Mennonite World Conference counts something over two million baptised members across more than eighty countries, and the composition of that figure is the most interesting thing about it: the majority of Anabaptists worldwide are now African, Asian and Latin American, not European or North American.
Ethiopia's Meserete Kristos Church is among the largest Mennonite bodies in the world. India, Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe hold large communities. Most of these are the product of twentieth-century mission and have no ethnic or migratory link to the Swiss and Dutch origins at all, which has raised a genuine question inside the tradition about how much of Anabaptist identity is theology and how much is inherited European culture.
The Amish are the fastest-growing part of the family in North America, roughly doubling every twenty years through large families and high retention rather than conversion, with a population now around four hundred thousand across the United States and Ontario. That growth has pushed settlements into states that had none a generation ago, and pushed Amish work out of farming and into construction and manufacture.
The tradition's public profile rests on pacifism and on the institutions built from it. Anabaptist refusal of military service produced the alternative service arrangements of both world wars in North America; Mennonite Central Committee, founded in 1920, is a substantial international relief and development agency; and Anabaptist bodies have supplied much of the personnel and theory of Christian peacebuilding and restorative justice.
Internal disputes are real and are handled quietly by preference: the treatment of same-sex relationships, which has caused congregations and conferences to leave national bodies in the United States and Canada, and a serious reckoning within several communities over the concealment of sexual abuse.