History & overview · every faith gets one
Nobody owns anything. That is not a policy — it is the article of faith.
The Anabaptist branch that has held complete community of goods without interruption since 1528, longer than any other communal movement on earth. They live on colonies of roughly a hundred people, eat in a common dining hall, farm at industrial scale, wear made-at-home clothing, speak an Austrian dialect at home and read Luther's German in church, and divide the colony in two when it grows past about 150. There are 544 colonies in North America and no Hutterites anywhere else.
The founding
In 1528 a group of Anabaptist refugees expelled from Nikolsburg stopped on a deserted road, spread a cloak on the ground, and put everything they owned on it — the Chronicle records this as the beginning of community of goods. Jakob Hutter, a hatmaker from the Puster valley in Tyrol, took over the fractious Moravian communities in 1533 and imposed the order that made them survivable. He was arrested at Klausen, tortured at Innsbruck and burned alive there on 25 February 1536, and the people are named after him.
Its founding is bound to Jakob Hutter — 1528 CE.
What it holds
Reality. One shared table, held in trust; private property is understood as the root of the fall, not merely a temptation.
The divine. The Trinity, taught from the Luther Bible and the sixteenth-century Lehren — sermons written down by the first generation and read aloud unchanged ever since..
Death and after. Resurrection and judgment; Gelassenheit now is the preparation for it.