“Though we are already Mennonites in name, we are learning how to be real peacemakers and what it means to reconcile.”
Olga Rubel — Ukraine
Alexander Neufeld (Part II) — Germany
“I could not work with those who would destroy the church, who were responsible for the sufferings of so many Christians.”
Alexander Neufeld (Part I) — Germany
“The Bibles were needed so badly that we used everything that we could!”
Anna Jansz
Written by Gerald Mast. The below text was originally presented as a sermon at First Mennonite Church of Bluffton, Ohio and published on Mast’s personal blog in January of 2015. In order to find our way into the story of Anna Jansz, we must travel from Zurich, Switzerland in 1525 to the north German city of Keep Reading…
Stanimir Katanic
Stanimir Katanic’s story is written by Marcia Lewandowski, who interviewed Katanic in 2014 about his experiences as a Nazarene conscientious objector in Yugoslavia. I met Stanimir Katanic as an 83-year-old man living in Ohio. In our interview, Stanimir requested to speak about the years of his imprisonment as a young man in Serbian, rather than English. Keep Reading…
Anna Wipf and the Believers of Alwinz, Romania
With thousands of believing refugees crowding into the Sabatisch community in Slovakia in the 1620s, every day brought its share of adventures. Nearly every day some died from the cold, hunger, and disease, while more kept coming. Then, in the thick of things, Bethlen Gabor came. Bethlen Gabor was the ruler of the land of Keep Reading…
Andreas Wurtz, Margarethe Strauss, and the believers of Sankt Peter, Austria
Deep in the mountainous south of Austria, Andreas Wurtz grew up in the province of Kaernten. As a young man he married and began a new home in Sankt Peter, in the valley of the River Drau. Like everyone they knew, he and his wife were Roman Catholics, and when their first child was Keep Reading…
“Nazarene” war-resisters in Serbia
Gjorgje Nikolic wrote well. He loved to write, and with a job for a paper like Belgrade’s Politika, just after World War I, he had great opportunities. With the opportunities came a deeply troubling experience. In the fall of 1926 the reporting manager of Politika sent him to observe a strange case before the Danube Keep Reading…