An Anabaptist Congregation Sprouts in Zollikon, but Arrests Quickly Follow
January 31, 2025 2025-02-07 22:16An Anabaptist Congregation Sprouts in Zollikon, but Arrests Quickly Follow
January 22-30, 1525
In the week following the January 21 prayer meeting in Zurich, many of those who participated in the baptisms took on the role of evangelists. Zollikon and Wytikon, two villages on the east bank of Lake Zurich, were particularly receptive, with many residents gathering together frequently throughout the week as if excited to be part of a spiritual revival. The residents had already been primed to consider believers’ baptism due to the preaching of Wilhelm Reublin and Hans Brötli there. With just a few days left before he had to leave home under Zurich’s banishment order, Brötli returned to Zollikon, where he had been assistant priest in the village church, and began organizing daily services, offering baptisms, and holding communion in residents’ homes, as well as in the church.1
Hans Ockenfuss, an early member of Grebel and Castelberger’s Bible study group in Zurich, described under interrogation one of the baptisms that he witnessed Brötli carrying out this week in Zollikon: after conversing with Brötli by the neighborhood well, a villager named Fridli Schumacher, responded saying, “Well, Hans, you have taught me the truth, for which I thank you and ask for the sign.” Understanding baptism as the sign of acceptance of this truth, they proceeded to baptism. Conrad Grebel also came to Zollikon in January before journeying further north to Schaffhausen. Ockenfuss attended a meeting in a Zollikon resident’s house where “Grebel and others were there talking about baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Then Grebel cut a loaf of bread and distributed it among them. He ate of it too, to symbolize that they would henceforth live a Christian life.”2 Johann Kessler, an adherent to the Reformed church who chronicled religious life in the northern Swiss cantons throughout the 1520s and 1530s, recorded what he heard of the Anabaptists’ practices at these services: “There water was prepared and if anyone desired baptism they poured a panful of water on his head in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”3
Zollikon and Wytikon had only about 90 farming families, but out of them 35 persons asked for baptism in the last ten days of January alone. Over the next few months, half of the families began participating in Anabaptists meetings and supporting the local priests in reforming the baptism practices of the village church. George Blaurock’s sense of public backing even emboldened him to attend more than one Sunday morning service in the village church and interrupt the preachers, saying “Whose community is this? Is this God’s community where the Word of God should be proclaimed? Then I am here as an ambassador from the Father to proclaim the Word of God.”4
So rapidly did interest spread that Kessler had the impression that “Zollikon in general had itself baptized, and they assumed that they were the true Christian church.”5 Kessler recorded that the Zollikon Anabaptists attempted to live in close emulation of the Jerusalem church’s intimate, trusting fellowship. “[T]hey also undertook, like the early Christians, to practice community of temporal goods (as can be read in the Acts of the Apostles), broke the locks off their doors, chests, and cellars, and ate food and drink in good fellowship without discrimination. But as in the time of the apostles, it did not last long.”6 From his sympathy for a unified state church, Kessler viewed the practice of community of goods as move toward separation from the church at large.
The canton authorities soon got wind of the developments in Zollikon. According to Kessler, “the governors…were as unwilling to tolerate such separation in their canton as in their city.” But “because the Zollikon people persisted, the burgomaster and council decreed that the baptizers and baptized be seized and imprisoned.”7
On January 30, twenty-five Anabaptists from Zollikon were indeed arrested and imprisoned. The newly baptized Fridli Schumacher was among them. Felix Mantz and George Blaurock were among them, as well. They were taken to the Wellenberg tower in Zurich, while the others were held in a former monastery. There, over the next nine days, a commission of officers appointed by the Town Council interrogated the prisoners for information on who was baptizing adults and tried to convince them, with more theological discussions, to stay in the state church.8
About This Series
This post is part of a series entitled “The Reformation at 500: Timeline of the Free-Church Movement.” Click here for more information on this series.
Featured image courtesy of the Wick’sche Sammlung, ca. 1575, Zentralbibliothek Zurich, Ms. F 23, fol. 294.
- Leland Harder, ed., The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents, ed. (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 344. ↩︎
- Reports of Illegal Anabaptist Activity (Zurich, Jan. 30, 1525), in ibid., 343. ↩︎
- Johann Kessler, Sabbata, in ibid., 345. ↩︎
- Harder, 344. ↩︎
- Johann Kessler, Sabbata, in ibid., 345. ↩︎
- Ibid., 345. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Harder, 345-46. ↩︎