"Anabaptist Origins Documentary: Retracing the First 100 Years" by Reagan Schrock

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Welcome to Strength to Strength. We're here to offer resources to strengthen your obedient, love-faith relationship with King Jesus, give you solid footing in a shaky world. We have Regan Shrock on today to talk to us about the story of the Anabaptist Origins documentary. So Regan Shrock is probably a familiar face and voice to many of you, but he's with us from Anabaptist perspectives, who maybe we could call our older and more well-put-together sibling from Strength to Strength. So Regan lives in Tennessee with his wife and two daughters. And on his bio here, it says he founded Anabaptist Perspectives in 2017. And it's been that long, wow, nine years. So anyhow, we're welcoming Regan on here this morning to share the story of the Anabaptist Origins documentary.

And the Anabaptist Origins is a 10-part documentary series tracing the first 100 years of the Anabaptist movement. It's filmed on location across Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. And the series is intended to bring viewers to the actual places where men like Conrad Grebbel, Felix Mollens, and Menno Simons lived, were hunted, and in some cases died for their convictions. 500 years after the first believers' baptism in Zurich, this is a chance to see our spiritual heritage, not as a distant memory, history, but as real events that still inform and influence us today. So yeah, hey, I'm really looking forward to actually seeing this documentary. And yeah, looking forward to hearing what you have to talk to us about today, Regan.

Before we dive into it, why don't we just—why don't we have prayer?

Father, we thank you for your goodness. Thank you for who you are. You're a good and wise God, and we thank you for that. And we want to see your kingdom come and your will be done here on earth like it is in heaven.

I pray your blessing on Regan as he shares. Thank you for the work and just everything that went into this and is still going into this series. And I just pray that you would bless it and bring it about. And now may you be glorified. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Over to you, Regan, and we'll see where this takes us.

All right. Thank you, Wendell. Yeah, it's good to be here. It's been a while since I've been with you all, so this is good. And one note too, yeah, I helped start Anabaptist Perspectives, but Jared Miller was also one of the founders as well. And I'm sure some of you have seen him around on the podcast and so forth. So that's every week we do podcasts. And we did that for a number of years. And there was a part of my own story where I—just being honest, I just did not enjoy church history. I just didn't really care. I didn't find it very interesting at all. Actually, if you look at some of those early first couple of years of the podcast, we didn't really do that much history.

That kind of reflects me, I guess, in some ways. And until one day, I kind of realized history is just stories, really. And I probably should care about it because I'm a historical being. What happened before kind of affects me as I think of even in my own family stories.

And over time, I was kind of surprised how little I actually knew of these important stories that have happened in the past. And so it's kind of started percolating over the years. And so I was getting lunch with the chairman of our board, and he's just like, "Where do you see this thing going? What's a big idea you have for Anabaptist Perspectives?" And this has been brewing in my head for a while, so I just kind of pitched it to him there over lunch in like three minutes. And I was like, "It would be really neat." And this is—I was like, "This is crazy. This will just never happen." But take a film crew and a historian or something and go to Europe and tell that first 100 or so years of Anabaptism.

What even was this thing? Why did it start? Who were all these guys? We hear all these names, but it's all kind of confusing in my head, and it's hard to visualize. And you try to find good books on it, and it's hard to find, or they're out of print, or they're really expensive. And he was like, "Sure, yeah, let's just do it." It was really about as simple as that. He's like, "Yeah, sure. Yeah, let's just do it." So some people stepped forward for the funding, and before we knew it, I was like, "Oh, I think we're actually going to do this." So we filmed it last year. And so I have some slides.

I know some people will be listening, so I'll just try to describe them the best I can if you're not able to see them here. Let's see if we can get my screen share up and running.

But this is going to just kind of give you an idea of what we did with this project. So is that coming through okay, Wendell? Can y'all see that all right? Yes, it's great. All right, awesome. So we did the series, but I don't want to come on here and be like, "You should go check out this great product." It's not about that at all.

This is a big story, and it's not ours, as in our organization, to tell it. We don't want to be the stewards of this. What I want to try to do this morning is encourage all of you to become more familiar with the story because it does matter to us. And that is a piece that has changed for me is really understanding that. So the first slide I have here is just showing, "Okay, this is what we did." The first episode's coming in July 11, and it's 10 full documentaries. So it's going to take a little while to roll it all out. That's why it's been about a year since we've actually filmed it. It's just a lot of work to edit.

I think it was like 500 hours of footage or something crazy. But we did it with Stephen Russell and Dean Taylor, which I know you've had on here before. They're wonderful, and they just put—oh my goodness—they put so much work into the script and fact-checking everything. And oh my, yeah, Stephen Russell especially, he's been a church history teacher for a long time, so he was really excited about this. What I'm going to do is kind of go through it roughly in the sequence that the story will be told as the documentaries release. And I'll do my best, but again, I mean, the first 100 years of Anabaptism, I mean, even with 10 episodes, 10 full documentaries, we had to cut so much stuff out just because there's a lot there.

So I'm going to start here. This is the skyline of Zurich, Switzerland. And that's actually from that—what would that be? That'd be the left side of the Grossmünster, which is the main church there that's Zwingli, right? We all hear the name Zwingli. Well, he starts the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland. And this is that church. And we got permission to film in there, and they let us go up all the way to the top, get some shots up there. And that's, in a way, where the story begins. It's early 1520s, where Zwingli is starting to say, "Hey, the Reformation, right? We should break with the Catholic Church." And some of his students would be Felix Mollens, Conrad Grebbel.

And again, I'd heard all these names, but it wasn't really concrete for me until we started researching for this. And they started becoming alive and realizing, "Wait, Conrad Grebbel lived right down the road. Felix Mollens was right here.

This is the streets they walked. This was real. It was a real place. It's not some dusty thing off there. These were real people." And it started becoming way more concrete for me. And I think that's one of the issues or challenges, I guess you could say, with history is you kind of lose touch of it, of the grounding, of these were real people making pretty hard decisions at the time. And we'll get into some of the consequences of those soon. But just kind of a sense of, there's the Grossmünster Church on the left, beautiful place. And that's where Zwingli would have been the lead—they called it people's priest or pastor or whatever you want to call it—because after they broke with the Catholics.

But what's really special for us, you look at the photo there on the right, that is the current pastor of the Grossmünster Church. He'd be like he had on his wall the line from pastor to pastor, the succession line for the Grossmünster, going all the way back to Zwingli. So that would be who this guy is, right? The successor in some ways of Zwingli. And that's Dean Taylor and Mr. Russell and myself. That's right outside one of the side doors. It's after he'd given us a full afternoon going through the whole thing with us, letting us film in there, showing everything. It was very special. And he was very kind. So I want to give him due credit for, oh my, they were so kind to us.

And they really cared. They wanted the story told. And that meant a lot to us. He was very warm towards saying things like, "We were not fair to you all. And the way we have allowed the story to be told was not right." And he mentioned Bollinger, which was right after Zwingli. And Bollinger was just very cruel and very mean towards the Anabaptist. And he even apologized for that, saying that was wrong. And that meant a lot. And just this very warm person. And so things like that, as we went and tried to tell this story, we had so many opportunities like that where people would come forward and say, "Oh, look at this thing," or "We'll show you this," or "We'll let you into these places you don't normally get to go."

I mean, you do not get to just go all over the Grossmünster with a film crew of five cameramen and film all this stuff. That's pretty neat. And he gave us access to everything.

But another place right down the street is attached to one of the libraries or museums there. And they had done a special curation of old documents for the Anabaptist story and had those out on display. And again, we had some great producers. They made contact with that guy, and he said, "I will show you. I'll open it up for you. I'll come give you—I'll show you everything." So this letter, for example, is a hugely important letter. This is Felix Mollens, so original Felix Mollens in his own hand a few months before—I think this is October 1524, so only a couple of months before the first adult baptisms. And this is his letter to the city council saying, "Here's where we stand.

Here's what we believe. We believe you should be baptized as believers. You should really lay out some of those very first points that they had where they started disagreeing with the state church and sent that to the city council. And that's been preserved, and they let us come in and look at it and take pictures." Another one, they actually literally had to open up the display case, unlock, and all this—it took a little bit of time because this is extremely rare. But this is that famous illustration I think we've probably all seen if you read your history books about Felix Mollens. And this is the painting or the image. And it's a manuscript, I'm trying to remember from when.

And it's showing him just about to be drowned. So there he is at the Fisher's Hut. And they're in the boat there. You can see they're pulling him in, and they're about to drown him. And all the people standing there watching.

Again, for those that are listening, you'll just have to look this up online. I mean, this is a well-known painting. But to see the actual original and have them open that up for us was pretty cool. But on the upper right, where all the people are standing, and then you see that kind of red-colored building in the middle, we filmed right there. So that's where the plaque would be that the church later put in saying, "Here's where Felix Mollens was drowned." And again, it's just like you see that, and you're like, "Oh, this is not a dry history.

This was real people that really believed what they believed," thinking it was right to drown him for his beliefs. And it's pretty sobering. Then you go, and that's the very spot right there then that's in that painting. And there's the plaque commemorating or commemorating, I guess, acknowledging what happened there.

And yeah, that's where Felix Mollens died for what he believed. Yeah. Yeah, no, go ahead. Yeah. So I'm just wondering, it sounds like maybe just actually going location and really spending time, especially with Stephen Russell and Dean Taylor there, helped to bring it alive for you.

Was that the case? Yeah, yeah, it really was. And this is one of the core visions that we have, is if you want to hear these stories, they're hard to access or hard to make real. I don't know. I have some of these books, right? You get these big, expensive books. They're hard to find on history of whatever, or maybe they're out of print. You can't get them. And then maybe they're a little academic, or they're not very interesting, or not visual. You can't really grasp it.

We wanted those visual anchors.

Yeah, it makes you think about it in a different way, at least it did for me.

Or even this. This is right up the road from that spot where Felix Mollens was drowned. And this is a pretty likely—they don't know 100%, but this house or very close to this house where the first baptism actually happens, where Conrad Grebbel, Felix Mollens, George Blaurock, we didn't be your core people choose. We're not going to be part of the state church. We actually believe that you have to individually believe and be baptized on confession of faith. And that's where it all started. That's where that split happens, really.

A hugely important part of our story. And I just don't know if I'd fully appreciated that until we had done this, right? And you see the fountain there. And Mr. Russell was like, "Oh, it's pretty likely. That's the fountain or that spot, at least, where they had to go get the water to do the baptism because you don't have indoor plumbing," right? And I was like, "Wow, man, that's something 500 years ago, and it really matters."

Another figure, too, is Michael Sattler. And we found this spot. This is the abbey that he would have been the prior at as a Catholic before he becomes the Anabaptist. It's a very well-established and beautiful place. And to track that down, film there, and say, "What was it that made him look at all the things he had done and say, 'I don't actually want that.

Something isn't right here'?" And to walk away from that and to join these, at that time, crazy radicals down in Switzerland, in Zurich, which had been pretty close to this location. What was that? And trying to get into his story, a significant piece he leaves there is the Schleidheim Confession. So again, they were just so helpful opening up the museum there in Schleidheim, letting us film in there. This is one of the few remaining copies from that time of the Schleidheim Confession. And I had always thought those documents were really difficult and boring and hard to understand and things. But then I started reading Schleidheim and some of this stuff, and it's really interesting, very readable, very understandable of what were the issues at the time, what were the things they really cared about, what was it that these people did that was considered so dangerous to the state that they would get banished or expelled or executed, thrown in prison.

Good night. What was it? It must have been something crazy, right? And then, well, you can just read it for yourself where they're stating, "These are the things we believe." And then now we look at it 500 years later, and you're like, "Why would you burn somebody at the stake because you have a different view of whatever some of this stuff?" But at the time, that's definitely how it operated, which right there is the spot then where Michael Sattler and his wife would have been executed, burned, and drowned. And it's just like, "Wow, that really makes you think about it.

What are the things that we believe and how far are we willing to go for them?" And yeah, it's actually a little tough sometimes. I mean, you look at how much these people suffered.

Yeah, it can be a little difficult for me to even conceptualize why was the state church so brutal to them? Yeah, etc. So I'm going to jump to another figure then. And this one, one of the things we were trying to do with the documentary is track down some of the stuff that's really hard to find. And this one, I don't know if this has been published before or not, but best the scholarship knows, this is the castle prison where Peter Rittenman was held.

He's a pretty significant early figure as far as a missionary and so forth. And I don't know if you can see it on the screen because I'm sharing screens, but he wrote this little book called Love Is Like Fire. And Plow Publishing republished this or got it back into print, which would be the Bruderhoff. And I really encourage you to go give this a read. He's writing in 1528, I think it is. And he's writing in this prison that I have up on screen.

And it says in one of the historical accounts, someone else writing about him says he was tortured almost to the point of death. And yet you read this book, and it's an incredible, powerful statement of, "Here's what we believe," and things like why love matters and why we can't fight back, and going through things like the Apostles' Creed and declaring, "This is what we believe. This is what we believe." And it is very readable, and I really highly recommend all of you read it. I think that was one of the things I had not done enough of is actually reading some of that source material of these people, their letters. He's sitting in prison. He's been tortured almost to the point of death.

And he writes this incredible statement on how we should love and care and not fight back and not be part of the kingdoms of this world and laying out, "This is what we believe, and we'll die for it if we have to," which, incredibly enough, he actually escaped somehow from this prison and continued journeying on in his missionary endeavors and was ultimately captured, I think, several more times before he eventually was killed.

Yeah, pretty courageous person there. And right with that, you run into things like this. This is the Golden Roof in Innsbruck, Austria. So back in the day, this has been hugely important. This is where the emperor would stand up there on that balcony, and processions would come by, and all the grandeur and glory of being the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, I mean, massively important. And then you can't really even see it. But if you look down at the bottom left near that umbrella, there's a little plaque.

And that little plaque says, "Here at this square, Jacob Huter, the founder of the Hutterites, Jacob Huter was burned at the stake." And you look at the contrast between those two things, and it doesn't get much more stark than that. And yet the point that really stuck with me is I don't know who that emperor was, and I don't even care.

But I look at someone like Jacob Huter, and we're still reading his writings today. We're still what he believed and helped shape has formed many thousands of people through time. And that empire is long gone. I couldn't have told you unless I had read the book or whatever before, I could never have told you who that emperor was, what empire it was. I wouldn't have known. I wouldn't have cared. I don't think anybody on that square really knew or really cared either, honestly.

And it just shows these empires can feel so permanent, and in the end, they're just gone. It doesn't really matter. And that was such a huge point of these guys. Oh my goodness, it just comes through their writings so much. It's like, "Don't get tangled up in that."

And it's so prophetic because at the time, it would have been like, "How could you ever question this?" And then now we look back and we're like, "Wow, they were right on the money because who knows anything about the Holy Roman Empire now?" I mean, I'm sure some people do, but it doesn't matter that much.

And again, the contrast was just so stark. And here's another spot. This is a dungeon, underground tunnel in the rock where a lot of those first Hutterites would have been held. We know for total certain, at least is what they're telling us. I mean, there's a little museum there. This is Falkenstein Castle. They were held right here and several other spots as well and waiting their trials or what's going to happen to you. Are you going to be executed, banished? In this case, a lot of them that were held in this underground cave, and this is right after Jacob Huter, right around that same time, a lot of them were actually sent to the galley ships, which is a really bad way to die.

You can look it up later if you want nightmares. Yeah, really, really rough. So again, they opened this place up, let us film in here, film all around Falkenstein Castle. Really special to see that.

So again, I'm kind of going through the story as it'll be told. So we'll have whole episodes on some of these things. And one of those pieces that makes us uncomfortable is some of the stuff in the Anabaptist story that isn't so good. And we do talk about that. We don't want to hide from the lesser parts of our story. This is part of the old city wall in Vienna, Austria. And they just added this here in the last couple of years, I think. That plaque on the right is about Balthasar Hubmeyer.

Hubmeyer was a really important and influential early Anabaptist writer and thinker that we've kind of forgotten about. But he had some really weird ideas on the sword and the state he wanted to make an Anabaptist. How was it? An Anabaptist kingdom, basically, kind of like an Anabaptist state church, like all the other denominations dreamed of, "We should do the same."

It was a disaster.

Yeah, the king got a hold of that and did not like that. And he had written this book basically saying, "I was wrong about this, and we should take up the sword. We should fight back." Two weeks later after that is published, he's thrown into prison, hauled down in chains to Vienna, and burned at the stake right here.

The irony of that is you could cut it with a knife. And so that story ends pretty tragically. And you got to wonder, did he ever see how wrong he had gotten it? I don't know. But we tell that story.

Not all of these guys were perfect, obviously. And we believe he was very wrong in that, his belief on, "We should fight back. We should take up the sword," because the persecution was so heavy. He's like, "We have to fight back." And yeah, he was clearly, I believe, clearly wrong.

But another oh, go ahead, Wendell. Well, I was going to say, Reagan, it feels like so many what you're talking about back to the Golden Roof there, the emperor, and how he doesn't even matter anymore here. Hubmeyer, when he came to the point where he's like, "Things are so bad. We got to start taking force." Those are really relevant for us today. Yeah.

I actually got his and again, this is credit to Plow Publishing, the Bruderhoff. In the last, I don't know, 15 years or so, they've started reprinting the classics of the Radical Reformation series. So here's a couple. I'm like, "This is all the works of Sattler that we have," which isn't that many. This is a lot of Conrad Grebel's letters and some stuff from Felix Bonds. Huge, huge volume. A lot of this had been going out of print. It was very expensive. Well, one of the volumes that they chose to continue to print is the complete works of Hubmeyer. Despite his flaws and the disagreements, they're like, "Well, but he did have influence on the movement, and we should remember this."

And it's right there. You read his little book he has in there on the sword, "Why We Should Pick Up the Sword."

Sobering stuff to read.

But another one with that, and we've probably all heard it, but again, I didn't know the story well, is Münster, Germany. So we filmed there as well. And that was sobering. I mean, it gets so much worse where the Anabaptists essentially take over the entire city and set up a government and take up the sword. The local lords are obviously not impressed with a whole city rebelling and leaving their little kingdom. So they circle it up and put it under siege. And there's this battle that goes on for basically a year where they're trying to take this city back. And it's just this pretty insane story. The stuff that happens is just awful. And that's also part of the story.

And we don't really like to talk about that very much, right? I mean, it's kind of like, "Ouch." These guys got it terribly wrong. And this church here, St. Lambert, right in the center of the city, is one of the few cities they didn't actually knock down the steeples on. They were so against the state church. And they were like, "We shouldn't have any of this." So they destroyed the steeples all around the city. But they kept these steeples in place so they could put cannons in them and shoot at the army that was outside the city walls. So again, the irony, you could cut it with a knife because when the city eventually and inevitably, of course, falls, they capture the three leaders that they could get their hands on.

Some of them escape, but the three leaders that they could get their hands on and parade them all over, make a mockery of them, execute them here at the church, put them in those steel cages, and hoist them all the way up onto that one steeple that they had used to put cannons in and shoot at the army. And those are still the original cages. They're still there. And the city has and there's been multiple efforts, actually, petitioning city council to take those cages down. It makes the steeple look bad. And they're like, "Well, these tourists are coming, and we don't like how it makes the steeple look, these giant, nasty, old steel cages." And the city council every time has been like, "Absolutely not.

We're going to leave them up. The story is too important. We can't let people forget what happened here." I find that commendable. There was a recent effort about 20 years ago where they pushed really hard to get them taken down, and it almost happened. But they were like, "No, we can't let this story be forgotten."

And so we were able to film a section right under those cages, actually. And that's a sobering when that episode comes out, that one's going to be pretty sobering. There's not a lot of a bright spot. It just ends badly in every way and nasty. And it's a real warning, I think, to us. Just like the Hubmeyer story, take up the sword. It gets executed two weeks later.

It's kind of like that. And we wanted to spend a good chunk of time on that, actually, in this series because and this is more Dean Taylor and Mr. Russell initially. And then I really started seeing that our people are still very much at risk of these things today.

It's just pretty easy to get all wrapped up into the kingdoms of this world. And it's just disastrous, at least in these cases, just totally disastrous.

Yeah. So there's another figure that was watching all that happening in Münster where they're taking up the sword and rebelling and fighting back. And he was a Catholic priest. And he's like, "This is just nuts. This is crazy." And this was his church. And his name was Menno Simons.

So this is Menno Simons' church where he would have been a Catholic priest. And he's hearing about this because Münster wasn't that far away. And he writes about it. And that was one of the crises of faith that he had of saying, "Man, I think I got all this wrong. This is the inside." They opened it up for us. Let us film in here. Man, that was really special.

And so he writes a lot of his writings is kind of coming out of that backdrop of like, "Whoa, the Anabaptists in Münster got completely derailed." And he spent so much effort trying to bring it back to its roots, I guess you could say.

That is way oversimplifying. I'm sure my historian friends will be like, "You're missing something." But needless to say, though, that is an important part of his story and kind of putting those pieces together and how he's able to keep that movement from just going to pieces and going violent and going crazy was pretty neat. And we actually went to the Amsterdam archive, and they have the only remaining manuscript from Menno Simons in his own hand, which is what I'm just put on the screen there. So that is a letter from Menno to a widow. And it's, yeah, it's the only piece of original writing that it still exists. And they pulled it out for us, which is really unusual.

This is not something that you can just go see, unfortunately. They're like, "Please, we want to take pictures of it. We want to see it." They're like, "Well, okay." So they were very gracious. But it's not something you typically get to see, which is, again, kind of unfortunate, I guess.

So yeah, we spent a lot of time on Menno. And then all throughout, you're getting things like this. This is a cave that the Anabaptists would have hid in because they can't meet in the cities anymore. It's too dangerous. This was a barn. It had a hidden door in it, and they could escape and hide down in there, and they would have their church services in here.

And this is just a family's farm. They had discovered it and started reading the story of their own farm. And they're like, "Whoa, who are these Anabaptists? We don't know what this is." And so they went deep in that story, reading their history, reading their family's story because that was their family 500 years ago that did this. And they said it was a major part of that lady's I don't know about conversion, but coming back to Christianity and saying, "Wow, Christianity, there's something here. There's something worth believing in here." And so they've set up this little museum. And it's so wonderfully done. And it's just a private farm. So I don't know if you can just go here.

I think you might have to call ahead. I'm not quite sure how that works. We got to just film in their barn. And they're in there raking hay. And they're just living life. But it's their family story. It was pretty neat, though, that they had yeah, they preserved it very nicely. And yeah.

And even things like that. This is one of the other archives. They point out these old drawings and paintings of these are some Anabaptists. They caught in the woods, and they're driving them back to the city to be tried for their horrible crimes, which in this case was believing in Jesus and getting baptized, which is just a horrible crime. But you're seeing stuff like this. And suddenly, it starts making you think, "I've got it so good. How would have I responded if I had to face something like this? If we had to have church services in a barn, what would that do to me? How would I handle that?" I don't know. It just makes you think.

I'd say the piece, though, that stuck with me the most and I want to leave these quotes with you here. When we were in Amsterdam, they pulled this out. This is the only original letter that we have that they found so far of a martyr written right before her death. It's in the martyr's mirror. The full letter is. And so that's why we know those things are not made up. It's accurate from this document.

So this is right before she's executed, burned at the stake in Amsterdam. And I want to read a few quotes from this. Again, this is so special. They pulled this out. Let us look at this. I don't even know if you can find pictures of this online. Or it's very hard to find, which is, again, unfortunate.

So let me just read this. She's writing to her son. And she says, "Oh, my dear son, though I am taken from you here, strive from your youth to fear God, and you shall have your mother again up yonder in the New Jerusalem, where parting will be no more. My dear son, I hope now to go before you. Follow me thus as much as you value your soul, for besides this, there shall be found no other way to salvation."

And then another excerpt. "My dear son, be not afraid of this suffering. It is nothing compared to that which shall endure forever. The Lord takes away all fear. I did not know what to do for the joy when I was sentenced. Love one another all the days of your life. Take handskin on your arm now and then for me. And if your father should be taken from you, care for one another. The Lord keep you all. Keep you one and all."

She was sentenced October 5th, 1573. And that letter was written that very night in prison. And she's burned first thing the next morning at the stake. And this is her last words. And I have it cropped in. You can see her signature there at the bottom. It says, "By me, Megan Wends, your mother, who bore you in much pain as a remembrance. Preserve this well."

And wow, preserve this well. Remember this. Remember this. And that's what we want to do. That's what we want to do. And to be able to see that and you're just like, "Wow, it's all" I'll go back to it here. Again, for those of you who can't see this, you'll look it up. We'll have this on our website and stuff. But you can see it's all stained and folded and really tattered. You can just kind of imagine her sitting in a dark, damp cell trying to scrawl this out. You've just been sentenced. You're going to be burned first thing the next morning. And you're like, "What are the last things I want to tell my family?"

Yeah. I can just imagine it being folded up in someone's safekeeping for years, too, the way it looks. Preserve this well. Yeah. Yeah. So someone cared enough to preserve it. You can read the full story in the martyr's mirror. But this is the illustration in the martyr's mirror that goes with that story.

This is the day after that she's been or this is the day she's been burned. That's her two children sifting through the ashes of what remains of her. You can see the remains of the place she was chained and, yeah, burned alive.

Had a two-year-old. Handskin was the two-year-old there in the picture. And yeah, wow. What was it these people believed? That they were willing to do that? And then what was it that was so dangerous that the state was like, "That's the kind of execution we have to give to a mother of two children?"

I was like, "We can't forget what that was. That's too important. Preserve this well. Remember this." One of the things in the martyr's mirror account says they started realizing when you're going to be burned at the stake, they would be like, "Well, you have nothing to lose anyway." So they would preach and testify. And so eventually, they developed this really cruel form of torture called a tongue screw. And that's a tongue screw right there on the left. And so basically, it's almost like scissors. It clamps over your tongue, and they tighten the screw down into where you obviously can't speak while that's attached to you. So they did that for Megan Wends. And as they're sifting through these ashes, as it shows here in the illustration, that's what they were trying to find because there's nothing left after someone's been burned.

But that piece, because it's iron, would still be left. So they would keep it so they'd at least have something to remember that person by. And that happened, especially in Amsterdam. But over time, throughout history, those tongue screws have been lost or whatever. As far as we were able to find and if someone knows anything more on this, please tell us. This is the only tongue screw left. And it is not in a museum. It's not anywhere.

It's in private family collection. They have kept it in their family for 500 years. And the curator of the archive knew about it and said, "Hey, I can call that person and see if she would be willing to have it photographed or in the documentary." And so that person it took a little bit of work, but that person decided to come to the archive, bring that thing out. And this is a document that goes with it. I think this document's from a little later, but it's basically just saying, "Yes, this is authentic. It was such and such person burned on such and such date and so forth." And that document alone is like 400 years old or something, verifying it.

And it stayed in the family ever since that time, since it was sifted from the ashes. And I asked her then, after we were done filming, I was like, "Has this ever been in a documentary? Has this story been told?" And she was like, "I mean, I don't think so. I don't know that it ever has." And so I was just like, "Thank you so much for bringing this and letting us see this because you just can't find these anymore." So that's going to be in the series. And again, it just really brings it to life. What would it be like having that thing bolted on your tongue and you can't speak, and we're going to chain you to this post and light a big fire underneath of you until you're burned to ash?

Yikes. I mean, that's intense stuff. And that's exactly what Megan Wends went through. And to be able to see her letter and then have this person show up and pull that out of her just out of her handbag, like, "Here it is," and just set it there on the table, it's like, "Whoa.

I'm not quite sure what to do with that, actually." It just makes you think.

And then we end the series with this story, which is very familiar iconography or imagery. Dirk turning back. Dirk Williams turning back to pull his pursuer out of the ice and saving that man's life. And this is from the martyr's mirror, of course.

And you would think you do that and, "Oh, we'll have mercy on you. Wow, that was so gracious of you to save your pursuer." Well, no. The pursuer arrests him on the other bank. He's ordered to arrest him. And he's tried and burned at the stake the very next day despite doing this.

And we went there. So that church steeple there, there's a prison cell in the top. And it's impossible to know 100% certainty, but it's as certain as you can be that that's where he would have been held that night. So he saves the man. They put him in that prison, and then he's burned the very next day.

And again, it's so kind of the church. They opened it up. Let us film in there. In this on-screen here, these pieces of water are still part of that original moat of the castle. So there was a castle there originally. It's basically in the middle of this picture. There would have been a castle. And that's where he escapes. He escapes from prison. He's running across the moat that's frozen. And he gets across. He's on the bank. The other person falls through. That's chasing him. It's the piece of moat on the left side of the image there, which is where he had been running. And then he turns back, saves that person. They put him in the church that time because they thought maybe he'll escape from the castle because he did once.

Keep him extra safe. So let's put him in the church, in the church steeple, which, again, just seems so bizarre. Why are we using the church to hold this guy in prison? And very next day, they do not wait around. They burn him immediately, right away. So it's like, "Okay. Whoa.

I don't even know what to do with that." And there's been a lot of research on this in the last couple of years. There's a book, actually. A historian did some really good work from that village. It's a pretty small town. And he just published that book last fall on his research, a lot of new stuff about Dirk, about that town, about the castle. They found the castle ruins, and they're still excavating it. So you can't even see it here on the screen, but the foundations, we got to see some of that. The actual location where he ran across, they're pretty certain they know exactly where that is.

It was neat to see that story again coming to life. These are real places. These are real people. Here's the moat that he fled across. It's still there, which now, interestingly enough, it's a children's park, right? So there's a playground there, and there's families and children, and they're just laughing and having a good time. And it's like, "Wow, how this place has changed from being a prison and a castle to that."

And then up in the church, this is the cell. Again, almost certain. It's hard to know for sure, but this would have been where Dirk was held until he's executed the next morning. Those aren't the original stocks. Those were installed about 100 years later.

But you get an idea of what that last night might have been for him after really radically living out what Jesus says, "Love your enemies. I'm going to pull this man out of the ice who's trying to kill me."

And then that person proceeds to haul him to prison and kill him the next day.

What was that last night? As he's sitting there, do you think he questioned his choices? I mean, he could have gotten away. I don't think anybody would have blamed him if he had just kept running, right? Or did he's like, "No, I'm willing to do that."

Yeah. It's like, "What would I be thinking? What would I choose to do in that situation? If I was in Dirk's spot and I could get across the frozen ice and that guy falls through, I'm like, I'm out of here." Or do you radically love your enemy, even at the cost of being literally burned alive the next day for choosing to do that?

Yeah. It's nice to think we would all do the right thing, but I had to be honest with myself, too, and be like, "That would be hard. It would be really hard."

So I'm going to wrap this up with this. Why did we do this? It's called Anabaptist Origins. Why did we do it? We want to tell their story, but it's also our story today, right now, even though it was 500 years ago. It's their story, and it's our story.

We want to wrestle with their legacy. It's not all perfect. We looked at the pictures of Munster. We looked at Hub Meyers. We got to take up the sword and defend ourselves. But it's also our legacy, and we should wrestle with that. And what were the issues of the day? Why did it matter to them? Why does it matter to us? How does it affect us? And then the last one, and this is the thread that just runs all the way through the series, Neochristendom is not the answer.