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Fellowship for Intentional Community: Our mission is to support and promote the development of intentional communities and the evolution of cooperative culture.

Brotherhood of Christ Church - Essene Community

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Mission: Daily living your Love for God

From www.ic.org/directory/brotherhood-of-christ-community/:


We are a present day Essene Community. We live a primitive, simple life based on our deeply held convictions of keeping the First Commandment and rejecting worldliness. Each person strives to give 100% of their life to God, not counting the cost, but attempting to make each thought, feeling, and all one's energy given to loving the Lord. We call ourselves "Brotherhood of Christ" because we view Him as our Brother, not because we are patriarchal - we're not.

We are a deeply religious community. We allow no violence, swearing, drugs, smoking or alcohol use, nor any sexual activity outside the context of marriage. Our religion is soundly Christian, although no one would recognize it as modern, western Christianity because it comes from an ancient background. We believe in the spiritual empowerment that Jesus taught in John 14:12 where He said, "Verily, verily I say unto you, he that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do."

No one person leads, but we have a community Council that makes decisions dealing with long term community issues. There are several other leadership bodies, all of which make decisions by "common consent" which is conditional unanimity. The mothers of children under 14 make decisions about family needs, medical, special diets, clothing, and other special needs. The fathers of children under 14 manage all the farming and land usage. The grandparents or "older elders" decide on matters dealing with equality, parenting needs, education, wisdom and advice. All men of religious service decide about worship matters. There is a Storehouse Board made up of members of each of the other groups who decide financial expenditures each month. Only two people drive or spend money for all the full members in Community. We keep a version of the Community Rule found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. We encourage interested persons to listen to our class series Christ View: A Perspective for Christian Community available at the "business, project" link in the upper right corner of this page. This series gives a good taste of our religious viewpoint. Hope you enjoy it!

We are a horse and buggy community. We use draft horses to farm nearly 1200 acres. We raise almost all our own food, although we still buy salt, sugar (in small quantities), cooking oil, and yeast. We sew much of our own clothing. We use horses to power our machine shops and all our equipment, including the laundry houses.

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Physical Address
south central, Iowa
United States