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

Branch
Overview Belief 3How to Live 1Practice 1Stories & Scripture 1Community 1 You × The Bruderhof Discussion
Precept of The Bruderhof

The Members Meeting decides by unanimity, and one no is enough.

Nothing carries by majority. A member who cannot agree can hold a decision indefinitely, which makes dissent formally powerful and socially very expensive — and that gap is where most of the movement's internal history has happened.

Add to My Beliefs →
What it asksEverything — property, career, and the right to decide alone where you live
Who it bindsMembers, by a lifetime vow taken at twenty-one or older
Where it bitesAt the Members Meeting, where decisions require unanimity and one held objection stops the matter
Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

Unanimity is the formal rule and it is genuinely constraining, but the practical experience described by former members is that unanimity plus a strong leadership produces enormous pressure to withdraw an objection rather than a genuine veto. The Bruderhof's own literature acknowledges that the movement has gone through repeated crises in which the machinery of church discipline was used against dissenters. The pattern most often cited is exclusion: a member is put out of the common life for a period, sometimes with family separation, until they are restored. The movement defends this as ancient Anabaptist practice and has since limited it; former members describe it as the instrument that made the crises possible.

The same ground, other faiths

claims that share this one's ideas
The weekly discipling meeting. The International Churches of Christ · rite Go deeper →
Aberdeen, July 1970. The Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (the Exclusive Brethren) · story Read it in full →
Grace does the work; your effort is mostly getting out of the way. Hinduism · core tenet Go deeper →
The fourfold sangha. Buddhism · community Go deeper →
Micchami dukkadam. Jainism · rite Go deeper →
Argument, for the sake of heaven, is sacred. Judaism · core tenet Go deeper →

The conversation

argument stays attached to the claim it is about All discussion →

Sign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.

Where next

The Bruderhof's How to Live roomback up one layer Propose a change to this passageone button — it routes to the review pool

Numbers count Panfaith activity only — never real-world adherence.

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