Mennonite World Conference

The first conference met at Basel in 1925, on the four hundredth anniversary of the first adult baptisms at Zurich in 1525, which Anabaptists count as the beginning of the movement. It was a commemoration before it was an institution, and the institutional form arrived slowly: assemblies at intervals, a general council of delegates from member churches, an executive committee, and a small staff.

What it is not is a synod. Member conferences keep their own polity, their own confessions and their own discipline, and the Conference has no power to legislate for any of them, to ordain, to discipline a member church or to speak in its name without leave. It describes itself as a communion of churches, and the practical content of that is mutual recognition, shared study and the ability to act together where members agree to.

The nearest thing to a common statement is the Shared Convictions, adopted in 2006: seven short paragraphs on God, scripture, discipleship, the church as a community, peace and nonresistance, and worship, framed as what the member churches hold in common rather than as a creed anyone must subscribe. The wording was deliberately kept brief. A confession long enough to be precise would have been long enough for member churches to disagree with, and the body exists to hold them together rather than to sort them out.

The membership statistics the Conference publishes are the most useful thing it produces for anyone trying to understand the tradition, because they contradict the picture most outsiders carry. The Anabaptist world is no longer European or North American in its centre of gravity. Well over half of baptised members are in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the single largest member body is the Meserete Kristos Church in Ethiopia, which is larger than any Mennonite body in the country the movement began in or in the country that most tourists associate it with.

That shift is recent and fast, and it changes what the assemblies are for. A global gathering held roughly every six years, meeting in Zimbabwe, in Paraguay, in Indonesia, in Ethiopia, is not the same event as a European commemoration, and the questions brought to it, on polygamy, on healing, on relations with the state, on wealth, are not the questions the founders of 1925 expected.

The Conference also carries the tradition's ecumenical business. In 2010 the Lutheran World Federation, meeting at Stuttgart, formally asked forgiveness of Mennonites for the persecution of Anabaptists by Lutheran authorities in the sixteenth century and for the condemnations of them carried in Lutheran confessional documents. Mennonite World Conference received that act on behalf of its member churches, which is the sort of thing only a body that speaks for a whole communion can do.