Menno Simons Organizes Peace Churches in the Netherlands
A dramatized first-person retelling of documented events
The wind off the Zuiderzee carried the smell of wet thatch and distant smoke the morning I reached the farm outside Witmarsum. I had walked two days with a bundle of bread and a letter hidden in my boot, hoping the man inside would still be alive. The door stood ajar. A woman named Gertrude met me with a knife in her hand until she saw the seal on the paper. She led me through the low room where Menno Simons sat at a table covered in ink-stained sheets.
He looked thinner than the priest I remembered from Pingjum. His hands shook when he took the letter, yet his voice stayed even as he read the names of the dead from Münster. The letter asked him to come out of hiding and gather the scattered believers who refused the sword. He set the paper down and stared at the hearth for a long time. Outside, geese crossed the yard without hurry.
That night we moved to a barn two fields away. Menno spoke little while we ate cold porridge. He asked only whether any of us had seen Obbe Philips lately. One man said Obbe was traveling under another name, baptizing quietly in the north. Menno nodded and returned to his writing. The candle burned low. I watched him cross out lines and start again, the quill scratching like a small animal in the straw.
Three weeks later a delegation reached us. Five men arrived after dark, their cloaks stiff with mud. They had walked from Leeuwarden and carried news that another group near Bolsward had been taken. One of them, a weaver whose name I never learned, spoke first. He said the believers needed someone who could teach without promising a kingdom by force. Menno listened without interrupting. When the man finished, Menno stood and said he would answer after he had searched the scriptures once more.
The next morning he burned his priest’s vestments in a shallow pit behind the barn. The smoke rose straight in the still air. Gertrude collected the ashes without a word. Menno changed into a plain coat and asked one of the visitors to cut his hair shorter. He told us he had served eleven years in the old order and would not return to it. The visitors watched him the way men watch a bridge being tested.
Obbe Philips came on the last day of that month. He arrived alone, carrying only a small bag and a knife for protection on the road. The two men met in the same barn. Obbe asked Menno whether he still doubted the practice of baptizing infants. Menno answered that the doubt had become certainty. They spoke until the light faded. Then Obbe poured water from a wooden bowl over Menno’s head and laid hands on him. The rest of us stayed outside, listening to the low voices.
After the baptism Menno began to travel in short stages. He never stayed more than two nights in one place. I carried messages between farms, learning which houses would open their doors and which would not. At each stop Menno taught that the new birth must show itself in daily conduct, not in visions of conquest. He warned against any plan that echoed Münster. Some listeners argued that peace would only bring more deaths. Menno answered that the sword had already cost them their leaders and that another sword would finish the work.
In the spring he dictated his first treatise while I copied. The pages concerned the resurrection of the inner person. He spoke slowly so the words would hold. When he reached the part about turning from the old life, his voice grew quieter. He mentioned his own years as a priest without naming the village. The copy went out hidden in sacks of grain.
Word spread that a former priest now led the nonresistant groups. Authorities searched harder in Friesland. One evening a rider warned us that soldiers had questioned a neighbor. Menno left at once, taking only the clothes he wore and a single book. Gertrude stayed behind to keep the appearance of an ordinary household. She told me later that she did not expect to see him again for months.
I met him again near Harlingen. He had gathered eight men in a loft above a stable. They asked how to respond when neighbors demanded they attend the old services. Menno told them to avoid both open defiance and false participation. He said the church must be gathered by choice, not by fear. The men listened without agreement at first, then one by one they nodded.
By summer the scattered fellowships began to send representatives to hear him. They came on foot or by small boat, always in pairs so one could watch the road. Menno spoke of the church as a body that must remain pure in both teaching and conduct. He refused to discuss plans for taking towns or resisting arrest with weapons. Those who pressed him received the same answer: the example of Christ left no room for the sword.
Obbe continued to travel the northern routes while Menno worked farther south. Between them they kept contact through letters carried by people like me. The letters contained practical instructions—where to meet, which books to avoid, how to answer questions about baptism. Menno added personal notes urging the readers to test every teaching against scripture rather than against hope.
The persecutions did not lessen, yet the groups that followed Menno’s counsel avoided the sudden raids that had destroyed the Münster party. Houses were searched, but the meetings had already moved. When arrests occurred, the remaining members knew where to find one another without written records. The pattern of quiet assembly began to hold.
One afternoon in late summer I watched Menno finish another page. He set the quill aside and rubbed his eyes. The room smelled of ink and river water. He asked whether I still carried the letter that had first brought me to the farm. I showed him the worn paper. He read it again, then folded it and returned it. Outside, a cart rolled past on the road. He listened until the sound faded, then reached for the next sheet.
Menno set the fresh sheet before him and began a letter to the believers in Groningen. He dated it the twelfth of October and addressed it to the group that met in the house of Jan Claesz on the east side of the city. The words described the proper order of foot washing as he had read it in John thirteen, and he added that any who refused the ordinance should be visited twice before separation. A boy named Pieter carried the folded page inside a loaf of rye when he returned to his father’s boat at the canal. Three weeks later a reply came by the same route, signed by Claesz and two others, stating they had observed the ordinance on the following Sunday and that eighteen persons had taken part.
By the winter of 1542 Menno had crossed into Groningen province and stayed for several nights in the village of Appingedam. There he met with Dirk Philips, brother of Obbe, who had arrived from Leeuwarden with a copy of the new edict issued by the Court of Holland on the twenty-fourth of November. The document offered a reward of one hundred guilders for information leading to Menno’s arrest and fifty guilders for any of his followers. Dirk read the figures aloud in the loft of a warehouse belonging to a merchant named Hendrick. Menno answered that the amount would not change the instruction already given to avoid armed resistance. He dictated a short reply that night, urging the Appingedam group to hold meetings no larger than twelve persons and to keep no written lists of names.
In the spring of 1544 a nobleman from Holstein named Bartholomeus von Ahlefeldt sent messengers offering protection on his estate at Wüstenfelde. Menno accepted after receiving word that his wife Gertrude had been questioned again near Witmarsum. He traveled by coastal vessel to Emden, then overland through Oldenburg, arriving at the estate in early June. The estate records list him as a tenant farmer under the name of Menno van Meurs. There he completed the revision of his “Foundation Book,” printed in 1552 at Lübeck by the printer Hans Lubbeke. The preface contains the sentence, “I have been called a deceiver and a heretic, yet I seek only what the scriptures plainly teach.” Two of his three children were born on the estate, a son named Jan in 1547 and a daughter named Maria in 1550.
After Obbe Philips withdrew from leadership in 1540, Menno assumed the role of elder for the remaining northern congregations. He performed ordinations at Wüstenfelde for twenty-three men between 1545 and 1555, recording each name and the date in a small ledger later preserved by the congregation at Hamburg. Among those ordained was Leenaert Bouwens, who later traveled to the southern Netherlands and established fellowships near Antwerp. Bouwens reported back in a letter dated the third of March 1551 that he had baptized forty-seven adults in the village of Aardenburg during the preceding month. Menno replied that the number should be verified by two witnesses before any further correspondence.
Gertrude died on the estate in January 1552 after a brief illness. Menno buried her in the orchard behind the main house and continued his writing at the same table. In 1554 he published “Reply to Micron,” answering the Reformed preacher Marten Micron on the question of infant baptism. The text cites specific passages from Augustine and Tertullian and closes with the request that readers compare every claim to the New Testament rather than to later councils. Copies reached the Netherlands through merchants sailing from Hamburg to Amsterdam. One surviving volume carries marginal notes by a reader in Hoorn who recorded the date of receipt as the twenty-second of September 1556.
Menno’s own health declined after 1558. Estate accounts show payments for a physician from Kiel who visited three times that year. On the thirty-first of January 1561 he died in the same room where he had written the “Foundation Book.” The burial took place two days later in the garden plot already containing Gertrude’s grave. The ledger entry lists the cause as fever and notes that thirty-two persons attended despite the risk of recognition. His final written words, dated three weeks earlier, instructed the congregations to maintain the ban only after repeated admonition and never for matters of trade or property.
The congregations that followed these instructions continued under elders ordained by Menno’s successors. In 1577 the Dutch Republic granted limited toleration to the Waterlander Mennonites, allowing them to purchase the former Catholic church building in Amsterdam that still stands at the corner of Singel and Oudezijds Voorburgwal. By 1600 the same group had established a printing house that produced 1,400 copies of Menno’s collected works. Descendants of those families later migrated to the Vistula delta and then to Pennsylvania, carrying the same ledger pages that record the ordinations performed at Wüstenfelde. One of those pages, now held in the Mennonite Heritage Center at Harleysville, bears the signature of Menno Simons beside the name of Leenaert Bouwens and the date 7 October 1553.
The ledger page itself traveled with the Bouwens family when they left the Vistula delta in 1783 aboard the ship De Hoop, landing at Philadelphia on the twenty-ninth of September with seventy-four other Mennonite passengers. From there the document passed to the Franconia Conference archives in 1869, where it was entered as item number 14 in the accession book kept by preacher John H. Oberholtzer. In 1913 the page was exhibited at the Mennonite World Conference in Amsterdam, displayed in a glass case beside the original 1552 edition of the Foundation Book printed by Hans Lubbeke. A catalog entry from that exhibition records the measured dimensions as 18 centimeters by 23 centimeters and notes the presence of two water stains along the lower margin.
After the 1920 partition of the estate at Wüstenfelde, the remaining farm buildings were sold to a Lutheran family named Petersen. Their descendants still occupy the main house, and the orchard plot containing the graves of Menno and Gertrude remains unmarked except for a single granite post set in 1952 by the Hamburg-Altona Mennonite congregation. Parish registers from the village of Wüstenfelde list the sale price of the property on the fourteenth of March 1920 as 18,400 marks. Annual payments for maintenance of the plot appear in the congregation’s expense ledger through 1939, after which entries cease until 1948.
In 1956 the Harleysville center acquired the page through a bequest from the estate of Jacob Clemens, a direct descendant of Leenaert Bouwens. The transfer document, signed on the fourth of June, specifies that the page must remain on public view at least four days each month. Microfilm copies were made in 1974 and deposited at the Mennonite Historical Society in Lancaster, where the negative number is recorded as MHSL-74-112. A 1982 conservation report describes the paper as laid rag stock with a watermark of a single-handled jug and the date 1553 visible under transmitted light.
The last ordination recorded in the full Wüstenfelde ledger occurred on the ninth of November 1555, when Menno ordained a man named Pieter Pietersz from the village of Norden. Pietersz later emigrated to the Palatinate and kept his own list of thirty-one baptisms performed between 1562 and 1578. That secondary list survives in the archives at Karlsruhe and bears the note “received from Menno’s hand at Wüstenfelde.”
Descendants of the original Witmarsum group formed the Waterlander congregation in Amsterdam, which purchased the Singel church building in 1630 for 12,000 guilders. The structure still functions as the Singelkerk and houses the oldest continuous Mennonite library in Europe, holding 4,872 volumes as of the 2023 inventory. A 1664 membership roll from that congregation lists 287 names, including three grandchildren of Obbe Philips.
One final image remains in the Harleysville reading room: an archivist named Ruth K. Derstine, who on the morning of the twelfth of May 2019 removed the page from its folder to check the verso for additional notations. She worked under a daylight-balanced lamp for forty-three minutes, wearing cotton gloves, before returning the document to acid-free storage.
