Anabaptists

Discussion in 'Faith & Religion' started by Ken Anderson, Apr 20, 2016.

  1. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    Bruderhof / Church Communities International

    Another Anabaptist group that I have some familiarity with are the Bruderhof, who currently go by the name of Church Communities International. Before they were known as the Bruderhof, they were called the Society of Brothers.

    Loosely affiliated with the Hutterites, the Bruderhof also live in community, sharing everything in common. There are Bruderhof communities in New York, Florida, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, as well as in the United Kingdom, Germany, Paraguay, and Australia.

    The Bruderhof were founded in Germany by Eberhard Arnold in 1920. Arnold had once studied with the Hutterites, but had not joined a Hutterite community until after he had formed the Bruderhof. He traveled from Germany to the United States in 1930, after learning that there were Hutterite communities still in existence in North America. While there, he was ordained as a Hutterite minister, and then moved back to his community in Germany, which were then considered to be Hutterite.

    When Hitler came to power in Germany, Arnold moved his group to Liechtenstein in 1934, largely due to their refusal to serve in the armed forces or accept Nazi teachers. There, they became the Alm Bruderhof. As Germany’s influence grew, continued pressure from the Nazis caused some of his group to move to England, forming the Cotswold Bruderhof in 1936.

    In 1937, the German secret police confiscated the property of the Bruderhof in Liechtenstein and gave the Bruderhof members forty-eight hours to leave the country.

    They reassembled in England, where the group grew to be over three hundred and fifty, many of them young English men who were seeking an alternative to serving in the armed forces.

    The German heritage of the Bruderhof and their resistance to join in a war against Germany unsurprisingly led to some problems with the English authorities. Faced with internment, the Bruderhof chose to move again, emigrating to Paraguay, where they still have a presence. This move was assisted by the Mennonite Central Committee.

    They were well received in Paraguay, in large part because they founded a hospital and medical clinics that served the larger community.

    In 1954, the Woodcrest Bruderhof was formed near Rifton, New York, and hundreds of new members joined, including people from other communal groups across the country. New communities were formed in Pennsylvania in 1957, and Connecticut in 1958. By 1962, most of the Bruderhof had moved from Paraguay to the United States and England, leaving a much smaller community behind in Paraguay.

    At that point, descendants of Eberhard Arnold took control over the group, abandoning its established leadership selection process, which created a rift among the membership, and several members left the Bruderhof, either voluntarily or were excommunicated, while the group left behind in Paraguay was abandoned with very few resources. There were also accusations of child molestation and other improprieties.

    The Forest River colony of Schmiedeleut Hutterites in North Dakota invited Bruderhof members to join them, and several of them did, resulting in turmoil among the Hutterites in that colony. In 1955, the Schmiedeleut excluded the Bruderhof and placed the Forest River colony under probation.

    In 1973, the Bruderhof leadership apologized for the problems among the Forest River colony and were reunited with the Hutterian Church. But, in 1990, the more conservative Dariusleut and Lehrerleut Hutterites excommunicated the Bruderhof, and refused to recognize them as Hutterites due to practices that did not conform to the Hutterite order, including sending their children to public schools, using musical instruments, and participating in peace protests.

    In 2002, the Bruderhof purchased a home in the part of Germany where the movement had started, and it is now one of two Bruderhof houses in Germany.

    That’s the history. The Bruderhof was founded on religious principles that were in line with Anabaptist beliefs and practices. Its faith was founded on a faith in Jesus Christ, especially His command to “love your neighbor as yourself,” the Sermon on the Mount, and New Testament teachings on nonviolence, faithfulness in marriage, and compassion for the poor. Like the Hutterites, one of the principles of the Bruderhof was to follow the practices of the first church in Jerusalem as recorded in the Acts, whose members were of one heart and mind, and shared all things in common.

    The Bruderhof is also a peace church, whose members do not serve in the armed forces of any country.

    Along with a small group of friends, including an acquaintance who had been raised in a Hutterite community in South Dakota, and an Amish friend who had been excommunicated from the Amish Church in Smyrna, my wife and I spent a few days at one of the Bruderhof communities in New York, which had purchased a former elementary school, which had been turned into apartments for Bruderhof members.

    Under the label of Community Playthings, the Bruderhof manufactures a line of school furniture, toys, and other products made of wood in a highly automated manufacturing facility. Other Bruderhof ventures include its Plough Publishing House, which publishes Christian literature, Rifton Equipment, which produce rehabilitation equipment for the disabled, and Clean Sheen Services, which is a property management and cleaning company.

    The Bruderhof is well respected in their communities, in large part because they do vote, and they represent a large voting block. Bruderhof members also serve on school boards and other elected offices.

    Being married, my wife and I stayed together during the few days that we were at the Bruderhof, but the rest of our group was split up, each assigned someone who would show them around. We would run into one another every now and then, and during communal meals, but we otherwise had little contact with one another.

    Nevertheless, when we compared notes later, we had all picked up on the same things.

    Everyone was very nice, and everyone appeared to be very happy, but that seemed to be on the surface, or for show. We all got the impression that something very different was going on below the surface; not necessarily horrific, but that things were not completely as they seemed.

    More importantly, Christ wasn’t there. During the time that we were there, we spoke to several members of the Bruderhof. Only one woman, who was in her eighties, spoke of the importance of having Christ in her life. She had left Germany with the group as a child during the Nazi era.

    No one else mentioned anything that was even vaguely Christian. Oh, everything was certainly family friendly. There was no cursing or objective language used but, for a supposedly Christian community, nothing was said about Christ, and the Bible wasn’t quoted even once.

    That includes their Sunday services. There was no pastor or minister, which didn’t bother me, but the meeting consisted of people getting up and giving testimonies, all of which had nothing to do with Christ. Instead, they spoke about projects they were involved in, and they read letters from family members who were now in different Bruderhof community. When children become adults, the general practice is to move them to another Bruderhof community, away from their parents and, although it wasn’t exactly stated, I didn’t get the feeling that it was voluntary.

    During the Sunday service, a group of young Bruderhof missionaries reported on their assignment in New York City, where they had passed out food in conjunction with Catholic Charities, participated in a protest, and met with various elected officials, but with no indication that they had spoken to anyone about Christ.

    The songs that were sung during the Sunday service were folk songs, and children’s songs like “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” Not one Christian hymn was sung, and not a single Bible verse was quoted or even alluded to during the entire service. There were no prayers.

    I have read about the Bruderhof, including a few books written by Eberhard Arnold, and I have no doubt that the Bruderhof was founded as an Anabaptist community, not far removed from the Hutterites, but that Christ had been lost somewhere along the way.

    My guess is that many of the new members who they accepted were interested in joining the Bruderhof, not because any commitment to living a Christian life, but because they were a successful commune, and because of their vocal opposition to war and violence. Basically, I think they were infiltrated and taken over by a bunch of hippies in the 1960s, and that these were the people who are calling the shots today.
     
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  2. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    The common practice among many Anabaptist churches was to not claim tax exempt status when eligible to do so, but a quick search suggests that this is no longer as common a practice as it once was. Both of the Grace Brethren churches that I was a member of did not claim tax exempt status, choosing instead to pay the same taxes that anyone else would on purchases. Of course, we paid property taxes as well, although not as a business because the church was not a business, but property taxes were paid. The practice among Grace Brethren churches was that pastors held jobs outside of the church so that being a pastor was not viewed as an occupation. When there were projects that would take a lot of the pastor's time, he was reimbursed for his time, but otherwise the pastor held outside jobs. One of my pastors was a plumber while, at another church that I attended, the pastor was the principal of a private Christian school not affiliated with a specific church or denomination.
     
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