Reformed Pastors Wash Feet of Amish Photo by Dale D. Gehman

At a historic conference in Switzerland, pastors of the state church seek reconciliation with the Anabaptists they drove away in the 1500s - many of them to Lancaster County, PA. Forgiveness is a two-way street.

By JANET K. RICHARDS Special to the Sunday News

Most of us can understand, at least to a degree, the heart of a father who is estranged from his son. We know he carries a certain inward pain until the day his son returns home and they are reconciled and restored.

Today, such a "father" in the Christian faith exists who has carried the ache of estrangement for years. His name is Geri Keller, the founder of Stiftung Schleife, a parachurch ministry in Winterthur, Switzerland.

The " son" is the Mennonites and Amish and all those who are of Anabaptist heritage.

Anabaptist is the name originally given to those who believed in adult baptism during the early years of the Reformation in the 1500s. As a member of the Reformed State Church of Switzerland and a former Reformed pastor for 30 years, Keller has longed to bring healing between the Reformed church of Switzerland and the Anabaptists whom they persecuted, executed and banished for almost 200 years.

Encouraged by God that the time was right for such a reconciliation, Geri and Stiftung Schleife convened a conference called "Heal Our Land," from May 1-4 in Winterthur. The call to attend was for all "fathers" and "sons" who were willing and ready to recreate a spiritual home for each other through repentance and forgiveness.

In addition to Anabaptists who attended from Switzerland, Germany, France. Austria, Belgium and other parts of Europe, there were two main groups of Anabaptists who attended from the United States.

One was a group of Amish families from two communities in Idaho and Montana. The other was a conglomerate of 18 Mennonites from three different church conferences in the Lancaster region: the Lancaster Mennonite Conference, Franconia Mennonite Conference and the Hopewell Network.

As the conference began, believers from each group agreed with calls from the pulpit for forgiveness and repentance toward each other. But repentance moved from mental assent to personal experience when a Reformed State pastor began to express the burden of guilt he personally carried because of the devastation his ancestors had perpetrated against us.

That was the moment when healing started to well up in our Anabaptist hearts. Tears flowed freely. We also recognized anger in our hearts that needed to be confessed and released.

We Lancaster Anabaptists shared the next day about our own sinful attitudes toward our former persecutors and our need for cleansing and healing. We spoke of our need to grieve over the losses that occurred as a result of having our spirits broken by oppression and persecution. We asked the "fathers" for forgiveness for the bitterness and resentment.

We listened to Reformed pastors openly sharing their struggles regarding infant baptism, which is still required as a sacrament in the state church. These men and women who love God are being faced with possible loss of job and income through their obedience to Scriptures.

Through many symbols of repentance, our hearts were gradually restored to our spiritual fathers and their hearts to us.

Reformed pastors in their clerical robes washed the feet of the Amish delegation and then stood and removed their clerical collars to give them to Ben Girod, an Amish bishop, as a sign of their desire to be reconciled; 30 Reformed state church pastors knelt on stage before the Lancaster Mennonite and Amish leaders and tearfully asked for and received a verbal affirmation of forgiveness from every Anabaptist leader and his wife; Reformed pastors lined up across the front of the auditorium, receiving prayers of blessing from individual Anabaptist representatives; water spilled out on hands all over the auditorium, as Reformers and Anabaptists asked each other to wash their hands in a symbolic cleansing of guilt and repentance; the president of the Reformed state church read a statement of apology from the Grossmunster church in Zurich, where many "guilty" verdicts had been brought against the first Anabaptists who were executed; and, for the first time in history an Anabaptist preached from the pulpit of the Grossmunster.

At Trachselwald castle, where many Anabaptist ancestors had been incarcerated and tortured before being taken to execution, a leading government official of the region and a brother in Christ, Markus Grossenbacher, publicly asked forgiveness on behalf of the government of the Trachselwald region for the sins done there.

In Schaffhausen, Sabine Aschmann, a Reformed pastor, sensed God asking her to return a part of what had been stolen from the Anabaptists. In response, she gave as a gift of restitution to the Lancaster Mennonites, her family's rare and priceless copy of a Froschauer Bible.

The Bible, printed by Sabine's family in 1538 for the Anabaptists, had been confiscated during the persecution years. It remains as one of a few copies of these Anabaptist Bibles that exist today.

In regards to the scriptural doctrine of baptizing adult believers, which originally gave our ancestors the name, Anabaptists, meaning "re-baptizers," Geri Keller stood on the last day of the conference, boldly and humbly proclaiming to all Anabaptists on behalf of the Reformed State Church, "We were wrong and you were right. You were right."

When true reconciliation occurs, joy and hugs abound. Tears course down. Dancing, singing, shouting, waving of banners and celebration erupt. We found all of these amidst the repentance, forgiveness and cleansing that washed over our group.

May God take the seeds of what began at "Heal Our Land" and sow them over the Anabaptist and Reformed communities throughout the world! May the hearts of the fathers be restored to the children, and the hearts of the children be restored to their fathers.

Janet K. Richards, of Ronks, is a free-lance writer.

Article and Photo used by permission of the SUNDAY NEWS published by Lancaster Nespapers, Inc.