Quotes & Sayings About Mennonites

Mennonites are very conservative. They don't drink, dance, smoke, go to movies. I grew up in a very conservative faith-based community. — David A.R. White

He is the same chap who informed me that there are unusually high numbers of Mennonites who suffer from depression but nobody knows why. I said, Well, thank you for that! As cheerfully as if I was accepting a plate of homemade Christmas cookies from one of my students. — Miriam Toews

My mother's families were Mennonites or Anabaptists that came to Minnesota from Russia. They were actually moving around Europe doing diking and lowland reclamation work, and they moved into Minnesota. — Phil Jackson

Mennonites are so called because they followed Menno Simons, a sixteenth-century Dutch Catholic priest — Mark Kurlansky

This huge and terrible industry [the slave trade] was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest ... In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine. — Christopher Hitchens

Mennonites formed themselves in Holland five hundred years ago after a man named Menno Simons became so moved by hearing Anabaptist prisoners singing hymns before being executed by the Spanish Inquisition that he joined their cause and became their leader. Then they started to move all around the world in colonies looking for freedom and isolation and peace and opportunities to sell cheese. Different countries give us shelter if we agree to stay out of trouble and help with the economy by farming in obscurity. We live like ghosts. Then, sometimes, those countries decide they want us to be real citizens after all and start to force us to do things like join the army or pay taxes or respect laws and then we pack our stuff up in the middle of the night and move to another country where we can live purely but somewhat out of context. — Miriam Toews

I remember a very nurturing, safe environment: everybody knew who I was, who my parents were, who my grandparents were, what part of Russia we were from originally. That was a really comforting feeling. Non-Mennonites, when they see that aspect of it, think it's a beautiful thing, and it is, but there's so much going on besides. — Miriam Toews

Wealthier Mennonites even though they're not technically supposed to be wealthy do their drinking in North Dakota or Hawaii. They are sort of like rock bands on tour in that the rules of this town don't apply to them when they're on the road. An embarrassing situation for wealthy Mennonites is to meet other wealthy Mennonites at the swim-up bar at the Honolulu Holiday Inn. — Miriam Toews

The Mennonites have Dirk Willems, who was arrested for his religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and held in a prison tower. With the aid of a rope made of knotted rags, he let himself down from the window and escaped across the castle's ice-covered moat. A guard gave chase. Willems made it safely to the other side. The guard did not, falling through the ice into the freezing water, and Willems stopped, went back, and pulled his pursuer to safety. For his act of compassion, he was taken back to prison, tortured, and then burned slowly at the stake as he repeated "Oh, my Lord, my God" seventy times over.8 — Malcolm Gladwell

As the tension between the Protestants and the Church of Rome intensified, so did the desire for a third way among dissenting groups. Soon a new group emerged, though in some senses it was also an old group - one that felt it could trace its origins all the way back to the New Testament. Known collectively as the Radical Reformation, these persecuted groups often advocated a nonviolent ethic, the separation of church and state, and a desire for both personal and corporate holiness. The ideas of these radicals spread through Europe, and over the years the Amish, Mennonites and Anabaptists, and to a lesser degree the Covenanters and Quakers, emerged or were influenced by this movement. — David Holdsworth

Several congregations had received permission to build churches before Danzig Mennonites were permitted to do so. Thus, in the village of Montau in the vicinity of Kulm, Mennonites were allowed to build their first church in the Vistula valley as early as 1586.8 — Peter J. Klassen

Theoretically, we Mennonites do not even know what we look like, since a focus on our personal appearance is vainglorious. Our antipathy to vainglory explains the decision of many of us to wear those frumpy skirts and the little doilies on our heads, a decision we must have arrived at only by collectively determining not to notice what we had put on that morning. — Rhoda Janzen

Throughout history, Christians have faced the persistent temptation of confusing the language we use to talk about God with the essence of Christian faith. This stubborn human tendency to turn doctrine into an idol - to confuse a human creation with the truth itself - can easily lead people to wield doctrinal claims as a weapon against minority or dissenting perspectives. Thus, anyone who does not line up with a certain formulation of Christian faith is not only wrong, but also a heretic and therefore worthy of punishment or death. — John D. Roth

My recommendation instead, however, is that we do not surrender questions of value, whether absolute matters of truth, goodness, and beauty or relative judgment of more or less truth, goodness, and beauty. With those questions to the fore, in fact, we can interrogate various other traditions and truly learn something that can improve our own. Perhaps the Presbyterians really do know more than we do about due process in church government. Perhaps the Orthodox really do know some things we do not about iconography. Perhaps the Mennonites really can teach us the meaning of 'enough.' Perhaps the Pentecostals can help liberate us from dull and disembodied worship. Baptists who have learned to improve their procedures from Presbyterians, their art from the Orthodox, their finances from the Mennonites, and their worship from the Pentecostals do not therefore become worse Baptists but better ones. And so around the ecumenical circle, no? — John G. Stackhouse Jr.

That in East Prussia Frederick William I tolerated the Mennonites as indispensable to industry, — Max Weber

he wore baggy sweatpants, because Mennonites thought it immoral for a man to show his legs. — Juliet Macur