And that is why I said that beliefs and right actions are not mutually exclusive.
Are there any beliefs that are required to be baptized? To be ordained? To become a member?
Are there any printed services I can see?
If its a “Mennonite confession of faith” that you’re curious about, the context and the link to the pamphlet that Mervin provided above is pretty representative, in my experience. As Mervin said, there are many different Mennonite groups, each which may differ on some minor points. And as he also mentioned, how some of the theology or doctrines are “worked out on the ground” in the local church are simply left to the discretion of the local congregation, i.e., lots of wiggle room. In the previous generation, many churches were too poor to pay salaries for church staff, and so the teaching was done by someone from the local congregation chosen from among them and deemed to “have the gift of teaching”–sometimes on an itinerant schedule, or rotating among several lay people in the congregation. In such a context, the focus was not so much on scrutinizing the doctrine of a single leader on stage, but on developing the biblical literacy and spiritual maturity of the entire congregation.
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Yeah. There’s that great big middle. Somewhere in there is a place for me.
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???
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That part of the “big middle” is not for me. ; )
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I should have pointed “Let the Truth Out” to the Unitarian Universalist Church, since they have accomplished what he wanted to do. Or something like that.
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Yes, I saw the pamphlet but I’m wondering what beliefs are required for a believer’s baptism. Ditto for ordination and membership.
As we’ve been saying, there is no “top-down” template for all this imposed on all churches, and so you will find variation. But since you want a specific example, here is the covenant that I signed on with to become a member at my particular Mennonite church. You’ll notice that there isn’t near as much detail or specific doctrine in these words as what you saw even in the national conference pamphlet I linked to earlier. And that is because my particular congregation is not doctrinally “heavy handed” and tends to more embrace our historical suspicion of long and detailed creedal prescriptions. There will be other Mennonite churches that probably (with opposite inclinations) have longer and even more detailed creedal requirements than what you saw in that pamphlet. But here is ours, just so you can see what I mean.
Covenant
We identify ourselves as a people who have embraced the salvation God made available through Jesus Christ and therefore want to live out our faith commitment to God as God’s people and the church by committing ourselves to the following covenant:
We commit ourselves to the Christ . Recognizing Jesus as Lord, we commit ourselves to a life of active following and close adherence to His teachings. Believing that there should be no discrepancy between faith and life, between what one believes and how one lives, we want to echo the affirmation of faith expressed by early Anabaptist Mennonite Christians that states: “No one can know Christ lest they follow Him in life.”
We commit ourselves to each other . We desire to celebrate life together in Jesus Christ. We realize that we need each other and will therefore want to contribute to the well-being of our community by caring for and loving one another and by calling each other to a life of discipleship.
We commit ourselves to others. Recognizing that our God personally identified with human beings by taking the form of a servant, we too want to enter into the lives of others, assuming the posture of a servant and announcing the good news of salvation. We also want to take seriously Jesus’s command to love our enemies and therefore we will seek to conduct our relationship with all people in a peaceful and nonviolent manner.
We commit ourselves to the Way of the cross and the resurrection . The lesson of the cross teaches us that our obedience to Jesus may lead us to our very death. The resurrection, however, exposes the powerlessness of death. In our life together, we want to embrace both the tragedy of the crucifixion and the victory of the resurrection.
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And our baptismal requirement sometimes (but not always) accompanies a joining of membership into our community, and so the covenant shown also roughly doubles for our baptismal requirement as well. But the one thing most Mennonite churches are probably pretty consistent with is that it be a voluntary (i.e. - believer’s) baptism, and so if they are a new convert it would involve a catechism class and preparation, whereas that may not be required for membership transfers or people who have already been baptized elsewhere. While our forebears may have wanted to insist that someone baptized as an infant get re-baptized as an adult (that was kind of a big thing - and they were killed for this practice back in the day), that sort of insistence would be a thing of the past (at least in our particular church). There would be no “compulsory” baptism (or re-baptism) since that would very much fly in the face of who we strive to be at my particular church, and we would welcome you with whatever baptism you bring; but there would be other much more conservative Mennonite churches that would still raise much more of a stink about such things. So just think of us all as being on the spectrum. 
There. Does that at least start to satisfy your curiousity?
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Its been several decades since I went through membership (“catechismal”) classes prior to baptism so my memory is a bit foggy about the content. But the procedure described by Mervin fits my experience too. But different congregations may do things slightly differently so there’s no strict procedure or list of creedal statements to “tick off the list” for the denomination as a whole. People (believers) may chose to be baptised at whatever age they feel comfortable doing so. Often in their late teens or early twenties if they were raised in the church, but can be much older if they are new believers. Basically, the baptismal (i.e. membership) candidate gives a personal testimony first privately to the board of elders, and later (during the Sunday of baptism) in front of the entire congregation, recounting the history of their relationship to God/Jesus, i.e., how they came to faith–articulating that they have trusted what Jesus did on the cross to forgive their sins and explaining what they have learned in their faith over the years, scripture that is meaningful to them etc… They are asked to affirm a general covenant of commitment to the local church body, much along the lines of what Mervin posted. Already baptized people who are simply transferring membership from another congregation don’t go through all the classes, but give their personal testimony in front of the congregation (as a means of introduction).
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Note that I put the words “catechismal” in quotes above, because it probably isn’t a strict format that others may be used to in different denominations. I meant it just as an equivalent word for “a general teaching session about the gospel message, the meaning of baptism–which Anabaptists view purely as an outward symbol of an inward heart transformation-, and the functioning of the church”. Here’s some info from the web:
It has been the policy of the Mennonite Brethren Church to reject all catechisms and catechetical instruction from its beginning in Russia, in favor of an emphasis on evangelistic preaching and conversion. This and the obvious non-use of the catechetical method and non publication of a catechism by Anabaptist-Mennonites in any country for the first century and a quarter of their history poses the question as to whether catechisms used by some groups are an importation, foreign to the genius of Anabaptism, whose use indicates a spiritual decline of the brotherhood and departure from its original character and type of piety, or whether it was actually a fruitful adaptation from the outside, useful and beneficial throughout the long history of its use in the Amish and Mennonite churches of Germany, France, Prussia, Russia, Holland, and North America
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At the very least it isn’t as though there is no need for a cultural substrate to get thought off on the right foot. How supportive or restraining that turns out to be is something even luck will weigh in on. Ideally what ever the starter used the bread that is baked will be a good one.
Sort of. Thanks for that. These answers are all over the map. I just wondered what somebody had to believe to be accepted for baptism. You know, like core beliefs.
Yours is longer and more detailed.
At any rate, I think it’s good for a church to put its cards on the table for all to see.
btw, what church did your particular branch of Mennonites split from?
Maybe you don’t have many options in your area. Going to several churches (not in one day) might be helpful.
I forgot to mention something about the LDS and how they control their members. Members are expected to tithe, and are expected to visit the nearest temple (not their local church) for special weddings, getting baptized on behalf of the dead, etc. But they need a “temple recommend” from their bishops to get in the temple. So they have to show the bish their financial statements to prove they’ve been tithing. They are also grilled about their moral character and ethics. No hanky-panky! I don’t know how they handle confessed sin. Too much! Mind your own business, bish!
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In wikipedia you may find a timeline of various denominations something like pasted below. The general category of “Anabaptists” arose very early–1525–on the heels of Luther. The first Anabaptists broke away from Zwingli in Switzerland. But those early anabaptists were a very broad and rather undefined category. Mennonites were a pacifist group of Anabaptists that congealed under the leadership of Menno Simons, a former Roman Catholic priest in Holland. Subsequently over the centuries, various smaller subdivisions among Mennonites occurred (and the Amish and Hutterites) arose in subesquent centuries. Some Mennonite denominations split off, and then re-merged with each other over time so the picture gets quite complex. These days, Mennonites are often classified as under the “protestant” grouping, but many Mennonites themselves consider themselves a “third way”–neither Catholic nor protestant because they were killed as heretics by both Catholics and magisteral protestants (Lutherans and Anglicans) back in the day. here’s the chart:
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That’s an interesting chart … and seems to include Zwingli as an Anabaptist. But my understanding is that it was Zwingli’s students: Conrad Grebel, George Blaurock, and Felix Manz who were more the founding members, and that Zwingli actually sided with the state against them. They had baptized each other as adults in defiance of the laws of the time.
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Yes, you are absolutely correct about that. I noticed that anomaly in the phylogenetic branch also-- but decided not to draw attention to it because the picture was rather complex as it is 
But yeah, Zwingli himself would have never been considered Anabaptist.
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@klw and @Mervin_Bitikofer, it’s been ages since my short, church history class my pastor did, but I think Zwingli was identified there as an Anabaptist. I wonder, if this is a common view among non-Anabaptist Protestants. And if so why.
I don’t know…but it may be a somewhat widespread error. I just found this piece on a historian’s webpage. Apparently early in his teaching, Zwingli had sympathy for the idea of believers baptism, but then under pressure from political authorities he recanted that idea and aligned himself with the city magistrates. At that point some of his students broke away from him and “re”-baptized themselves, Zwingli subsequently ordered those first Anabaptists killed, so would not be considered part of the movement himself. I found this reference to a German text which you might appreciate:
Zwingli’s 1525 treatise, von der Taufe ( Concerning Baptism …). The German text is in the Corpus Reformatorum ( Zwinglis Werke , vol 4). The English translation is in the Library of Christian Classics volume Zwingli and Bullinger . Zwingli wrote:
For some time I myself was deceived by the error [of the Anabaptists] and I thought it better not to baptize children until they came to years of discretion. But I was not so dogmatically of this opinion as to take the course of many today, who although they are far too young and inexperienced in the matter argue and asset rashly that infant baptism derives from the papacy or the devil or something equally non-sensical (139).
how’s that for getting into the weeds…! But interesting. @Mervin_Bitikofer
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On YouTube I was looking for Mennonite baptisms and I came across a baptism by Raleigh Mennonite Church. It was in a river, but it had the core structure of the baptisms I am used to. It’s a small, affirming congregation so is probably on the liberal end of the spectrum. They seem nice. They rent worship space from Good Shepherd Episcopal church, so I doubt they are bitter about their history or extremely distrustful of other churches.
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