The goal of this blog is to open a small window into the Hutterite community, allowing the viewer to see a segment of the Hutterites in operation in order that the viewer can understand the larger picture of the Hutterite Communities.
The Hutterian Brethren living on the Great Plains of western North America are much studied but little understood. They come from a history of 400 years of unrelenting persecution, and almost extinction. Their history of steadfastness and perseverance is unique in the annals of Christian history. And while this glorious history lies behind them, the contributions they might yet make to the way humanity understands itself might well still lie ahead of them.
The Hutterites are much studied by sociologists and ethnographers. Their way of life is a valid subject of study, but the underlying philosophy their way of life should be the topic of theological and economic study, and the study of human motivation.
Since coming to North America, colonies have typically branched out when they have reached 130 to 140 souls, children included. This is done by buying new land, erecting the buildings and infrastructure and buying the machinery and equipment needed to ensure the success of the new colony. Then, shortly before the actual branching out occurs, the names of the colony members, with existing and potential new leaders for all aspects of new colony life, are drawn by lot to select who will go to the new colony and who will stay behind. This method of cell division ensures that the skills and abilities of potential leaders are utilized and the creativity and initiative within the colonies used to build up their communal life rather than dissipated in personal rivalries competing for leadership.
A visit to a colony is a study in contrasts. Socially, there is much that harkens back to the Reformation. Clothing styles, some of the teaching methods, worship, and the division of labor between the sexes would not be strange to middle Europeans of the 16th century. Production equipment, whether this be in the kitchen, the workshop, the factories or the fields, demonstrates an expertise that 21st century industrial designers and production managers would admire. Vocational training, learned by working with skilled elder-mentors, is still the practice today, and young people are trained in the wide spectrum of skills needed to manage a colony. Then they are chosen for specific duties, based on the aptitudes they demonstrate in various training settings. A visit to a colony demonstrates all the skills needed to manage a community-skills as diverse as animal husbandry, cooking, teaching, gardening and food preservation, welding, carpentry, accounting, sewing, plumbing, mechanics and operating all kinds of equipment-from an air seeder guided by a global positioning system to managing meat packing operations supervised by government food inspectors.
The Hutterites have demonstrated an economics that provides a cradle to grave food, shelter, clothing, health care, education, social services, employment, cultural development model for the entire community. It is a system that confounds those economists committed to the belief that money and economics are the most powerful of human motivations, for no one on the colony draws a salary or a wage. With few exceptions, members of the colonies are highly productive, creative, innovative people who defy most contemporary economic theory. It is my belief that in the colonies there exists an alternative to the economics of scarcity and divisiveness that characterizes the economics of capitalism that has become ascendant since the fall of communism. Humanity desperately needs alternatives to this economic model that is inexorably driving the human experiment towards destruction. I believe that there is in the Hutterite model an alternative that the rest of humanity needs to study if we humans are going to live together in this world without destroying ourselves.
