The narrow way
The Anabaptists
Some of the reformers looked at the Reformation and judged that it had stopped halfway. The break with Rome was real, but the new churches were still wedded to the magistrate, still baptizing every infant into a Christian society by default, still treating the whole of a territory as the people of God simply by birth. A smaller band could not accept it. They baptized one another again, as believing adults who had chosen the faith for themselves — and from that act came the name flung at them, Anabaptist, the re-baptizers. The church, they insisted, was meant to be a gathered people, voluntary, visibly distinct from the world around it, walking the narrow road on purpose. For this break within the break they were hunted without mercy. Catholics and Protestants, divided on nearly everything else, found common cause in destroying them; the radicals were imprisoned, exiled, drowned, and burned by both at once. They had pressed past the point where their own former allies would follow, onto the narrow way that few choose and fewer survive, and they paid for the second mile with their lives.
“How narrow is the gate, and restricted is the way that leads to life; few are those who find it.”
— Jesus — Matthew 7:14 (WEB)
“You are an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession, that you may show forth the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
Sometimes a first break, however brave, does not go far enough, and faithfulness asks a second one — lonelier than the first, because this time even your allies stay behind. The hardest disconnects are rarely the ones that win you a crowd. They are the ones that cost you the crowd you already had, the people who marched the first mile with you and will not walk the second. There is a real temptation, once a reform has won some ground, to settle at the comfortable halfway house and call the journey finished. The narrow way is narrow precisely because so few are willing to keep walking it after the easy applause runs out. Be careful, then, how you judge the ones who press on past where you stopped. They are sometimes simply more consistent than you, following the same logic further than your nerve allowed. The road that loses you even the approval of your friends is not, for that reason, the wrong road. It may be the most faithful mile of all.