The means of conversion is the active grace of God mediated by the work of the Holy Spirit in response to faith. They insisted on baptism as a sign that conversion had taken place and rejected the concept of sacraments as the means of grace. The effect of grace was a real change in the self of the believer. Anabaptists were critical of other reformers who spoke of justification by grace its a change of status before God without equal emphasis on a real change in the believer. Neither did they distinguish sharply between justification as the initial experience, and sanctification as the later experience.
Conversion is the indispensable protection of the voluntaristic principle of the believers church.
The Anabaptist and Mennonite tradition has not found it easy to preserve the earlier meaning of conversion. For a socially isolated and community oriented people, the depth of personal religious commitment in the new generations can easily he replaced with ethnic identity and cultural forms. Even where religious experience is deeply felt, there is less of a sense of sudden change than of a gradual nurturing of spirituality. The individual is formed by the community to such an extent that a personal spiritual identity can be missing or weak. Thus the meaning of conversion can be modified or lost altogether.