Mennonites

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Mennonites. Christian denomination. It derives from followers of the 16th-cent. radical Reformer Menno Simons (1496–1561), a Dutch Roman Catholic priest who joined the Anabaptists in 1536. Simons's leadership was an inspiration to them. His teaching about believers' baptism, Church discipline, pacificism, and the non-participation of Christians in the magistracy gained wide support in many congregations, amongst whom he exercised an itinerant leadership ministry for twenty-five years. Today there are about 700,000 Mennonites in various parts of the world, mostly in America where their ranks have been occasionally fragmented by division.

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