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From Plough-
This year’s five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation comes just as Christianity is undergoing what may prove to be its biggest recalibration since the fourth century. Christendom, the system in which Christianity shaped Western laws and society as the majority religion, has been shaky since the Enlightenment. Now it’s in its death throes, felled by secularization, consumerism, and the sexual revolution. For better or worse, Christians must learn to be a minority. There’s no better time than now to recall Karl Barth’s admonition: “The church must always be reformed.” What is the reformed church we need now?
On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther famously affixed his Ninety-Five Theses to a Wittenberg church door in a brazen challenge to the authority of the pope in Rome. His action ended up sparking a religious conflict that would plunge the continent into a century of war between Catholics and Protestants. Out of the bloodshed, so runs the story, modernity was born.
More here-
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/anabaptists/the-church-we-need-now
From Plough-
Ulrich Stadler, a mining official from the Tyrol, became part of the nascent Anabaptist movement in the early 1520s. He led fellow believers under persecution and founded several communal settlements. Together with one of these groups, he eventually joined the Hutterite church. Stadler’s writings demonstrate deep spiritual insight and have been valued by Anabaptists up to the present day. In this teaching, he examines the metaphor of the body of believers used by the apostle Paul in Romans 12.
There is one communion (gmain) of all the faithful in Christ and one community (gmainschaft) of the holy children called of God. They have one Father in heaven, one Lord Christ; all are baptized and sealed in their hearts with one Spirit. They have one mind, opinion, heart, and soul as having all drunk from the same Fountain, and alike await one and the same struggle, cross, trial, and, at length, one and the same hope in glory. But it, that is, such a community (gmain) must move about in this world, poor, miserable, small, and rejected of the world, of whom, however, the world is not worthy.
More here-
http://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/anabaptists/what-is-the-true-church
From Plough-
