The Hutterites

Denomination·Founded 1528 CE·est. 58,392 in 544 colonies in North America in 2024, from a Hutterite-published directory analysed by the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies and published in the Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities. Nearly three in four live in Canada: 20,999 in Alberta, 12,655 in Manitoba, 7,955 in South Dakota, 7,873 in Saskatchewan, 5,706 in Montana. The entire population descends from a few hundred survivors who reached South Dakota in the 1870s.

Judaism → Christianity → Catholicism → Protestantism → Anabaptism → The Hutterites

Hutterites.orgYoung Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College

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Rite of The Hutterites

Gebet — half an hour every evening, in words written in the 1500s.

The minister does not write sermons. He reads one of the Lehren, transcribed from the first Hutterite preachers and copied by hand for four centuries, in an early modern German the congregation understands as church language and would not speak at home.

⏱ Daily — half an hour in the church before the evening meal◌ Everyone on the colony above school age
Add to My Beliefs →
What happensGebet, the evening prayer service: a hymn sung slowly in unison, a reading, a sixteenth-century sermon read aloud by the minister, then the whole colony walks to the dining hall
What it needsThe Lehren — sermons written by the first generations and read verbatim, not composed
What it aims atThat the day ends in the same room, in the same words, as it did in Moravia
Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this rite is held

The Lehren are the reason Hutterite worship sounds like nothing else in North America. Ministers do not compose sermons; they read from a manuscript corpus transcribed from the sixteenth and seventeenth-century preachers, which means a colony in Alberta in 2026 hears the same exposition of a text that a colony in Moravia heard in 1590. Hymns come largely from the Lieder der Hutterischen Brüder, many written by prisoners, and are sung slowly, in unison, unaccompanied. The daily half-hour service before supper is followed immediately by the meal, so the two are one motion: the whole colony prays together and then eats together, men on one side of the dining hall and women on the other, children in a separate room. Sunday adds a longer morning service.

The same ground, other faiths

rites that share this one's ideas
A Agni — the fire that carries. Vedic Religion · figure Meet them →
Sandhyavandana — the joints of the day. Hinduism Go deeper →
Chanting. Buddhism Go deeper →
Shabbat — the day of rest. Judaism Go deeper →
The hours. Christianity Go deeper →
Salat — the five daily prayers. Islam Go deeper →

The conversation

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

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Where next

The Hutterites's Practice roomback up one layer Propose a change to this riteone button — it routes to the review pool

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

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