Picture this: As the new millennium dawns, anabaptists will do a new thing in the city. They'll build a large communal neighborhood - or, rather, a confederation of independent alternative communities, housed in a series of contiguous apartment buildings and populated by thousands of non-resistant, simple-living sectarians.
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The project will be initiated by the Bruderhof communities and some Old Order Amish, partly for practical reasons: (1) the Amish and Bruderhof population explosions, making it necessary to continually branch out and establish new settlements; and (2) the shortage of farmland, making it difficult to maintain a rural way of life.
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More importantly, the initiative stems from a "quickening" among the plain people. They realize they've lost their ancestral vision for going into the marketplaces and street corners, inviting others to become co-workers in establishing Yahweh's Reign on Earth. They also realize geographical isolation no longer protects them against worldly influences as it did in times past. So they branch out to the Bronx, constructing their own city on a hill, where they can let their light shine before the world instead.
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These "city Amish" and "city Bruderhofers" will buy a large tract of land and buildings (four square blocks at once, to frustrate real-estate speculators and chain-store developers). They'll ship in a few hundred of their own people, then invite like-minded folks (Brethren, Hutterites, Kibbutzniks, Mennonites, Moravians, Quakers, Schwenckfelders, Waldensians, etc.) to join them. They'll start up dozens of manufacturing shops and cottage industries, with the goal of creating an eco-friendly and self-sustaining neighborhood economy. Local production for local consumption. And in the process they'll build what they say is a true first-century christian community: an urban one, like the communities of the early Jesus people and of the early anabaptists.
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It'll be dense, diverse, auto-free and without a steeplehouse in sight. For instead of preaching evangelical doctrine and conducting traditional mission work, these anabaptists take their cues from the subversive social ethic of the Sermon on the Mount. They'll also draw on the "hospitality house" model set by Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin and Ammon Hennacy of the early Catholic Worker movement on the Lower East Side. It'll be an Anabaptist Worker neighborhood, merging centuries-old communal experience with hospitality to the urban poor. It'll be a city-church community, separated from the world (not geographically of course), where residents try to live according to Jesus' first-shall-be-last/ last-shall-be-first philosophy.
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As a result, "Hutterville" becomes a haven for the city's bums, tramps, tormented souls, assorted riff-raff and other of "God's ambassadors." All are welcome, they say. And as Emmy Arnold put it in describing the Sannerz Community of 1920s Germany: "We try to concern ourselves with each one who comes." No coercion, no rejection. In this environment many "crazy" people off the streets become miraculously coherent in a short time.
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Instead of engaging in a lot of talk over what needs to be done about our cities, these anabaptists simply decide to do what needs to be done. Why? Because Jesus wants it that way, they say.
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