Overcoming Loneliness: The Bruderhof Community Experience

We’ve been hearing that community is declining and people are lonely. There are certainly people who are isolated and lack friendship, community, support, love. Since we already know this is a human problem and won’t argue with that premise, what can be done to seek out community, whether loneliness and isolation is a national trend or not? Over the years I have been blessed to enjoy a number of tight-knit, loving, joyful communities. I have also observed or had friends in or know about some other communities. I’m going to tell you a story about a community called Bruderhof.

Bruderhof, “place of brothers,” is a Christian intentional community, originating in Germany in the 1920s, where members share possessions and live together based on the teachings of Jesus, particularly the Sermon on the Mount. They are known for their communal lifestyle, shared work, and emphasis on loving God and neighbor. 

According to Bruderhof + Foundation for Intentional Community

About twenty years ago, I became aware of Bruderhof communities. I wrote about Bruderhof in one of my first blog posts, before the days of social media. I had linked an article by Dan Hallock, who still writes for a Bruderhof publication, Plough. Bruderhof is a German word that means something like brotherhood or fellowship. Bruderhof today is an intentional community where everyone takes a vow of living together with no individual wealth and a commitment to be moved anywhere in the world to live in Bruderhof communities. This is a Christian community and an example outside of the Catholic Church and outside of hippie communes where people can live in community while taking vows of service and disavow worldly wealth. I was fascinated and once read articles on a web site they produced in the early 2000s. It seems the online effort changed, went offline, and I lost touch with where I could find anything about Bruderhof, until 2023 when I received an email out of the blue from a man named Martin Johnson.

I don’t know if this will reach you but I want to tell you how much I was gripped by your book Lay Down Your Guns. We want to thank you for your detailed writing about Dr Madrid.  She has been an amazingly brave believer and a real example to us all.  I am not good about such things but I cannot access your website which may not be active now. We would love to know what you have done since 2013. Can you give me the website for your church so we can read a bit about it.  We hope all your family is well and thriving.

I responded, “I was very happy to receive your note, in which you told me how my book about Dr. Amanda Madrid inspired you. I am gratified to hear this because the research, travel, and writing were a labor of love that brought me joy as well.”

We correponded for a while until Martin invited me to Maple Ridge Bruderhof in Ulster Park, New York. Half a year later, having made arrangements with my brother Toby, and sister-in-law, Debbie, to drive from their home in Whitesboro, New York, to Albany then to Ulster Park, we drove in to the Bruderhof community, a view like the one in the photo on this page where Toby, Debbie, and I were being hosted on a tour of the Bruderhof with Martin Johnson and Christian Lorentz.

We were given a tour, fed a delicious meal along with more than 300 community members who invited us to speak, and we introduced ourselves then sang two Christian songs. I think one of “We are one in the spirit,” and many of the community sang along. Soon we were sitting and visiting with Martin Johnson, who had invited us. A photo of Martin and me is on this page.

Later we had tea and cookies with a community members in one of the production facilities on the Bruderhof campus. The company, owned by Bruderhof, is called Community Playthings, and supplies durable wooden educational toys and furniture to schools, libraries, and churches. We saw three aspects of the work, though there are many other moving parts. First, we saw a research and development group making 3D printed parts to improve their version of a baby crib that is used in day cares. Second, we saw Martin and other members of the community assembling wooden pieces for furniture and toys. Third, we visited with some folks who sell the products by phone and physical visits to places like New York City.

The following is a description from the Community Playthings web site:

In 1947, Macedonia, a small cooperative community in rural Georgia, was looking for a way to pay the bills. False starts involving broilers and persimmon pies left the young entrepreneurs ready to listen when visiting educators urged them to supply the nursery school movement with play equipment made from their 600 acres of woodland. A teacher from Caroline Pratt’s City and Country School in Manhattan introduced Pratt’s modular Unit Block design, and Community Playthings was born.

Meanwhile the Bruderhof community movement was coming out of the backwoods of Paraguay where they had homesteaded as World War II refugees. In 1954 they founded Woodcrest in Rifton, NY, the first Bruderhof in the United States. When Macedonia joined, they brought Community Playthings north with them. The Bruderhof has been making wooden play equipment for a living ever since.

The 1960s brought Head Start. The 1970s introduced daycare for infants and toddlers. The 21st Century presents new challenges. We have lost the original pioneers but we’re grateful that Tom Potts, our early General Manager, held to the mantra “Quality, quality, quality.” We are grateful that the business has grown alongside our communities. We are grateful to our customers–the new and the loyal–for demanding quality, and we look forward to continuing that way together.

Remember the name Tom Potts, because he’s going to come back into the picture.

I was moved by the community in many ways, and I had lots of questions about how they live in community and share all things in common. For one thing, we visited a school where many of their children attend high school. A beautiful campus was purchased from a former private religious school, and it hit me how much a group of people can do when they pool their wealth and decide in common how to spend their money.

I was also inspired by the Community Playthings business, a large global company that specializes in durable wooden toys in partnership with Bank Street College childhood education experts that first developed the “unit block.” For years I had wondered what if anything could be done with wood materials wasted in the home framing and cabinet making processes. My father also wanted to do something with scrap and hated, like I do, to see wood go into the landfill. In the winter, framing crews keep warm with the pieces under 18 inches long burned in a barrel, reminiscent of the barrel around which singers in the first Rocky sang the line, “there are three kinds of love that you ought to know.”

Over the course of two years, I have discussed with experts like Tom Potts, who spent years at Community Playthings, who are very open with their processes and designs and expertise and how to scale down for smaller production processes and target markets for unique handmade toys vs. their production precision maple pieces for schools, libraries and educators using Montessori methods. I do not want to compete with mass produced toys and large toy companies but will learn from them and compete with other small handmade toy enterprises. I do believe, however, that I could have a unique chunk of selling propositions that include the following: repurposed wood, handmade by neighbors in an under-resourced community, variations and character in toys, and benefit to children and parents alike in simplicity, educational value, and safety of the toys. We are selling to customers who say, “No beeps, bonks, or batteries please!”

I have been working on a business plan for a toy company, inspired by the people of Community Playthings and this long-standing admiration of Bruderhof, Community Playthings, and more recently Martin Johnson and Tom Potts.

Here is the bird’s eye view of the business plan, and I’d love to get your input by commenting or emailing me.

Mission

The mission of North Wood Toys is crafting simply fun toys families will want to keep and pass on to the next generation.

Values

The shop will be known for love of the Northside and locally staffed with people who share values of serving the community, quality, trust, and living the golden rule.

Vision

Wood toys are a way for kids to play creatively because they are not overly detailed. Studies show children imagine more with less detailed, durable, safe toys for learning and exploration. We envision kids and their siblings and friends happily playing with wooden toys and parents being happy they are safe, made of repurposed materials, and made uniquely and skillfully by people in a neighborhood where the shop is adding needed jobs and opportunities.

3-5 Year Breakthrough Objectives

1. Re-use wood waste in the homebuilding and cabinet making industry.
   
2. Teach next generations old fashioned woodworking skills that will also serve
   in re-building Northside community housing.
   
3. Develop a line of wood toys that kids love to play with and parents feel good
   about in multiple ways, including safety, environmentally friendly, durable yet affordable, and unique.

Finally, here’s another bird’s eye view of the Maple Ridge Bruderhof where visited. Please pray for more loving communities all over the world like this. We don’t all have to do community in the same way but the way of Jesus demands that we not neglect to love in radical ways where we are.