"The Naked Anabaptist" Introductory Post

At Annual Conference this July, I picked up a copy of the book “The Naked Anabaptist: The Bare Essentials of a Radical Faith” by Stuart Murray. I’d heard about it before, and I’ll admit what intrigued me the most was the title. I wondered what does he mean by “The Naked Anabaptist?” Certainly it would be something other than simply an Anabaptist going around without any clothes on, wouldn’t it?

Murray describes an encounter that led to the title of his book. A friend was asked at one point “What does Anabaptism look like without the Mennonite, Hutterite, or Amish culture in which it is usually clothed in North America?”[1] Murray’s friend responded by saying “Ah, you mean ‘the naked Anabaptist,’ do you?...Anabaptism stripped to down to the bare essentials.”[2] The book, then, seeks to explore the basic beliefs that are inherent in the majority of Anabaptist understandings of Christianity.

Overall, this book does a good job of introducing the basic beliefs that undergird the majority of Anabaptist traditions today. Murray is a part of a group called “The Anabaptist Network,” a group of people in the UK who are interested in Anabaptism in their own context. They have come up with “7 Core Convictions”, the discussion of which forms a good portion of Murray’s book.[3] In future weeks, I hope to look at each of these convictions, and discuss how I see them fitting into our congregation here at Daleville.

As I close this week, I would like to give a couple of links to sites that might be of interest as I begin this time of looking at Murray’s book:

Amazon link for the book “The Naked Anabaptist”

The Anabaptist Network – UK group exploring Anabaptist ideas in UK

7 Core Convictions – Link to 7 Core Convictions Murray explores in his book.

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[1] Stuart Murray, The Naked Anabaptist: The Bare Essentials of a Radical Faith, Scottdale, PA: Herald Press 2010, 15.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 44-46.