose to stay on the east side of the Jordan River. One of those tribes, the Levites, was to be scattered throughout all the other tribes.

One of the tribes, Benjamin, became so wicked that their brothers just about wiped them off the face of the earth. They left about 400 of them.

Variety amongst the tribes.

Some tribes were more daring than others. Some tribes stayed more true.

And so when you think about the Anabaptist world, there is a lot of people calling who's in the kingdom and who's out. But from my understanding, if you take all of the Anabaptists from the most conservative to the most progressive, it numbers just a little over 2 million people.

Very tiny group. Very tiny. Very insignificant.

And yet I do like to think of us as diverse as we are: the Kleinigaminda, the Beechies, the Hutterites, the Conference Mennonites, the German Baptists, the unaffiliated, and others.

I think there's enough salt to salt the earth.

And I think God's okay with the variety. I think he's pleased when groups are doing the best that they know how with what they have. And really, I find the assortment very interesting. I think it'd be kind of bland if all the churches were like Shippensburg Christian Fellowship. I really appreciate us. I think people should be more like us, but I'm not saying they should be exactly like us.

And so we have the same basic tenets, but we live them out in very, very different ways.

And far from being a detraction or a disgrace, I think it serves to make us more responsible. There's such a variety out there. If you can't find one to plug into and be accountable to and yield to, I think God's going to have a list for you possibly and say, you had all these choices.

Couldn't you choose one?

It's a beautiful thing. Don't like the way Shippensburg Christian Fellowship does things? There's other churches around. Plug in. Submit. Practice Galatian height.

I think we have such a wonderful variety in our hymns, our schools, our mission fields, the causes that we're concerned about, the things that we are striving for. We're part of many cultures, and there are elements of many cultures that influenced us. And I think that's a beautiful thing. Cross-pollination is a beautiful thing.

I think it's also healthy for us to wrestle with questions of how do we respond and interact with people who are Christians but not like us?

If we're strong in what we believe and we're content in what we believe, we can actually interact fairly freely with other people without feeling threatened. I don't have to feel more superior than or inferior to other people if I know where I stand, if my identity is strong. And I see this in the River Brotherhood people. Now, they would probably say, oh, well, that needs to be qualified quite a bit. I understand. But they are a people who are fairly strong in their identity, and they reach out very broadly. They're involved in this mission trip and this singing group.

But they're very different in how they practice. But overall, they're fairly content. They're a small group. They know that nobody else is like them. And that's all right. We can still be friends.

We can still smile at one another at Walmart.

So what about people who are Anabaptists but are not like us? Let's embrace the variety without compromising scripture, of course. And the final thing that I really appreciate about Anabaptism is what I would call endurability.

It's endurability. That may or may not be a word. I was trying to get my dictionary app to really tell me for sure if it is. It seems like it potentially is. But we're going to roll with it.

Longevity asks the question, does Anabaptism have a foundation? Endurability asks the question, does Anabaptism have a future?

And I believe that the answer is a resounding yes. Yes. I wouldn't be part of this group if I didn't think there was a future for Anabaptism. I know that sounds kind of selfish and self-serving. But I'm not just concerned about me. I'm concerned about my children and my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as the Lord tarries. I am responsible to choose the best group that I know for endurability.

And I say this coming from a bit of the outside. I'm a bit of an outsider to the conservative Anabaptist world.

All of us want to be part of something that matters, I think. Something that endures. None of us wants to get to the end of our life and realize, oh, I poured myself into the wrong thing. And now it's going to crash and burn. Now I have nothing to show for all my work.

And that's where I find the Anabaptist connection to the kingdom so powerful. It's that kingdom element, the never-ending kingdom of Christ, that to me gives its enduring value.

The psalmist in our text tells us that it requires multi-generational faithfulness. Faithfulness to receive from those before us. Faithfulness to give to those after us. We see this call and commitment throughout verses 4 to 7. He says, we will not hide them from their children, telling to the generation to come the praises of the Lord and his strength and his wonderful works that he has done. For he established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children. Why? That the generation to come might know them. The children who will be born, that they may arise and declare them to their children, that they may set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments.

In the midst of all this celebration about Anabaptism, I want to be very clear about this.

Anabaptism is not an end. It's not an end. It is merely a means to an end. That's very important.

The value of our group is how it functions as a vehicle to an end. And what is the end? You see it there in verse 7, that they may set their hope in God. That they may set their hope in God. Our desire is that we and all of our offspring would firmly, fully plant their hope on the Lord Jesus Christ.

That's what we want for our children, our grandchildren down the generations.

And so in order for us to be part of the endurabilness of Anabaptism, it is important that we get to know our stories, our theology, our history, and our hymns. And of course, not just get to know them, but pass them on. Pass them on.

And I speak as a father who is early in the journey. I have no idea where my children will end up. I know my ideals and hopes for them, but they all have a free will, and they can choose to go where they want.

But I know the desires that I have for them to choose something of enduring value. I have a huge application from the message this morning, literally and figuratively. The application from this message is, I want you to take your copy of Mara's Mirror, which most of you said you have. And if you don't have one, get one or get one from the church library.

And I want you to decide you're going to read through it. Now, 1,158 pages is nothing to sneeze at. But if you do a little over a page and a half a day, you can do it in two years.

Biggest devotional book you ever buy.

But I know in 2012, January 1st, I decided to start on that journey, and I finished in June of 2013. It's a powerful book. It's well worth your investment. Just as we all follow someone in life, so too we all must choose a cultural path in which to live the kingdom. None of us can live culture-free. It's impossible.

And so we choose the group that eventually does shape us and shape our children and shape our grandchildren.

And so I'm encouraging you, don't look for perfection. Look for credibility. I'm swiping this from dad. Look for credibility. My interest and inspiration in relation to Anabaptism is only based on its connection to its manifestation of the kingdom of God.

And as long as we continue to foster that connection, Anabaptism will be something worth celebrating.

So for these reasons and others, I believe that Anabaptism is fully alive in 2025. You really should choose the conservative Anabaptist way of life because it's possibly the closest representation of credible kingdom living anywhere on earth.

I know this is not a comprehensive list of the beauties. I'd love to hear some of the ones that you would add to it. I'm also aware that we have a lot of work to do as far as changing things that are not well.

And I don't overlook those.

In closing, Anabaptism is a kingdom movement that gets older without aging because it's connected to the eternal kingdom.

It's a reformation worth celebrating because through it, we have been influenced. I have been influenced to love and serve and obey King Jesus. To serve in his kingdom in a number of beautiful ways through amenability, longevity, identity, variety, and endurability.

I'm so thankful for the 500 years of witness that God has granted the Anabaptist people.