Practice of Community in the Early Anabaptist Movement — Dean Taylor — Ep. 095

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. We're here in Boston, Massachusetts, with Dean Taylor. You're the president of Sattler College, sitting here in your office, 17 floors up above the city. Yeah. And something I know you're passionate about, and I've heard you speak about before, is the early Anabaptist understanding of community. And can you just kind of—I know it's a big question, but can you give us a synopsis of what the early Anabaptist writers said about that topic? You know, this is a really, really important question. It's a great question. Community is intrinsically connected to being an Anabaptist. Hmm. Okay. And it is actually very different than an evangelical understanding of the church.

And let me give you an example. G.K. Chesterton has an interesting take on this lamppost. And I read that once, and it really made me think of this analogy he gives of the lamppost. And it made me think of the views of the church. So I'm going to use Chesterton's idea, but take it to Burger King. All right. So let me start this with an idea of Burger King. All right. So let's say you're in Burger King. You've got yourself your $7 burger, whatever they charge you for on the term pike, and you're there eating, and you're there with your family. And you're looking around, and you know, and there's this lady here, and she's on the way to Pittsburgh the other way to see her grandmother.

And there's this guy over here, and he's a recovering drug addict on his way to Philadelphia for this. And there's other persons there and people there. And you're all there in the Burger King. And you know what kind of feels like church? You know, you're there, you're having a meal, you know, you're there. But here's the key. The gathering is an accident. Hmm. There's no reasonable—there's no way we would reason that tomorrow even the same gathering would be there, that next week the same gathering would be there, that the whole thing is an accident. It's a gathering. It's a nice gathering, but it's an accidental gathering.

The view of the church with the Anabaptists, and I believe the early Christians, was, let's say we're there now and this tour bus comes in. And this tour bus comes in, and they all got these, you know, goofy T-shirts on. You know, they're there, and they're coming through, and they are going somewhere. And they're going somewhere together. They set together, and they're all talking and ruckusing and all this, you know, and they get this and they go. And you're sitting there, and you see them come, and you see them go. But they're on purpose. They're decidedly together, and they're doing something decidedly together.

That's the Anabaptist view of the church. What has happened, and particularly in America in the 21st century now, is this: it's a beautiful thing. You have some great sermons. You have great worship services and everything. And there's lots of people there, but the gathering is an accident. And so the idea of community, the idea of an on-purpose gathered people of God that you get intimate with, you share life with, you share dreams, and you share successes and failures, is a very important and missing element of the church that I think in the 21st century. The Anabaptist view of the church imbibes that in community from the very beginning. When you look at some of the early quotes and the way they talk about it, and you have to put yourself in their context.

So even today, you know, in the parish system where, you know, a geographic area would have been that we would have today in like Catholic churches or something like that would be the way that all the Protestant and Catholic churches were. So a general geographic area where people just went to church. When the Anabaptists started, they were on purpose. So you joined the church community because of your faith, as a statement of faith. And joining together was on purpose. And this very act is one of the most significant acts of early Anabaptism. Now, this was expressed in different ways. Of course, the Hutterites took it the furthest, but all parts of the Anabaptists have that degree, have some degree of community.

There's a quote here in Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision, and Franklin Littell brings up some interesting ideas on the idea of early Anabaptism and community. And he says this: that the core of the 16th-century Anabaptists is found in their view of the church. R.J. Smithson, author of one of the few reasonably adequate books on the movement, says this, quote, "The real issue between the Anabaptists and the other reformers was on the question of the type of church which should take the place of the old church." He goes on to quote the great—he goes on to quote the great church historian Philip Schaff to the effect that, quote, "The reformers aimed to reform the old church by the Bible.

The radical, the radical reformers attempted to build a new church from the Bible. And so the idea was to allow the Bible just to have its and create a church from this. The reformers' idea was to correct this and correct that. The radical reformers, which is why they have the name, wanted to take that further on." The idea of community, he goes on, is built into that in every way. He says this on page 127.

He says, "The church as a community of discipleship is the needed word and witness today. This can be seen in the encounter with alternative ideologies. Some time ago, as national socialism and communism were in full flood, the general secretary of the World Council of Churches expressed the problem in these words, quote, 'The main task of the Christian community and the greatest service which it can render to the world is to be the Christian community.'" And then Littell says, "For the real tragedy of our time is that we have, on the one hand, an incoherent mass of individual Christians, and on the other hand, powerful impulses towards new forms of community, but no Christian community. Christians today do not form a true community.

And the communities which shape the new world are not Christian," meaning like the communist thing that was happening. Actually, that's quoting the World Council of Churches. "The present-day task of the Christian community is, therefore, not to enter more deeply into the world, but to rediscover itself. It must learn to understand again what Christian community means before it can go out and change the world around it." And so he brings out this idea that, you know, how each of the Anabaptists, when just the fact that you were coming against the world and forming together these societies by faith and discipleship, it changed.

It is a community. Again, this impulse that seemed to be in them about, you know, you're being persecuted, you're coming together, that you obviously saw them, you know, coming together like that. Interesting, there's some records. So like in the very first church in Zylicon, which came from—so you have Zurich, and if you've ever been there, you know, right up the hill is Zylicon, where the first church was being planted.

There's records there of how they were being accused of knocking the locks off the door, holding all things in common, and having this common pot. Now, Felix Muntz, when he was in court, denied that they actually had a complete common purse. But there's several different writings that mention a—he denied a community of goods, a complete community of goods. But they did all have a common pot where they would put different things in for help for the need, for the needy. And so there's interesting also some work done by a man named Opakel, and he was doing a lot of the work on the Hutterites. And he talks about this church order, which was, it seems to predate even the Schleinheim Confession.

And in the church order, and in the things that the cover letters that come with the Schleinheim Confession, again, there's this talk of sharing and this talk of community sharing that they have. As this was expressed, particularly in the South German and Austrian area, a lot of these people had seemed to be experiencing more of this type of community. Now, it's perhaps some people argue that they had a little more freedom, you know, with the persecution. There was more of the Lutheran area there. And one of the leaders there, who was the most successful in converting people back to Lutheranism, was sort of mild, and Philip of Hesse. And so the communities there you see, you know, practice this way.

With the Hutterites, you know, it came off to a rough start. So it's interesting when you have the whole Anabaptist starting, you know, like 1525, you know, and then 1527, Schleinheim, the first martyrdom at 1527. Now, to make it then to and up to from 1525 with the very first three baptisms, all the way to Moravia, the Moravia was opening up and all the Anabaptists moved to Moravia. In that short amount of time, 1525, 1527, and a little bit after 1527, 12,500 people had been converted and were able to and be willing to sell everything they had and gone to Moravia because hoped to have freedom of religion in Moravia. It was so big in Moravia that the Liechtenstein, the emperor, the king there, prince there, himself converted to Anabaptism and was rebaptized.

The publishing house with Froschhauer and Hubmeier, they all made it there. And the difficulty is that this was, it was so popular that it was starting to maybe be an Anabaptist state church. So a lot of these convictions that Schleinheim had just established were now being tested. And so, but there's something else that added to the mix.

At the same time, Suleiman the Magnificent had a jihad against Europe and was actually coming up, had gone through Hungary, take Hungary, and now coming up towards Moravia. And so Charles V was making this order. Okay, everybody on these border countries has got to get and carry a sword so that you can defend ourselves against a Muslim attack.

So you talk about early Anabaptists. So out of all those, Hubmeier started publishing and trying to defend the sword and trying to change the view from Schleinheim. 200 of them said, "No, we're not compromising. We're not going to do this. We're not going to compromise. We're not doing this." And so they said, "Well, you got to leave. I'm sorry. You're going to have to go." So they upped and left and started going out. And these 200 were what became the Hutterites. And so they didn't know what to do. They threw their coats on the ground and said, "What do you got? I don't know. What do you got?" And basically threw everything in there. And this was the start of it.

There were a few movements also. There was another one that was around that area that also had a community of goods, but with a different spin to it. And then some of the early evangelism that they had there brought in people like Jacob Huter and Peter Ritterman. And then they came to it and it more developed into what they had for a community of goods. Your question was, was it different? So yeah, they would definitely have taken it further than the rest of them. Matter of fact, that group that I just mentioned, I have a quote here, Gabriel Asherham. So they would have been a non-Hutterite group, but another early Anabaptist group in the Austrian area and this type of thing, but a different spin on community.

And you'll hear what he says. This is him speaking. He says, "The apostles did not preach anything about community of goods, nor order anyone to keep it in the first church of Jerusalem. But when they heard the good news of Christ and the kingdom of God, the people believed and came to take part of the visible kingdom of the Holy Ghost. He filled them with joy and fixed their heart upon a heavenly blessing so they counted earthly possessions as nothing. Willingly, on their own and without being told, motivated only by the joy in their heart, they went and sold their property, bringing the money from it to lay at the apostles' feet. Then they distributed to everyone according to the need.

The first believers began community of goods without being told. Everyone given out of his own free will. Community of goods, as a result, was an open witness of the kingdom of God that has already come to them. It was not something commanded by men for the sake of the kingdom of God. It was something that free flowed." So they actually were debating with the early Hutterites. They eventually came into the Hutterites and came.

There's also other ones. You were mentioning some other ones had some different views, like in the South German. And they were very strong that we cannot just live worldly lives and that we have to have sharing. And this was very much part of all of them. And I think still is very part of all the Anabaptists. And here's the difference of it's a debate that kind of comes up now a little bit when people start to think about community. Usually you end up with two different thoughts on it. You either think, "Oh, it's unbiblical." I mean, look, you read later in the epistles and you see, well, clearly, I mean, there's instructions on how a home should not burden the church and yet take care of your widow.

And there's these other ones. And then the people who read who are just, it has to be community, read the Acts and say, "Oh, no, no. Look at Acts 2 and 4." And then people make debates. It's very clear that there is no command to live in community.

And I would say the Hutterites would come close, but even the early Hutterites would have, well, maybe they would have come pretty close to saying that. But would it come, most of them would have not said that it was something that was a command. And certainly today you don't find a Hutterite, usually, I've not found one, who would say that it was a mandatory way that you had to live.

However, what we end up losing is that what's behind the radical teachings of taking care of the church and this, you know, found in the later epistles and in the community of goods in Acts is behind it, like I think Abraham, what was his last name? Yeah, Asherham brought out, behind it were the radical teachings of the kingdom of God. And so Acts 2 and 4 are not a command.

They're a testimony of how to apply the radical teachings of Jesus. The later epistles, although they didn't have community of goods, and I think that's very obvious, they did not. But yet behind it all was still the radical teachings of Jesus Christ and to live these radical economics. And so what I hate is to hear the debate back and forth. The guys who are all everything has to be community of goods have usually forgot why they should be living community of goods.

And then the ones that say, "Oh, no, community of goods is unbiblical," it just, it doesn't even make sense. I mean, the Acts 2 and 4, it's sort of like celibacy. To make an argument that everybody would have to be celibate would be a hard sell for the New Testament, okay, or the whole Bible. But to say that it was unbiblical would also seem to be inappropriate. It's kind of like that. This is a radical way to apply some teachings. And it's not for everyone, but it's some precious calling to the whole thing.

Yeah. So where I think I was going earlier, the thing with those who just claim you have to live in community, the thing that you notice in the early Hutterite writings, and I could bring out that the reason they lived in community and the reason they were missionaries and the reason they did these things, everything, they kept saying because of the commands of Christ. And so what I would encourage communitarians today is to let the essence of why you're there, let the reasons of why you're living in community be motivated by radical kingdom living.

And then to the others, I would say, if you don't feel called to live in community, which most of us don't, then still we still can't get away from the radical teachings and commands of Jesus Christ to live radically on this earth with our economics. It's not a license to live how we want. And so that's what you'll see in the early Anabaptist. Whether you're Hutterite or non-Hutterite, they were very concerned about materialism, very concerned about sharing and helping the poor. Mendel Simons makes an argument how the state churches don't care for, you still have people begging. He said, "This is absolutely ridiculous. And we would never allow one of our people to beg." He said, "We don't have a community of goods in Holland, but we do have a place where we would bring those resources."

Those who live in community of goods need to realize they're doing that because they're trying, they should be trying to apply Jesus's radical teaching on his sharing, his using the community for an outlet for radical mission discipleship, this expression of the Trinity, the community of the Trinity expressed in John. These should be the things motivating a communitarian. On the other hand, those who say, "Well, I thought it all called to live in community," I think there's absolutely that the majority of the support in the New Testament, those people were not living in community. But Paul was still saying, "Let those who are," how's he worded it? "Let those who are wealthy be ready to distribute."

That this idea of radical sharing was still in every, whether it's community or non-community, the teachings of Christ are what's behind and underneath every one of them. So however we express that, we should be thinking, "How can I put to practice the teachings of Jesus Christ?" And whatever the best way that you can do that, I think is should answer where you come on that. There was kind of a division, you know, in how people got along. Some of the bigger things that come out is Pilgrim Arpex.

He was there in Switzerland. And so he had a lot of connections with the Swiss Brethren and also with the Hutterites. And, you know, you get all those guys were a little bit too sure of themselves when it came to we're the only one. I mean, you get it certainly from Mendel Simons. You get it from Pilgrim Arpex. You get it from the Hutterites. And you get it from the Swiss Brethren. And so each of them thought that their way was, you know, the best way.

So yeah, but you can see a challenging of these thoughts back and forth as some of them interact like that. Reading the early Christian writings totally changed my life. I thought I was a strong, zealous Christian up until the time I read their witness. And then I realized, boy, if I'd lived in the church back in those days, I would be considered a backslid and really washed out Christian. With the early Christian writings, we can go back and we can see what did Christians believe when there was still just one church where everywhere on earth, all Christians believed the same thing and they could trace it back to the days of the apostles. Through these courses, our listeners are going to be learning a lot about the New Testament.

They're going to learn a lot about church history and what the early Christians practiced back then. But the whole point is to help them build an obedient, love, faith relationship with Jesus Christ for that to be strengthened so that they can become vital citizens of God's kingdom.

So the differing choices in lifestyle that these groups that were doing the community of goods, you know, all living together, whatever, what was the outcome when compared to the rest of the Anabaptists? And then what would have they learned along the way? What are some of the challenges? And big question there. It's a great question.

When it comes to organization, nobody touched the Hutterites. I mean, and so when we look at like the first mission focus and all the zealous missionaries of the early Anabaptists, it was the Hutterites. And so this original idea of a missional, a missionary-minded community was very effective. And during a time of a lot of persecution, you can look at a map of the different communities that the Moravian Hutterites had planted. It was incredible. And so, you know, in the years that they had to survive famine and the plague and the 30-year war and back and forth and all those things, a couple more, another jihad in the 1600s came and took lots of them back to different places.

And to survive through all that and keep a missionary focus was incredible. I've written a little pamphlet called The Hutterite Mission Machine, which goes into details of how they did that. The Swiss Brethren were also very effective. And the one thing I appreciate about the Swiss, both the Swiss, all the Hutterites, the Swiss Brethren and the Marpeck and some of the South Germans and such had a brotherhood and a community spirit that was very prone to not splintering. As a matter of fact, there were no divisions, no major divisions at all in the Swiss Brethren or the Hutterites until the Dutch way was brought to them through Jacob Amen. And during all those splits that were happening with Jacob Amen, there's lots of things you could be said about that and the other thing.

But there was something about the Swiss thinking that seemed to be more, I don't know, community-minded in general. The Dutch, unfortunately, even at the end of Mendel's life, seemed to be prone to fracture. It seemed to be a little bit more cerebral, a little more theological when you read Mendel Simon's writings versus Peter Ritterman's of the Hutterites writings. I mean, it's like night and day, just the way the spirit is there. As far as literature, all of our early, you know, or a lot of our early literature that's been kept and maintained, the Hutterites, of course, with that organization, it gave them that. So once they got beat down and finally, you know, through years and years of compromise and beat down and finally they kind of restarted, didn't quite have the same mission drive that the original people did.

And they had a restart. Now that reboot came with many of the things of living in community and many of the things they had in that sense, but without the mission drive. Then it became a difficulty of just keep polishing within the community. And this becomes dangerous for any of us. During that time, the Swiss Brethren, I think, were more able to be more versatile and to go different places and to move and to come into Bern and come out of Bern and to establish in the mountains and this. And that gave them a great advantage under some of those severe persecutions. And so you get a lot of that. And just the whole coming to America in the 1700s, you know, we can thank to the Amish and the Swiss Brethren.

The Amish came, of course, a little later in the late 1600s and the 1700s and as a renewal group to the Swiss, to the Swiss Brethren. And again, you had that. So, you know, when you get later, each of their worst expressions, when you get into the Hutterites, eventually end up in Russia and had now sort of lost their vision and were still living in community, it gets really bad.

It gets really bad. And that's when you're sometimes wondering, would it be better for just us not to exist or to exist in this way? And they were very honest. And they tell, like some of them just goes for pages on, you know, something that happened. Like for instance, they get to, when they were trying to make a decision, should we go west towards the Protestants and Catholics who are killing us or east to the Muslims, they chose the Muslims. So when they get to Transylvania, though, there's the Sultan there had made a law, you can't chop down crosses and religious items or you're going to get your hand chopped off. You know, he did that because he didn't want a bunch of raids on all the churches and everything.

Well, some Hutterite boys were out there one day and the chronicler write, and not for religious reasons, decided just to chop down a few of these crosses. And the Sultan found out and it goes on for and on here about how they had to beg for him not to get his hand chopped off and they had to threaten to pay money. And anyway, it's one of the most honest histories I've ever read. And it just gives some of the facts that are there. The fact that they could even say that in honesty, I think, is awesome. Okay, this is the Chronicle of the Hutterite Brethren, volume two, page 666. All right. There was a time where they were no longer living in community and they were wanting to restart it.

They tried it and it failed. There were two versions. One that did pass where they said they didn't go to man, but just trusted in God. And there's a lot of just relying only on God and not the old ways and that kind of a thing. Then there was one that said they realized that they actually say if you're not living in community, you're not a Christian. And we're very strong in that way. And that one failed. And that one closed. And at the end, it said, quite a few members of the new community were well aware how awkward the situation was.

But they nonetheless submitted without protest. Others saw the drastic changes to their property as only a means and an outward alteration with the purpose of restoring the group to what they regarded as true Christianity. These now turned their attention particularly to the children's education. But in spite of all kinds of suggestions and consultations, the group could not come to a united decision about anything vital. The women in particular showed little inclination for communal life. To overcome their resistance, a resort to coercive measures had to be made at every step. And as a result, the arrangements were devoid of all suitability and practicability. Obviously, and here's a very honest statement, the reformed methods of property holding did not of itself bring the hopeful results of richer blessings to the members' souls.

Many of the most sincere men failed to find the expected moral compensation either for their personal rights they had given up or for the material advantages they had sacrificed in order to start the community. Little by little, they were overcome by the conviction that nothing was achieved by simply holding all material goods in common and that true community could not be established for the time being since the members are not permeated by the Holy Spirit.

It's amazing. The other congregation, though, it says here, they fell on their knees and most seriously calling to God that they should, that God, calling to God that he should show them with power from on high how to establish this work of the Holy Spirit through them and that this might happen in honor and praise and glory of his holy name. They did not counsel with flesh and blood or old documents any longer, but only with God Almighty. And this group then went immediately, it succeeded, it went into missions, it began to share. And it's actually that's the group that survived and came to America later on. Oh, wow. But in every time in their history and today, when they're mission-focused, when it's driving for kingdom purposes, it's powerful.

But when it's not, it's not. And then it falls apart. And yeah, it's a strong tool. It's either a strong tool for positive things or it's a strong tool for not. The Swiss Brethren, still though, you cannot separate Anabaptists with the idea of a community. And even today, if you hear people from Mennonite churches will talk, they'll say, yeah, our community. And they'll use this term community almost unwittingly, that it's part of us because we're accountable to one another. We submit to one another. We share. You know, just the idea of having your hospital bills and sharing things like that with each other in a church from my background was unthinkable.

And for all the Anabaptist churches, whether they're Hutterite or Amish or Mennonite or whatever, it's just, well, it's just expected. You wouldn't think of any other way. These kinds of things are really deep within the Anabaptist idea of the church and it needs to be. It's something we should be sure never to lose. Wow, that's, yeah, that's really interesting. And the contrast you're showing there between those two different communities there is, yeah, I didn't know that. That's fascinating. Yeah, I preached to so many ones to the tale of two communities. And because this was a restart, they had stopped having community of goods in Russia for a while. They said, we're going to start it again.

And there were two trials, one very legalistically done and one in the spirit of God. And then as soon as they got to America, the one that came to America said, now we've got to go back and evangelize and bring people to the light. And then unfortunately, after a couple of them were killed in World War I, they went up to Canada and sort of took more of a more protective isolation type of way, which has not been healthy. I wrote the Anabaptist or the Hutterite mission machine in a prayer to remember those beginnings. It's right there in their statement of faith about the missions and about how you should have an apostle that's leading missions and these different things.

And I'd love to see it done again. See it happen again. Wow. That's the last question I had. Is there anything else you'd like to share? I encourage us as we go in the 21st century, you know, and as the word is atomized, where we just keep getting knocked down to our smallest amount and there's nothing that binds us together.

This question of community, and again, not necessarily in a Hutterite community, not necessarily not in a Hutterite community, but just the idea of having real lives together here in Boston with Followers of the Way. We've been practicing like living as close together, sharing things and that type of a thing. The church needs purposeful concepts of living lives together in some way. And as the world is getting worse and worse, we need to start thinking of creative ways to do this. And so I think it's something that we don't need to lose and it's something we can gain, not with any feeling that you have to do it this way or have to. There's no commandment, there's any way you have to do it, but allow those commands of Jesus to form genuine and true community in our lives.

Thanks for taking the time to share. And there is a ton of research that went into that. So thank you for doing that and sharing it with us. I really appreciate it. Amen. Thank you, brother.