On Tuesday evening, College Mennonite Church hosted “Looking Back, Living Forward: A Worship Service Celebrating 500 Years of Anabaptist Faith and the launch of the Anabaptist Community Bible.” Hundreds of Anabaptists from the Goshen area and beyond gathered to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the first adult baptisms in Zurich, Switzerland.

The service included a series of songs from Goshen College’s choirs, congregational hymns, reflections from members of the Anabaptist Community Bible publication team, and a homily from John Roth, the project director of Anabaptism at 500. They even had a life-sized cardboard cutout of Menno Simons.

“500 years ago today, on Jan. 21, 1525 a small group of Christians gathered in the home of a friend. They opened the Scriptures and prayed together, and being so moved by the Holy Spirit they baptized one another,” said Mitch Stutzman, the director of development and partner engagement at MennoMedia, to open his reflection on celebrating the Anabaptist Community Bible.

Earlier in the evening, Roth put it a different way. “And so in great fear of God, they were baptized, and together they surrendered themselves to the Lord, and then, at then, at the very end, soon they all gave witness with their blood.”

Scott Hochstetler, director of Vox Profundi and Chamber Choir, said that he and H. Roz Woll, the director of Voices of the Earth, were given plenty of notice leading up to the event to pick out songs that they thought would be appropriate. Chamber Choir’s song, “House of Our God,” is the first movement from Alice Parker’s Melodious Accord, which “is based on Mennonite shape note hymns,” Hochstetler said. “I thought why not sing the words of Menno Simons … that’s why we sang “True Evangelical Faith,” which is also by a Mennonite composer: Larry Nickel from the western part of Canada.”

Hochsteler also extended gratitude to two Ethiopian students in choir who passed on the worship song, “Le’ul Tewelede,” of the Meserete Kristos Church, the largest national member of Mennonite World Conference.

In his homily, Roth focused on the phrase, “For God’s sake, do something courageous.” It was written in a letter by the former teacher of the early Anabaptist, Ulrich Zwingli, and in his use case he was asking the Zurich city council to help him raise an army to defend the city from the Catholics. Roth however, looked at the phrase from a different perspective.

He spoke of a different calling that the Anabaptists of history saw as their own, a countercultural vision of love and the church that refused to tie itself to earthly powers. “In short, a readiness to risk social order for the sake of the gospel and an alternative vision of human relations was meant to be lived by those who claimed His name,” Roth said.

Phil Waite, the pastoral team leader at College Mennonite Church, was involved in the planning from the logistics side of things, coordinating largely with Roth. Reflecting after the service had concluded, Waite said that something he noticed in the planning process was that “for others it’s more of a celebration, but for me it’s a little more solemn, more of a commemoration.”

However, in their conversations, Roth and Waite were not only worried about the logistics – they also made time for the emotional and the theological. Waite said, “[Roth and I] talked about the conviction with which the 16th century Anabaptists believed about God. They just believed deeply about God and who God is … we live in a really different world than that world, and in some ways we live in a world in which it’s harder to have that kind of conviction.”

He continued on by explaining his own questioning of his own convictions, and the doubt that creeps in that he believes in anything to such a degree that he would give up his life for the cause.

However, in the end he concluded that the service was also a powerful demonstration of the unity of the Anabaptist community, and their desire to be less “schismatic” in the coming years. “I think it was a beautiful service and a meaningful service. And I think it was encouraging and inspiring for people.”