Hutterite Gemeindeordnungen

The Gemeindeordnungen (congregational orders and church disciplines) that have governed the Hutterite communities since the 16th century, through expulsion from Moravia, migration through Eastern Europe, and the establishment of more than 500 contemporary colonies in North America.

The Hutterites trace their origin to the Anabaptist movement of the 16th-century Radical Reformation and specifically to the community founded in Moravia in 1528, which came to be led by Jakob Hutter (executed by the Habsburg authorities in 1536). They have practiced community of goods continuously for nearly 500 years, through repeated waves of persecution, expulsion from Moravia, migration through Slovakia, Transylvania, Wallachia, Russia, and finally arrival in North America in the 1870s. Today they live in more than 500 colonies (Bruderhofs) across the Canadian prairies and the northern United States, with a total population of approximately 50,000.

The Gemeindeordnungen, congregational orders and church disciplines, are the body of rules by which the colonies have governed themselves through the centuries. They are not a single document. They are a continuously-refined body of regulation, classified into two main kinds:

• Orders dealing with the general organization and discipline of the community, its morals and spiritual guidance.
• Orders dealing with the special functions of the various members of the group, the administration of crafts and other occupational tasks, and their economical fulfillment.

The Ordnungen are spiritual and moral as well as practical. They are hortatory in tone, never threatening, admonishing all members to cooperate carefully in the great enterprise of brotherly living in community of goods. The main theme running through all of them is the battle against Eigennutz: selfishness, greed, the profit-motive. Austerity, simplicity, and a degree of ascetic living are enjoined throughout.

Practical regulations cover: millers, cutlers, barber-surgeons, potters, smiths, buyers, stock clerks, stewards, farm foremen, and many other occupational roles. Work is to be done diligently and reliably, every day including Saturday, without haste but also without idleness. No luxuries. No private possessions of any kind.

Governance is held by the Vorsteher (preacher and spiritual leader) and a council of elders, with major economic decisions made by the men's assembly and many practical decisions made within the relevant work groups. Membership is by birth and by adult baptism (typically in the early twenties); leaving the colony means leaving the community of goods entirely.

For a researcher building a constitutional library, the Hutterite case is the depth-of-time case. Five centuries of continuous communal life under one tradition of rules. The fact that the Ordnungen have remained workable across that span, through extreme persecution and complete geographic dislocation, says something important about constitutional design: rules that are simultaneously moral, spiritual, and operational seem to bind communities more durably than rules that try to do only one of those things.

Living examples and entry points for community builders

If your community is working through questions about what to regulate collectively versus what to leave to individual choice, or about how rules get transmitted across generations, here is what others have done and where the door is.

Lehrerleut colonies in Alberta and Saskatchewan are one of the three main Hutterite branches. They tend to be more conservative on technology and dress than the other branches. A Lehrerleut colony typically has 80 to 150 people. When a colony reaches around 150, it splits and starts a new one.

Dariusleut colonies, concentrated in Alberta and Montana, are slightly more permissive on technology adoption than the Lehrerleut but operate under the same Ordnung framework. The differences between branches illustrate how governance documents evolve under different pressures while maintaining the same basic structure.

Schmiedeleut colonies in Manitoba and South Dakota split in the early 1990s into two groups with different positions on connection to outside communities and ecumenical relationships. The split itself is a case study in how Ordnung governance handles irreconcilable disagreement.

Old Order Amish communities use a parallel governance document also called the Ordnung. They do not practice community of goods, so the economic structure is completely different, but the mechanism of community rule-setting and the bishop's interpretive role is structurally similar.

The Bruderhof, as a theological cousin, shows what happens when the same Anabaptist governance logic is applied to an urban, internationally dispersed, and actively growing organization.

Where the door is:

• Rod Janzen and Max Stanton's "The Hutterites in North America" (2010) is the most thorough English-language scholarly overview available and is readable without an academic background. Start here.
• Visiting a colony directly is possible but requires a prior personal connection. Colonies are working farms and manufacturing operations, not visitor destinations. The best path is through a university researcher or someone in a Mennonite or Amish network who has an existing relationship.
• The question that unlocks this model for your community: make a list of everything your community actually wants to decide collectively, and a separate list of everything you want to leave to individuals. Then ask whether your current governance structure can actually enforce the collective list. The Ordnung works because the community has both the will and the capacity to enforce it. Many communities have the first and not the second.

One caution: the Ordnung works inside a community with near-total economic interdependence, shared geography, shared ancestry, and a theological framework that makes compliance a matter of salvation rather than preference. Extracting specific rules and applying them to an open community, where members can leave without losing their livelihood, their housing, and their social world, requires rethinking the entire enforcement mechanism from the ground up. The rules are not the source of the cohesion. The economic and social totality is. Rules without that foundation are suggestions.