Menno Simons
1496 CE–1561 CE · Witmarsum
Menno Simons (c. 1496–1561) was a Frisian-born Catholic priest who in January 1536 renounced his orders and joined the Anabaptist movement in the Low Countries, becoming its most influential northern leader. He articulated the core Anabaptist convictions of believers' baptism (rejecting infant baptism as unscriptural), the gathered and disciplined church, strict nonresistance, and separation from the world. His voluminous writings, above all the Foundation of Christian Doctrine (1539), gave theological coherence to communities scattered across the Holy Roman Empire and circulated clandestinely under imperial persecution. Spending his final decades as a fugitive in East Friesland, the Lower Rhine lands, and the Baltic coast, he nonetheless held the movement together through pastoral letters and repeated personal visits. The Mennonites — the largest surviving Anabaptist tradition — take their name from him.
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WitmarsumNetherlands
What they did here
Born c. 1496 in this small Frisian village; his father was reportedly a dairy farmer.
About Witmarsum
Witmarsum, a village in Friesland, in the northern Netherlands. The Anabaptist leader Menno Simons served there as a Catholic priest before breaking with Rome in 1536; the Mennonites take their name from him.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Menno Simons’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
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