Church on the run
If I want kinship with my Anabaptist ancestors, I know where to look: in prison.
The square in the Neumarkt area of Zurich where Conrad Grebel lived in 1525, and where began the Anabaptist movement on January 21 of that year, with the baptisms of Grebel and George Blaurock. (Google Maps)
January 21 marks the 500th anniversary of Anabaptism, the day when George Blaurock, a former Catholic priest, was moved by the Spirit to request believers’ baptism from Conrad Grebel. In turn, Blaurock baptized Grebel along with the dozen others who had gathered in secret at the home of Felix Manz in Zurich, Switzerland.
In less than a year, the Zurich city council outlawed believers’ baptism. The punishment was death. Manz was arrested and executed by drowning in the River Limmat. Blaurock was severely beaten and exiled from the city. Grebel left Zurich to spread the gospel and died at age 28, likely from the plague.
A hundred years later, a Dutch Mennonite named Thieleman Jansz van Braght compiled these stories of imprisonment and state execution in a volume called the Martyr’s Mirror, a hefty compilation of the horrors exacted on the faithful.
