In 1525, Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, George Blaurock, Michael Sattler, and others met discreetly in the home of Felix Manz to discuss their disagreements with Ulrich Zwingli. Zwingli was a primary leader of the Protestant Reformation, which sought to break away from the Catholic Church's practice of selling indulgences, infant baptism, and unity between the church and state. However, Zwingli wasn't taking as conservative a stance as some of his associates wanted. He still wanted to align with the Catholic Church and approve the non-biblical practice of infant baptism. Several of Zwingli's followers simply could not follow this ancient practice of baptism and insisted that Zwingli take a more radical approach. When Zwingli threatened these radicals to conform to his beliefs with the penalty of arrest, they began to meet together secretly. That was why these men and women were meeting - to decide whether to conform to or resist Ulrich Zwingli.

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On that day in January of 1525, the radicals, later named Anabaptists, decided that they must break their ties with Zwingli and follow the teachings of Jesus and the early church as written in the New Testament. The Anabaptists soon received persecution as a result of their beliefs, once the news reached Ulrich Zwingli. Two years later in 1527, a formal statement called "The Schleitheim Confession" was written by Michael Sattler which outlined their beliefs on major church issues. Even though persecution was rampant, the Anabaptist movement continued to spread throughout Switzerland and Germany.

 

We at Lichty's Mennonite Church are indebted to these faithful men and women throughout the centuries, for it is out of this movement that our Mennonite faith is based. Ultimately, we seek to follow the Bible as our guide for faith and practice, whose author is God himself. We agree with the stand that the early Anabaptists took in 1525 and uphold the biblical beliefs they outlined in "The Schleitheim Confession." A more extensive, detailed version of this statement was written in 1632 at Dordrecht in the Netherlands. A revised version of the "Dordrecht Confession" was published in 1963 and is known as the "Mennonite Confession of Faith." We at Lichty Mennonite Church use the 1963 Confession of Faith as a means of concisely articulating our religious beliefs founded on the principles of scripture.   

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