Welcome to five minutes in church history hosted by Dr Stephen Nichols, where we take a little break from the present to go exploring the past.

Travel back in time as we look at the people, events, and even the places that have shaped the story of Christianity.

This is our story, our family history. Let's get started.

Welcome back to another episode of five minutes in church history.

On this episode we're traveling back to the reformation and we're going to visit a time

when we have the first confession of the Reformation.

It's on February 24th, 1527,

and this is the Schleitheim confession.

Schleitheim is a town in Switzerland.

It's actually in what is the Canton Schaffhausen in Switzerland, and this

confession is going to come to represent the beliefs of a group within the Reformation we call

the radical reformers, and we also call them the Anabaptists.

We call them the radical reformers because of the Latin word radics.

That word means root.

And this group thought that the other reformers, and sometimes in distinction we'll call them the

magisterial reformers, it's of course is Luther up in Germany and the other Swiss cities,

Zwingley, Zurich, Calvin down in Geneva,

those reformers, according to the Anabaptists, did not go far enough in their reforms.

The Anabaptists thought the root of the problem was this union of church and state,

and so they advocated for a separation of

church and state.

They also differed from the other reformers in the view of baptism.

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