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Home›Traditions›Anabaptist

Anabaptist Illustrations

Radical discipleship, pacifism, and the church as a distinct counter-cultural community.

Key question: “How does this text call the community of faith to live as a distinct, counter-cultural witness to the Kingdom?”

23,674 sermon illustrations through the Anabaptist lens

Sermon Illustration

The Night Blaise Pascal Could Not Look Away

On the evening of November 23, 1654, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal sat alone in his room in Paris when something shattered his ordinary world....

Isaiah 6:1-8Universal

236 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Kitchen That Fed a Neighborhood

In 2019, Maria Gonzalez started a small food pantry out of her garage in East San Antonio. She hauled donated cans in her minivan, sorted...

1 Corinthians 3:1-9Universal

249 words

Sermon Illustration

The Apprentice Who Learned to Hear the Beats

In 1987, a sixteen-year-old named Marcus Chen began apprenticing under piano tuner Walter Kraus in Portland, Oregon. Walter would strike two notes simultaneously and ask,...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

243 words

Sermon Illustration

The Lighthouse Keeper of Galveston

When Hurricane Ike slammed into Galveston, Texas, in September 2008, the storm surge swallowed entire neighborhoods. Streets became rivers. Homes folded like cardboard. In the...

Nahum 1:7Universal

232 words

Sermon Illustration

The Pharmacist Who Planted Anyway

When Mithat Isik arrived in Altenburg, Germany, as a Syrian refugee in 2015, he had every reason to hold back. He was a trained pharmacist...

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7Universal

242 words

Sermon Illustration

The Parchment Sewn Into the Coat

On the night of November 23, 1654, Blaise Pascal — the brilliant French mathematician who had calculated the weight of air and invented the mechanical...

Luke 9:28-36Universal

249 words

Sermon Illustration

Bonhoeffer's Prayers from a Distance

When the Gestapo shuttered his underground seminary at Finkenwalde in 1937, Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not stop being a pastor to his students. Scattered across Germany,...

1 Thessalonians 3:9-13Universal

244 words

Sermon Illustration

The Retouched Portrait

In 2019, photographer Lindsay Adler gave a TED Talk in New York where she showed two versions of the same portrait. The first had been...

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2Universal

243 words

Sermon Illustration

The Frequency Only Stillness Can Find

In 1995, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton traveled to Olympic National Park in Washington State to document something increasingly rare: one square inch of pure silence....

1 Samuel 3:10Universal

248 words

Contemporary

The Man Behind the March

In the sweltering summer of 1963, Bayard Rustin worked from a cramped office at 170 West 130th Street in Harlem, a telephone receiver pressed to...

Micah 6:8Universalservicehumility

246 words

Sermon Illustration

Seven Steps Into Muddy Water

In 1982, a young chemist named Gertrude Elion stood in a Stockholm concert hall to receive the Nobel Prize for developing the first effective drug...

2 Kings 5:14Universal

237 words

Sermon Illustration

The Blackened Stones of Dresden

On the morning of February 14, 1945, the Frauenkirche in Dresden lay in ruins. Allied firebombing had collapsed the great baroque dome, reducing one of...

Jeremiah 33:14-16Universal

235 words

Sermon Illustration

The Stadium That Sang in Every Language

On a sweltering July evening in 2019, sixty thousand people packed Busan Asiad Main Stadium in South Korea for the closing worship of the World...

Revelation 7:9-17Universal

250 words

Sermon Illustration

The Crown That Echoed Around the World

On June 2, 1953, twenty-seven million people in Britain alone watched something unprecedented — a coronation broadcast live on television. Inside Westminster Abbey, the young...

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14Universal

248 words

Sermon Illustration

The Plumb Line of Finkenwalde

In 1935, Dietrich Bonhoeffer opened an underground seminary at Finkenwalde, a small town on the Baltic coast of Germany. The Reich Church had made its...

Amos 7:7-17Universal

217 words

Vivid Retelling

The Earthquake at Midnight: Acts 16:16-40

Cinematic retelling of Paul and Silas in Philippi prison

Universal

989 words

Sermon Illustration

The Flood That Saved a City

During the Siege of Leiden in 1574, the people of Holland faced a crisis eerily similar to Israel at Rephidim. Spanish forces had surrounded the...

Exodus 17:1-7Universal

239 words

Sermon Illustration

Pandita Ramabai and the Temples That Breathe

In 1889, Pandita Ramabai opened the doors of Sharada Sadan in Pune, India, a refuge for child widows and girls rescued from temple prostitution. Ramabai,...

1 Corinthians 6:12-20Universal

236 words

Sermon Illustration

The Two Movements That Restart a Life

In 1960, Dr. Peter Safar demonstrated at Baltimore City Hospital that effective CPR requires two distinct actions working together. Chest compressions alone are not enough....

Romans 10:9Universal

227 words

Sermon Illustration

The Light That Holds Until Dawn

In 2018, a team of twelve boys from the Wild Boars soccer club and their coach became trapped deep inside the Tham Luang cave system...

2 Peter 1:16-19Universal

232 words

Movie Analogy

Nomadland: Blessed Are the Poor - Progressive (Beatitudes)

In the film *Nomadland*, we meet Fern, a woman who, after the economic collapse of a small town in Nevada, finds herself living in a van, traversing the vast American landscape. As she travels from one dusty campsite to another,...

Matthew 5:1-12Universal

322 words

Sermon Illustration

The Bear in the Campsite

In 2019, a family camping in Glacier National Park woke to the sound of something heavy pushing against their bear canister. The father, Greg Walton,...

James 4:7Universal

237 words

Sermon Illustration

The Carpenter's Hands on Moving Day

Margaret Chen had lived alone in her apartment on Birch Street for eleven years after her husband passed. When the building was condemned last October,...

John 13:34-35Universal

246 words

Sermon Illustration

The Garden in Milan Where a Restless Man Finally Listened

In the summer of 386 AD, a thirty-one-year-old rhetoric professor sat weeping beneath a fig tree in a Milan garden. Augustine of Hippo had spent...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

235 words