The Bruderhof

Movement·Founded 1920 CE·About 3,000 people in roughly two dozen communities as of 2024, in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Paraguay, Australia and South Korea. The Bruderhof does not publish an audited membership figure; the count includes children and resident non-members.

Judaism → Christianity → Catholicism → Protestantism → Anabaptism → The Bruderhof

The BruderhofHutterites.org

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History & overview · every faith gets one

Community of goods, started again in 1920 by people who had read about it.

A German communal movement founded by the theologian Eberhard Arnold in 1920, which sought out the Hutterites in 1930 and was formally joined to them, then separated, then reconciled in 1974 and again in the 1990s. Unlike the Hutterites the Bruderhof recruits, uses the internet, publishes a magazine, sends members to universities and runs two well-known manufacturing businesses. Roughly 3,000 people across about two dozen communities in the United States, England, Germany, Austria, Paraguay, Australia and South Korea.

Why it is filed this way

The Bruderhof was founded as an intentional community rather than as a church split, and only afterwards attached itself to the Anabaptist line. It is formally in fellowship with the Schmiedeleut Hutterites, which makes it a denomination by descent and a movement by behaviour — it seeks converts, publishes to a general audience, and has no territorial parish of any kind.

The founding

Eberhard and Emmy Arnold, out of the German youth movement and the religious socialist ferment after the First World War, left Berlin in 1920 with a handful of others and took a house at Sannerz in the Rhon hills, opening it to anyone who came and living from a shared purse. Arnold read himself back into the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, concluded that the Hutterites had preserved the thing he was trying to build, and travelled to North America in 1930 to find them; he was ordained by them in Alberta and the Sannerz community was united to the Hutterian Church.

Its founding is bound to Eberhard Arnold — 1920 CE.

What it holds

Reality. The Sermon on the Mount taken as a practicable order for a shared life rather than an ideal to be admired.

The divine. The Trinity, held without much dogmatic apparatus. The stress falls on the church as a visible body — Arnold's formula was that the incarnation must become social or it has not happened..

Death and after. Resurrection and the kingdom, expected and partly built now.

The line

descent is public here — where it came from, what left it
Judaism — c. 1000 BCE Christianity — 30 CE Catholicism Protestantism — 1517 CE Anabaptism — 1525 CE The Bruderhof — 1920 CE

Keep going

Back to the overview — the living page: elements, discussion, the web The Belief room — the claims themselves, with sources and context Branch The Bruderhof — inherit everything, change what you must

Numbers count Panfaith activity only — never real-world adherence; the global following above is a stated estimate, not a Panfaith count.

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