The Mennonite movement in modern English history can be traced to relief efforts by North American Mennonites during World War II. In 1940 Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) sent Ted Claassen to London, followed several months later by John E. Coffman. During the hostilities 24 MCC workers served in England.

After the war MCC's activities shifted to the European continent. But John Coffman, who had married Eileen Pells (the first 20th-century English Mennonite), remained in London to do inner-city mission work. The Mennonite Board of Missions (MC) in 1952 sent Quintus and Miriam Leatherman to open the London Mennonite Centre, which until 1981, provided a ministry of caring and housing to international students of many races and national origins. In the centre, a London Mennonite fellowship met regularly.

By the 1980s some English people, impelled by a world crisis of militarism and maldistribution of wealth and by an awareness that traditional forms of Christianity were disintegrating, began to show renewed interest in Anabaptist and Mennonite insights. In response, the London Mennonite Centre, led by Alan and Eleanor Kreider, began a Cross-Currents program to do discipleship training in the Anabaptist and Mennonite tradition for a wide variety of English people. A resource center, with library, book service, and conversation partners, was also developing. The Centre's workers made significant contributions to the Christian peace movement in England.

Simultaneously, a growing number of English Christians in the 1980s had claimed the Anabaptist heritage. Many of these were charismatic Baptists; others were members of networks of rapidly growing charismatic "house churches." From 1936 onwards (with several interruptions), in a succession of communities in several parts of the English countryside, the Hutterian Society of Brothers (Hutterian Brethren) had given its witness to communitarian Anabaptism. Either through affirmation or denunciation, thinkers in several English Christian traditions were beginning to pay tribute to the influence of Anabaptist and Mennonite positions.    

Bibliography

Adapted by permission of Herald Press, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, and Waterloo, Ontario, from Mennonite Encyclopedia, Vol. 5, p. 269-270. All rights reserved. For information on ordering the encyclopedia visit the Herald Press website.

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