Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

Anabaptist groups, beginning first of all in Switzerland, were not considered in this
arrangement as they were largely personae non gratae and, in any case, not political entities.
Among them there were fanatical factions such as the Zwickau prophets and the leaders of
the city of Münster (1533-35), who were seen as dangerous revolutionaries.
Two main groups of orthodox Anabaptists remain to this day, the Mennonites and the
Hutterites.
What must be remarked is that the Anabaptist concept of the Church as gathered-out
congregations of the faithful is in practice how many Protestants in Britain view their
Church today. The mobility of worshippers moving between churches and denominations,
the disappearance, to all intents and purposes, of any Protestant State/Church connection,
and the breaking down of denominational barriers from the mid-20 th Century onwards
have created a view of the Church that it is the local church that matters first and foremost
in identifying allegiances.
The Church of England has to be singled out as a very special kind of Protestant Church,
claiming to be both Catholic and Protestant. Political events brought it into being as an
established State Church in 1534 under Henry VIII. It still retains its legal connection to
the State to this day, despite calls over very many years for its disestablishment. On the
Continent there are countries such as Sweden which have established churches, but dissent
is now tolerated, officially at least, everywhere in European countries.
In the Reformation period differences between the mainstream Protestant churches were not
about the classical Christological and Trinitarian Confessions of the Church universal, but
about baptism, the Lord‟s Supper and Church order. These were all issues in which they also
differed from the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.
Episcopacy was retained by the Church of England and Lutherans, while the Calvinists
followed a Presbyterian 51 form of government. By the late 16 th Century, Congregationalist
ideas of church governance were appearing in southern England (the „Brownists‟) and were
to become a permanent feature of Christianity in Britain. All these churches practiced infant
baptism, though denying a Catholic doctrine of baptismal regeneration. By the 17 th Century,
Anabaptist ideas from the continent lead to the formation of Baptist congregations, which
were Congregationalist in church order and practising credo- (believers‟) baptism.
The sad experience of the Colloquy held in Poissy (1561), just north of Paris, must be
mentioned here. Huguenots (French Protestants) and the Catholic Church met to promote
unity at a conference convened by the Queen Regent, Catherine de Medici. It lasted about a
month.
Theodore Beza and Peter Vermigli, a Calvinist and a Zwinglian, led the argument from the
Protestant side. Beza began by urging the delegates not to deny their differences nor fail to
assert their close agreement on many points of doctrine. However, his assertion that while the
51 Presbyterian. The Presbyterian form of Church order was by the rule of elders
(‘presbuteroi’ in the Greek of the New Testament) over a congregation. As Presbyterianism
developed, congregations became linked together under the guidance of regional councils,
presbyteries and synods. In Scotland, Prebyterianism is the established, national Church. In
Holland it became the officially approved Church body, if not formally established.
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