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Background

Believers Church Conferences (BCC) have been held on a regular basis since 1967. The last and 19th was in January 2023 in Raleigh, NC, USA. At that conference it was decided that the 20th conference will be held in Amsterdam in 2025. The choice for Amsterdam has a number of reasons:

  • Although the first conference in 1967 was in Louisville (Kentucky), USA, the original initiative for these conferences was taken in the early 1960s by the then rectors of the Mennonite and Baptist seminaries in the Netherlands, respectively, Johannes Oosterbaan and Jannes Reiling
  • The Netherlands in general and Amsterdam specifically play an important role in the beginning of the Anabaptist (Menno Simons) and Baptist (John Smyth) movement
  • Teun van der Leer (Amsterdam) wrote his PhD on the Story of the Believers Church Conferences in 2021 at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam
  • Baptists (Unie-ABC) and Mennonites (ADS) in the Netherlands, together with the International Baptist Theological Study Centre in Amsterdam and the Faculty of Religion and Theology (FRT) of the Vrije Universiteit (VU) and its Amsterdam Center for Religion and Peace & Justice Studies in Amsterdam, will host and sponsor the conference, with the Acadia Center for Baptist and Anabaptist Studies in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada, as co-sponsor.