Other Peace Churches

Other denominations with a peace heritage:

The Hutterites, who date back to the same 16th C. Anabaptist movement which produced the Mennonites and the Amish.

The Bruderhof Communities, a product of Hutterite contact with an early 20th C. German pietist/renewal movement.

The Doukhabors, a Medieval Christian group thrown out of Russia and now in Canada.

The Moravian Church, descendants of the Medieval Unitas Fratrum (United Brethren), who were clearly pacifist. Modern Moravians are not uniformly pacifist (some join the military), but they know this is part of their heritage and some desire to retrieve it.

The Waldensians, a Medieval group still around in Italy which calls itself a pre-Luther Protestantism. No longer strictly pacifist, most Waldensians have a vague sense that they SHOULD be.

The Stone-Campbell movement of the 19th C. U.S. Frontier began as pacifists. The liberal branch of that movement has become the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). There is a large Disciples Peace Fellowship. The conservative branches of the movement, the Churches of Christ, and the Christian Churches, are today fundamentalist and largely militarist, but they were listed as peace churches in WWI and WWII with the government for conscientious objection purposes. Some conservative Campbellite historians are seeking to renew the peace witness.

The Church of the Nazarene began as pacifist until WWI.

Originally, most of the earliest Pentecostals were pacifist. Some Pentecostal scholars are attempting to revive this witness among the Assemblies of God, the Church of God (Cleveland, TN), the Church of God of Prophecy, and the (mostly African American) Church of God in Christ. There is growing awareness that the 1st generation Pentecostals were theologically conservative, but socially radical: They crossed racial boundaries long before the end of Jim Crow; they reached out to the poor and disenfranchised; they allowed women great leadership roles in church (although their literalist interpretation caused them to still restrict women in the home) in a kind of biblicist semi-feminism; they were pacifist. "Young Turks" among Pentecostal ministers are attempting to revive all this--the biggest success so far has been a national repentance over caving into American racism 1 generation after the movement started and splitting into white and black denominations. They are holding merger talks and worshipping across racial boundaries, again.

The Church of God (Anderson, IN), no relation to the Pentecostal denominations similarly named, is a revivalist denomination which grew out of 19th C. abolitionism and was originally pacifist. There is still a Church of God Peace Fellowship that has connections to the interfaith group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

There are other peace church seminaries: Eastern Mennonite Seminary in Harrisburg, VA; Friends University in Witchita, KS; Friends Seminary in TX; Mennonite Brethren Theological Seminary in Fresno, CA; Ashland Theological Seminary in Ashland, OH ( a school of the Brethren Church, a more evangelical split from the Dunker movement that also gave us the Church of the Brethren).

My own heritage, Baptist, is decidedly mixed. Originally, we grew out of radical 17th C. Puritans who met and were influenced by Dutch Mennonites (2 distinct branches), but the Baptist movement never adopted the Mennonite peace witness as a whole. Portions of the early Baptist movement were pacifist while other portions were decidedly militaristic. In the centuries since then, peace impulses keep arising in the midst of various Baptist bodies--often meeting resistance in those same bodies. A start at telling that heritage is Paul R. Dekar, For the Healing of the Nations: Baptist Peacemakers (Smyth & Helwys Press, 1993).