Two Years of a Hutterite Life Are Spent Standing in One Room

The man who preaches on this colony has never written a sermon in his life. Neither did the man before him. Neither will the man after him. He does not compose and he does not prepare. He opens a book and reads out something somebody else wrote down, and then he closes it. There are about a hundred of them. They were written in the fifteen hundreds and the sixteen hundreds, by men who were being hunted, and they are still what is read. This evening, before supper, like every evening. I sat down with a feed invoice last week and worked out how much of a life that adds up to. I checked it three times because I did not believe it. I am Andreas Wurz. I keep the books on a colony of a hundred and fifty people in southern Alberta. There is also a book on a shelf in my house that I copied out by hand as a boy, between about eight and fifteen, because you cannot finish our German school without producing one. I will be sung out of it when I die. That part is at 5:18. SOURCES That the evening service, the Gebet, is held daily before the evening meal and runs about half an hour, opening with a song and followed by sermon and a brief prayer; that the Sunday and holy-day service, the Lehr, is held in the forenoon and typically lasts about 75 minutes, with a song, the Vorred, a prayer, the teaching with scripture reading and exposition, and a closing song; that Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, Ascension and the Annunciation carry extended services; and that most Hutterite ministers still line the words of the song for the congregation, a practice becoming less common especially among the Schmiedeleut — Hutterites.org, Church Services. https://hutterites.org/our-beliefs/church-services/ That roughly one hundred Lehren and the shorter Vorreden survive and "are still being read today in Hutterite worship in High German"; that Hutterites "read the old sermons of their forebears"; and that each student must present a complete handwritten hymnal to complete the German school — "Hutterites: An Historical Overview," Montana State University. https://mtprof.msun.edu/Spr1993/TBP.html That sermons are handwritten in the old German script and rest on texts around four hundred years old based on the Froschauer Bible; and the three-language arrangement — Hutterisch spoken daily as a Carinthian German dialect, High German used in church, English taught through eight years of school — Linda Maendel, Hutterites.org. https://hutterites.org/news/hutterisch-mother-tongue-hutterites/ A NOTE ON HONESTY The arithmetic at 11:15 is mine, not anybody's published figure. The inputs are the ones above — half an hour every evening, an hour and a quarter every Sunday, from fifteen years old to eighty. I have shown my working in the video so you can disagree with it. If you get a different number I would like to see it. I do not name a particular hymn or its author at 5:54. I know the category is right. I would get a specific name and date wrong from memory, and somebody would correct me, and they would be correct. What happens when a man does not attend, at 10:12, is what I have observed on this colony in forty-six years. It is not a rule I can point you to, because there is no rule written down about it. Next: what it costs to split a colony in two, and what happens on the night before the move.