Anabaptist World
Anabaptist World is a news organization serving Mennonites and other Anabaptists, based in Newton, Kansas, in the United States. It publishes a print magazine and a news website at anabaptistworld.org, reporting church news, features, and commentary for the global Anabaptist movement, with particular strength in North America. It describes its ambition as being the flagship Anabaptist publication, in print and online — a place where a diverse community comes together to explore and strengthen Anabaptist values and encourage one another to follow Christ faithfully.
The organization, incorporated as Anabaptist World Inc., was created in 2020 by the merger of two established publications: The Mennonite, the denominational magazine of Mennonite Church USA, and Mennonite World Review, an independent newspaper based in Newton. Through the second of those predecessors, its journalistic lineage runs back to 1923, giving the young organization one of the longest continuous records of any publication serving the Anabaptist tradition.
The Newton Lineage: Mennonite Weekly Review
The older root of Anabaptist World is the newspaper founded in Newton in 1923. According to the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, the Mennonite Weekly Review, published at Newton by the Herald Publishing Company, appeared in an introductory issue on 9 August 1923 as a supplement of Der Herold, the company's German-language paper, and began regular independent publication on 18 September 1923 as a four-page paper. The Herald Publishing Company had been organized in 1920 principally to keep German-language literature available for Mennonite readers, but its president, H. P. Krehbiel, explained in an editorial that English was rapidly becoming prominent among the younger generation in the central West, and that an English Mennonite periodical was needed, particularly for the Midwest.
The paper grew from a mostly local circulation in its first decade into a family paper for Mennonites everywhere, read across most branches of North American Mennonite life. It carried family, church, and community news, articles on current issues, school reports, and a summary of world news, and adopted a twelve-page tabloid format in 1951. Its early editors included A. J. Krehbiel from 1923 to 1925, H. P. Krehbiel from 1926 to 1935, and Menno Schrag, who became editor in 1935 after years as an assistant editor. Columnists and contributors over the years included historians and sociologists of Mennonite life such as Cornelius Krahn, Melvin Gingerich, and J. Winfield Fretz.
From Weekly Review to World Review
On 2 April 2012, the newspaper changed its name from Mennonite Weekly Review to Mennonite World Review, a title that expressed the widening scope it had already developed: independent coverage of Mennonite groups in North America and of the global Anabaptist movement connected through bodies such as Mennonite World Conference and Mennonite Central Committee. In its later Newton years it published on a biweekly rhythm. Its news pages reported denominational assemblies, mission and relief work, congregational life, obituaries, and debates over theology and practice across the many Mennonite groups, from Mennonite Church USA and the Mennonite Brethren to more conservative fellowships.
The Review's independence was its defining trait. It was not owned by a denomination, so it could cover all Mennonite groups and report critically on any of them. That independence made it a common record for a fragmented tradition, and its Newton office — at 129 West Sixth Street, with a post office box in the town — became a small but significant address in North American religious journalism.
The Other Root: The Mennonite
The second predecessor, The Mennonite, carried a lineage beginning in 1885 as a denominational magazine. In its final form, from 1998 to 2020, it was the denominational magazine of Mennonite Church USA, serving that denomination's members with official news, features, and opinion. Where the Review was independent and pan-Mennonite, The Mennonite was an official channel: it connected a specific denomination's agencies, congregations, and members, and it spoke with the authority — and within the limits — of a church-owned publication.
The two publications thus complemented each other. One brought scale, a defined membership audience, and denominational support; the other brought independence, a subscription base built over nearly a century, and a newsroom in Newton that had covered the whole Anabaptist spectrum. By the late 2010s, however, both faced the pressures bearing on all print religious journalism: aging readerships, rising costs, and migration of readers to digital news.
The 2020 Merger
The merger that created Anabaptist World took legal form on 1 September 2020, when the new nonprofit, Anabaptist World Inc., was born, based in the former Mennonite World Review office in Newton, Kansas. The Associated Church Press, to which both predecessors belonged, reported that the new entity would continue the missions of both publications: serving the members of Mennonite Church USA, as The Mennonite had done, while independently covering all Mennonite groups and the global Anabaptist movement, as the Review had done.
The new print magazine began with 8,200 paying subscribers, and its first issue was mailed on 18 September 2020. Paul Schrag, the editor of Mennonite World Review, continued as editor of Anabaptist World. Danielle Klotz of Goshen, Indiana, served as executive director and chief executive officer of the new nonprofit. Staff of The Mennonite did not continue with the merged publication: Gordon Houser retired after 42 years with The Mennonite, and Sheldon C. Good resigned to pursue other opportunities. The combined title dropped the word Mennonite from the masthead in favor of the broader term Anabaptist, signaling an intended audience wider than any single denomination or ethnic tradition.
Publishing Program
Anabaptist World publishes its print magazine sixteen times a year, on a cycle of roughly every three weeks with some four-week intervals, according to library records of the publication. Its website publishes news more frequently, between print issues, and serves readers who follow Anabaptist news daily. A media kit issued by the organization in its early years listed about 7,500 print subscribers, about 8,600 email subscribers, and tens of thousands of website visitors annually, and described it as holding the largest subscription list of any Mennonite periodical in the United States.
The content mix joins the two predecessors' strengths. News coverage reports on denominations, congregations, schools and colleges, relief and service organizations, mission work, and peace and justice activities. Feature writing explores Anabaptist theology and practice — nonviolence, mutual aid, plain living, believer's baptism, and community — while opinion pages carry debate within the tradition. Its stories are regularly reprinted by other Mennonite publications; church magazines that cite its reporting credit it by name, and its staff, including associate editor Tim Huber, who worked at Mennonite World Review from 2011 until the merger, contribute reporting across the movement's media.
Audience and Community
Anabaptist World's readers belong to a spectrum of Anabaptist and related traditions. Its own reader research, published in its media materials, describes highly educated, deeply engaged readers, a large majority of whom had made a charitable donation in the previous year and who showed strong interest in socially responsible investing, education, travel, and books. Denominations and traditions represented among its readers include Mennonite Church USA, Mennonite Brethren, and other Anabaptist bodies, along with readers from outside the tradition who follow its peace-church witness.
Geographically, the readership centers on the historic Mennonite regions of North America — Kansas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, and the Canadian prairies and Ontario — while its reporting follows the global Anabaptist fellowship, whose largest populations today are in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Coverage of events such as leadership elections in the India Mennonite Brethren church, reprinted from Anabaptist World by other Mennonite magazines, illustrates that global brief.
Newton, Kansas, as a Publishing Center
Newton's role in the story is not incidental. The town and neighboring North Newton have been a center of Mennonite publishing and education since the late nineteenth century, home to the Herald Publishing Company, to Bethel College, and to the offices of Mennonite publications serving the prairie settlements founded by Mennonite immigrants from Russia and Europe. Gerhard H. Willms, an immigrant from the Molotschna colony in South Russia who arrived in Kansas in 1922, edited Der Herold in Newton, while the English-language Review grew up beside it — a bilingual publishing house serving a community in linguistic transition. Anabaptist World's continuation of that Newton base keeps the merged organization in the town where its oldest predecessor began in 1923.
Significance
Anabaptist World represents a consolidation strategy increasingly common in religious media: as denominational magazines and independent papers each became too small to thrive alone, they merged into a single nonprofit claiming the whole tradition as its constituency. The choice of name expressed the wager behind the merger — that the future audience is defined by Anabaptist conviction and values rather than by membership in one denomination or descent from one immigrant community.
For the WorldNM directory, Anabaptist World is classified as a religious news organization and agency-style source for the Anabaptist movement, based in Newton, Kansas, publishing a print magazine sixteen times a year and continuous online news in English at anabaptistworld.org, and serving Mennonite and Anabaptist readers in North America and worldwide.
