A Bruderhof is a village rather than a congregation: houses, a dining hall, a school, workshops, a laundry and a communal kitchen on one site, with anywhere from thirty to three hundred people. Meals are the load-bearing ritual and the movement takes visitors seriously — guests eat at the same table from the first meal, and a substantial number of the Bruderhof's members arrived that way. Singing is a genuine specialism: the movement inherited a large German folk and hymn repertoire from the youth movement and sings it in four parts without instruments. The gatherings after supper carry the business of the community as well as its devotion, and letters circulated between communities are read aloud in all of them, which is how a scattered movement keeps one mind.