Mennonite Weekly Review

AMSTERDAM, the Netherlands — The leading Mennonite church in the Netherlands hosted an international Baptist gathering July 30 celebrating the 400th anniversary of the first Baptist congregation’s founding.

A photo taken during the 1967 Mennonite World Conference assembly shows the Singelkerk’s three-level interior. — Photo by MWR file

The event was held at the Singelkerk, or United Mennonite Church, historically the center of Mennonitism in Amsterdam. The Singelkerk congregation marked its 400th anniversary last year.

At the celebration, Baptists — whose founders, like some Swiss Mennonites decades later, went to the Netherlands for religious liberty — were challenged to continue championing that cause.

“We as Baptists must continue to defend religious freedom for all peoples and all religions,” said Denton Lotz, former general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance.

The Singelkerk is a short distance from the site of the first Baptist congregation, founded in 1609 by exiles from Britain who had fled religious persecution in England.

This proximity led to some influence on the Baptists by Dutch Mennonites, according to the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. However, some of the similarities — such as believers baptism and emphasis on the Bible — arose independently, GAMEO states.

That first Baptist church was established in an Amsterdam bakery under the leadership of Thomas Helwys and John Smyth, a former Church of England cleric, who sought a self-governing church free from state control.

Smyth maintained that the church should receive its members by baptism after they had consciously acknowledged their faith and thus opposed infant baptism.

“If we fail to take seriously the 21st century and merely continue to defend religious freedom as though we were living under King James I, then we will have become irrelevant and our defense of freedom irrelevant,” Lotz said.

The threat today is not directed at religious practice, “but rather whether or not religion will be granted a fair hearing,” he said. “Our public and state education has promoted secularism as its own religion and has indoctrinated the younger generation to believe that man can live without God and can explain the universe and history and community without faith.”

The service was the highlight of a series of international events held in the Netherlands July 24-Aug. 1 by the BWA and the European Baptist Federation to celebrate the anniversary.

The BWA is a fellowship of 216 Baptist conventions with a membership of more than 37 million. Several Baptist groups are not members of the alliance, including the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, the world’s largest Baptist denomination.