Foundations of Our Faith and Calling (Bruderhof)

Details

  • Author: Eberhard Arnold
  • Category: Constitutions
  • Published: 1926
  • Source: Bruderhof Communities
  • Source URL: https://www.bruderhof.org/
  • Access: public

Description

The 1926 founding manifesto of the Bruderhof, a communal Anabaptist Christian movement now numbering around 3,000 members across communities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Paraguay.

Annotation

Foundations of Our Faith and Calling is the constitutional document of one of the longer-running European communal movements. The Bruderhof live without private property, without salaries, and without bank accounts; income from their businesses is pooled and used for the care of all members. The 1926 Foundations text, together with the 1920 to 1929 Orders documents republished in 1976, gives the most direct view of how the founders articulated the radical discipleship they were attempting.

Full text

The Bruderhof was founded in 1920 in Sannerz, Germany, by the Protestant theologian Eberhard Arnold, his wife Emmy, and her sister Else von Hollander. Appalled by the social injustice and devastation of the First World War, they sought answers in the Sermon on the Mount and felt called to a radical form of Christian discipleship: to give up everything for Christ and live in community of goods after the example of the early church in Jerusalem.

In 1926, Arnold wrote a brief manifesto for the first community: Foundations of Our Faith and Calling. The document calls for life in community as a response to Jesus' teachings. It is short, declarative, and frames the community's existence as a continuation of an Anabaptist tradition reaching back to the radical reformation of the 16th century, and beyond that to the apostolic church.

A second body of documents, Foundation and Orders of Sannerz and the Rhön Bruderhof, covering the years 1920 to 1929, was republished in 1976. Together these texts give the most direct view of how the founders articulated the constitutional commitments of the movement.

The operational rules that flow from these documents are simple and stark:

- **No private property.** Members hold everything in common.
- **No salaries.** Members do not receive wages and do not have bank accounts.
- **Pooled income.** Income from all the community's businesses (Bruderhof communities run successful manufacturing enterprises, including Community Playthings and Rifton Equipment) is pooled and used for the care of all members and for outreach.
- **Community of goods rooted in Acts 2:44-45,** the early-church passage in which all the believers were together and had everything in common.

The Bruderhof now numbers around 3,000 members across approximately 30 communities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Paraguay. It is one of the larger continuously-operating Christian communal movements in the world.

For a researcher comparing constitutional documents, the Bruderhof is an interesting case in how brief a founding document can be when the surrounding tradition (Anabaptism, the Sermon on the Mount, the early church) does most of the constitutional work. Arnold did not need to write a long charter because his community already knew what radical discipleship meant; he needed to write a clear call to live it.

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## Living examples and entry points for community builders

If your community is working through questions about economic sharing, the relationship between faith and common life, or what it takes to hold together across generations, here is what others have done and where the door is.

Woodcrest in Rifton, New York is one of the original Bruderhof communities in North America, founded in 1954. Around 350 people live there in full community of goods. Members work in community-owned businesses, share all income, and make collective decisions about major life changes including marriage and where members will live.

Darvell in East Sussex, England is the largest UK Bruderhof community, with around 300 members. It operates a publishing house (Plough) and a manufacturing operation. Visitors are welcomed at specific times.

Fox Hill in Walden, New York is a smaller, newer Bruderhof community that has grown over the past two decades. It illustrates how the Bruderhof model continues to expand rather than consolidate.

Hutterite colonies in Alberta, Manitoba, and South Dakota share the same Anabaptist theological roots as the Bruderhof and practice full community of goods, though with significant cultural differences. They are theological cousins, not descendants.

Reba Place Fellowship in Evanston, Illinois is a Mennonite community that practices a modified form of economic sharing closer to what some call semi-communal life. Income sharing is partial and voluntary rather than total.

Catholic Worker houses share the radical hospitality and poverty commitment without the formal membership structure or economic totality of the Bruderhof.

Where the door is:

- Plough Publishing is the Bruderhof's own press and is one of the most direct entry points. Their books and quarterly magazine cover community, family, and dissent from consumer culture. The writing is frank about what the life costs.
- The Bruderhof holds open days at most of its communities several times a year. They are genuinely interested in visitors who are asking serious questions about common life, not just touring.
- Johann Christoph Arnold's writing, particularly "Seeking Peace" and "Why Forgive," gives a sense of how the Bruderhof understands conflict and reconciliation internally.
- The foundational question worth sitting with before studying this model: is your community willing to make full economic sharing a non-negotiable condition of membership, from the start? The Bruderhof's framework depends on that answer being yes before everything else.

One caution: the Bruderhof practices a form of exclusion called Ausschluss, a period of being cut off from the community for serious violations of community norms. Former members have documented this as deeply traumatic, particularly when the person being excluded has grown up inside the community and has no outside social network. The community's cohesion and its disciplinary mechanisms are not separable. Anyone studying this model as a governance template needs to understand that the low exit costs many communities value are, in this model, deliberately high. That is partly why it holds together. It is also why leaving can be devastating.