Arnold came out of the German Student Christian Movement and the post-war religious socialist scene, and his starting position was that the church of 1919 had made the Sermon on the Mount into an inner disposition precisely so that no institution would ever have to act on it. The Sannerz house was the experiment: open door, shared purse, no salaries, and pacifism in a country that was about to make pacifism dangerous. What distinguishes the Bruderhof from most 1920s communal experiments is that it survived, and that it deliberately attached itself to a four-hundred-year-old tradition instead of remaining a project. Arnold read the Anabaptist sources, corresponded with the Hutterites from 1928, and in 1930 travelled to the colonies in the Dakotas, Manitoba and Alberta, where he was ordained and the Sannerz community was formally incorporated into the Hutterian Church.