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Radical Reformation History  /  Lecture 14: The Birth of the Hutterites (Part 2)  /  Discussion Questions
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Question 4
The chronicles record believers digging holes “like foxes,” being smoked out, threatened with gallows at their doors, and housing “250 children” with the sick and blind in one place—what picture of God’s care and the church’s responsibility for the vulnerable is assumed in these stories, and what would it require for our churches to live with that same kind of costly mutual obligation?
Another way to ask: In these stories, what do we learn about how God cares for suffering people and how the church should care for the weak? What would our churches have to change to carry that kind of costly responsibility for each other?

Direct Answer These stories assume God cares for deserted believers and that the church must practically carry the weak through organized, costly mutual care—feeding, sheltering, and protecting children, the sick, and the elderly even when the whole community is under threat. For modern churches, it would require shared burdens, material sacrifice, and deliberate systems of care sustained by “brotherly love.”

Support from Transcript:

  • Persecution forced extreme living: believers “flee into the woods and the mountains in the cold…dug holes in the earth to live in like foxes.”
  • Violence continued even then: “Some godless men built a fire at the entrance and tried to suffocate them,” and others threatened gallows: “You have till such and such time to be out or you’ll be hanging.”
  • The vulnerable were gathered in one place: a “little house…in Hungary…had 250 children living in one house, as well as sick and the old, lame and the blind.”
  • The church supplied concrete help: “The brothers in this area supplied them with food, sending them bread and keeping up with brotherly love.”
  • Their prayer assumes God’s special care for abandoned people: asking God “to care for those who trust in him but are deserted by everyone else.”
Discussion Follow-ups What ‘structures of brotherly love’ (food, housing, shared funds) would your church need if persecution or economic collapse hit? Who in your congregation would be most at risk?

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