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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01/12/01