Chapter 1
The Merging
In tracking my personal history, I
learned that in the year 1631 a baby boy was born,
presumably to an Anabaptist couple, in the Ober-Deisbach
area of the Canton Bern in Switzerland. The family’s
surname was Brönnimann. The baby was named Melchior.
There in the exquisitely beautiful
countryside with its high hills and dales, in sweet,
fresh air with snow-capped mountains in the distance,
Melchior spent his childhood.
In the main those were likely happy
days and years. But always there must have been a certain
fear, an uneasiness, a wariness Melchior sensed in his
parents and their friends. Melchior certainly learned
early that his family was different. Likely some
neighbors seemed to avoid them. They did not visit with
the Brönnimanns; they seemed uneasy about even being
seen talking with them.
Just by listening to his elders talk as
they visited and worshiped together, Melchior would have
come to understand how his family and their friends were
different from many other families. Early on he would
have realized that the difference was about the things
they believed.
As he listened Melchior heard the
grown-ups insist people should not be baptized until they
were young men and women. Only when they grown could they
understand what it meant to be baptized. Individuals
should make their own decision to be baptized. No one
else should make that decision for them when they were
babies.
So even if someone had been baptized as a baby, that
person needed to be baptized again as a grown-up if
membership in this special group of people was wanted.
This practice of infant baptism was to be used in place
of infant baptism, which was carried out by the state
church. And that was why they were often called
Anabaptists (meaning “rebaptizers”).
Melchior’s parents and their
friends also believed that the church and state should be
separate. The church should be able to decide and
practice what it believed was right. The state should not
tell the church what to believe and do.
Being peaceful was also crucial to
Melchior’s people. Violence was never to be
practiced. Nor were they to bear or use arms of any kind.
Sometimes the tension surrounding the
Brönnimann family must have become almost unbearable.
Like the time their Anabaptist neighbor was taken away
and word came back that he had been drowned because he
would not give up his faith. For a long time after that,
young Melchior slept restlessly. He probably dreamt he
heard men outside the house coming to get his father.
Then he would waken trembling.
The years passed. Now Melchior was a
young man. Now it was time for him to decide whether he
would be baptized to signify the washing away of his
sins.
Sometimes he likely thought how easy it
would be to live like people who were not
Anabaptists—to not be hated, afraid, persecuted. But
he believed what he had been taught was right. He knew he
could not be really happy if he followed the way of the
world. So he went to the leaders of the Anabaptists,
known also as the Swiss Brethren, and was baptized.
Several years later Melchior married.
He and his wife established an Anabaptist and Christian
home in the Ober-Deissbach area of the Canton Bern and
began their family.
The uncertainty of life continued year
after year for all Anabaptists. Perhaps for awhile, after
one of Melchior’s friends was burned at the stake
for his faith, Melchior and his family took their
bedding, under cover of early darkness, and crept to a
ravine some distance from home. There they spent the
night so they could not easily be found.
And sometimes they trudged across the
fields to a small cave for the night. At other times they
and other Anabaptists gathered to worship in that same
cave.
Often in their gatherings they
discussed their troubles, especially after one of them
was tortured or killed. They decided together and over
and over that yes, what they believed was right; it was
what the Bible taught. You couldn’t lie and say you
didn’t believe it when you did. And you
couldn’t lie and say you believed what your
persecutors wanted you to believe when you didn’t.
So there was no other way but to be truthful and suffer
or die if need be. They encouraged each other to be
faithful no matter what.
Then it was 1659. Melchior was a young
man, twenty-eight years old. He was a weaver by trade. He
had a young family and perhaps things seemed to be going
reasonably well for them. Maybe the community had been
fairly quiet for awhile, and the Brönnimann family was
more relaxed than it had been for some time.
Then it happened. It could have been like this. They were
sleeping quietly and comfortably one night when there
came a heavy banging on the door. Loud, rough voices
called for Melchior Brönnimann. The Anabaptist hunters
had arrived.
For a moment the family was paralyzed.
But as the banging and demands for Melchior to come out
continued, Melchior got to his feet and started toward
the door. His wife began pleading with God to save them.
When Melchior opened the door, he found
three strong, armed men. “I am Melchior
Brönnimann,” he said. “What do you want of
me?”
“We want you,” they said as
they roughly grabbed him by the arm. “You come with
us!”
“Let me say good-bye to my wife
and children,” Melchior implored. But they hurried
him down the hillside path.
The sobbing mother gathered her little ones around her.
Together they prayed that God would protect their loved
one from harm and bring him back to them.When daylight
came, the little family trudged here and there to let
other Anabaptists know what had happened and beseech them
to pray.
In the days and weeks that followed,
friends of the Brönnimann family found their way to
town. Cautiously and sometimes in disguise, they mingled
with groups of people in public places to hear
discussions of the latest happenings. Gradually they
learned what had happened to Melchior.
He had been told to renounce his faith.
When he refused, he was threatened with torture and
death. Still he refused. Instead of renouncing his faith,
he gave a clear, strong testimony of what he believed,
why he believed what he believed, and why he could not
renounce his faith.
Melchior was taken to a cell in the
huge old castle of Thun. That enormous, ancient edifice
had been built in 1190 just a few miles from
Ober-Deissbach. Areas of it were used over the centuries
to incarcerate and torture persons at odds with the
state.
Melchior’s tormentors left him
there. That is where he remained in chains and in
miserable living conditions for months that stretched
into years.
One can only guess what finally brought
Melchior’s release from prison. For generations,
even centuries, the Brönnimanns had been stable,
respected residents of the surrounding area. It has been
suggested that the authorities may have had a certain
amount of respect for that name and hence for the people
who carried it. Or maybe these authorities felt they
would lose the respect of their fellow citizens if they
further tortured this member of the Brönnimann family.
At any rate, after a few years in
chains in the ancient castle of Thun, Melchior was
released. He was permitted to return to his family, with
whom he tried to reestablish his life.
In 1665 the Brönnimann family welcomed
a baby boy. They named him Melchior, after his father.
Reestablishing himself in the community
after his imprisonment was exceedingly difficult for
Melchior. The attitudes and demands of the state toward
Anabaptists were becoming more and more intolerant and
severe. As a consequence, life for the Anabaptists as a
whole seemed intolerable. In their desperation they
sought for ways to get out from under their oppression.
One way, a frightening one, seemed at
least a possibility. Gradually the possibility evolved
into a plan. In 1671 Melchior and his family joined
around 700 other Anabaptists with names like Stauffer,
Wenger, Schenck, and Burchalter. They fled to Greisheim,
in the Palatinate in Germany.
Younger people carried bundles on their
backs and young children in their arms. Many elderly,
crippled, and lame were in the crowd. Many were in tears
as they arrived and considered their plight. They were
now penniless aliens. At night they had not even a
sleeping place to call their own.
Melchior . . . was . . . forty
years old, his wife thirty-five, and was the father
of seven children between the ages of one and a half
and fifteen years. . . . His worldly possessions
consisted of one horse, one trundle-bed and bedding
and forty-three rix-dollars. [This quote was
taken from Helen Good Brenneman, “Digging the
Roots of the Family Tree,” Christian Living
(April 1968): 27. The source of the information was
not given.]
It was because of this flight from
Switzerland’s Canton Bern to the Palatinate in
Germany that Melchior Brönnimann became known as
Melchior the Exile.
At the time of this flight or
migration, Germany was seemingly more tolerant of
religious deviations than Switzerland. The country had
come through the Thirty-Years War. Large areas had been
devastated. In the Palatinate many towns had been wiped
out along with seventy percent of the population. It was
a place of desolation.
Under these conditions the state was
willing to allow some religious beliefs and practices not
in line with the state religion. The aim was to attract
people who would restore the wasted areas and repopulate
the towns.
However, certain limitations were
placed on religious expression. They were not to meet in
large groups—only in small groups in their houses.
They were not permitted to invite people of other
religious groups to worship with them. And they were not
to rebaptize people who had already been baptized.
Even though these people came with
little to a land that was devastated, even though many
struggled with homesickness for the wondrously beautiful
land they had left behind, and even though at times they
chafed at the restrictions and taxes placed on them; they
proceeded to overcome, and live above, these handicaps.
They restored the land. They established homes and hofs
that were a credit to themselves and the country to which
they had come.
The Merging
orders:
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