I have chosen the label "Seventh Day Anabaptist" to represent my faith as a Christian. My hope is to grow a fellowship of like minded believers who will share in my desire to return to Apostolic Christianity.
Why the label "Anabaptist"? My inspiration comes from the movie "The Radicals". I feel that the Anabaptists best represented what the New Testament Congregation is supposed to look like.
They believed in the seperation of Church and State. They didn't believe in picking up the sword of politics or war. They believed that when a Christian got baptized that it was a seal of their entrance into the Kingdom of God and leaving the Kingdom of this world. They didn't believe in the Catholic/Protestant doctrine of water regeneration but rather that it was a symbol and seal of their confession in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and dying to this world and walking in newness of life with Christ.
The Anabaptists believed in the preisthood of all believers unlike the Catholic Church and Protestant Church. Even though most Protestant denominations give lip service to the "preisthood of all believers" concept for the most part they don't put this in practice. The Anabaptists were zealous evangelists unlike their Protestant contemporaries. Even today nary a Protestant denomination is known for fervent evangelism especially within the United States.
Even though many of the various Anabaptists sects had leadership they didn't have hierarchical Nicolatian type leadership. It was more of a flat structure of leadership with Pastor's operating as true sheperds rather than overlords. Also, each believer was encouraged to operate in the gifts that Jehovah blessed them with.
The definition of Church was understood differently by Anabaptists than their Protestant counterparts. The Church to Anabaptists was the people themselves not a building or institutional organization.
In my research of the Anabaptists there were many that were Sabbath keepers and some that Non trinitarian. There was a sizable Unitarian Anabaptist community in Transylvania. There were also strains of Arian Anabaptists. Some of the Sabbath keeping Anabaptists were martyred for not keeping Sunday which they viewed as the holiday of the antichrist. Many of them also refused to celebrate other Catholic holidays.
Doctrinally, they varied from community to community. Most important to them was in how they practically lived out their Christian life according to word of God.
Some of the modern day descendants of the Anabaptists are the Mennonites and Amish. The Mennonite is the largest and they vary from very conservative to very liberal.
We are not direct descendants of the Anabaptists, however we have adopted many of their principles in order to carry the torch of Apostolic Christianity that for the most part has died out. The descendants of the Anabaptists are hardly recognizable to the original movement of the 1500's. Some have become more insular whereas some have become all about social justice. Make no mistake about it, the original Anabaptist was about preaching and living the Kingdom of God and Christ.
I think all of us outside the institutional Church system have some Anabaptist in us. They would have been the group we would have joined if alive during the Reformation era. Unlike the often hateful Protestants and Catholics, the Anabaptists were not about devouring each other over disagreements about doctrine that were not salvational. They were also not persecutors of others. They believed in freedom of conscience.
The Anabaptists brought back the truth of the premillennial return of Christ and believed in the teaching of a literal millennium. The Protestants and Catholics were amillennial deriving this from the gnostic Augustine who taught that the material world was evil. The Anabaptists were very much into bible prophecy. Many considered both or either the Papacy and the Protestants as the antichrist.
My position is that the Papacy is the antichrist system and that Protestant America is the false prophet and that the image of the beast will be a Church-State union of Protestants/Evangelicals and the United States of America and the United Nations. The World's false religions will also be part of this Church-State Union. In America, the Protestants and Evangelicals will lead the charge to unite with State. The U.N will provide the international aspect of this union with the world's false religions heavily involved. This will include the New Age movement.
We believe that bible believing Christians much like the Anabaptists during the Reformation era, will be persecuted in America by Protestants and Catholics as a repeat of what happened in 1500's and 1600's. Of course persecution will be worldwide and all the false religions untied with State will engage in the persecution of the saints.
So living in a 2016 context, how do we apply Anabaptist living today? We return to the old paths. These radical reformers probably lived closest to the way new testament Christians lived in the apostolic times. They had all things in common sharing their goods with each other and giving to each other as each had need. This is more than possible today, it's just most of today's professing Christian Churches have been so influenced by materialism that they make every excuse in the world to not let go of their precious possessions.
As Anabaptists today, we don't seek to emulate outward forms of dress such as the Amish but rather to live a simple and modest life in all areas. It's not about the outward dress or appearance but rather the heart and how you live out your walk with Christ. When we do this then temperance in all things naturally follows. As Seventh Day Anabaptists in our community, we visibly are not much different than our neighbor. We are not seeking to stand out visually in appearance but rather stand out in our witness of Christian daily living.
The most important thing is to fufill the gospel commission (Matthew 28:19-20) and preach the Kingdom of Jehovah to a dying world. We have the sermon on the mount as the core of our statement of faith. We feel that it is not enough to believe but to actually live out our faith in a real way instead of just theory.
We want to do our part in restoring Christianity to it's primitive apostolic roots. This was the goal of the Anabaptists which since has been left behind by it's descendants. We seek to return to the original ideals of that Radical Reformation led by those brave men and women who carried that torch of precious truth.
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