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Conrad Grebel (1498-1526) ***

Organizer of the first Free Church congregation. He was born in Zurich, at that time a decidedly Roman Catholic city. It is believed that young Grebel studied at the Latin School called the Carolina from his eighth to his sixteenth year. He then attended the University of Basel in 1514-15; the University of Vienna in 1515-18 (with a royal scholarship which his wealthy father extracted from the Austrian emperor); and finally the University of Paris in 1518-20 (this time with a royal scholarship from the king of France). He later secured a papal grant to attend the University of Pisa but this plan fell through. He was a brilliant scholar, knew Greek, wrote Latin well, but lived a secular and rather wild life. In 1521 he came to know and love ardently a girl named Barbara, and in spite of the vigorous opposition of his parents, he married her on February 6, 1522, while his father was out of the city.

Grebel had long been an admirer of Zwingli and was in the inner circle of scholars who gathered around the Zurich reformer. Some months after his marriage Grebel was converted to the gospel of God's free grace, coupled with earnest discipleship, as taught by Zwingli. At first Grebel was an earnest and enthusiastic disciple of Zwingli, but by the fall of 1523 he had grown critical of Zwingli for his allowing the Zurich Council of the "200" to determine the tempo of the reformation. And by the fall of 1524 Grebel had developed the major features of his own theological position. He and his followers (now called Mennonites) held to sola Scriptura with warmth; the Free Church concept; believer's baptism; a life of earnest obedience to the NT (called Christian discipleship); the rejection of the civil oath on the word of Christ; the rejection of all force and violence, including participation in the military; the concept of a suffering church coupled with the "believer's cross"; a simple and plain meetinghouse; religious toleration (no persecution of religious nonconformists); and the saved status of infants and children without any baptismal ceremony.

Grebel founded the first modern free church and inaugurated believer's baptism on January 21, 1525, after he and his followers faced fines and imprisonment for disrupting the religious unity of Zurich's new evangelical religious movement under Zwingli. He spent some time in prison, evangelized earnestly in northern Switzerland, and died of the plague the summer of 1526, a year and a half after founding his biblicist church.