Daily Verse
Wednesday, May 20, 2026
Community and Fellowship
🎧 Listen to Today's Devotional
Wednesday's Reflection
Romans 12:16 — Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits.
In 1920, a German theologian named Eberhard Arnold walked away from a promising academic career in Berlin and moved with his wife Emmy and their five young children to a rented room in the back of a village inn in rural Germany. The country was in chaos after World War One — economically shattered, politically unstable, spiritually exhausted. Arnold had watched the churches bless the war and then struggle to explain the devastation that followed. He was convinced the church had drifted far from the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount, and he wanted to try to live that Sermon as literally as possible, together with others who felt the same way.
What started with a handful of people in three small rooms grew slowly, stubbornly, against enormous odds. They worked together, prayed together, shared all their income, and welcomed anyone who came to their door — students, labourers, people with nowhere else to go. They called themselves the Bruderhof, the place of brothers. In the 1930s the Nazis targeted them for their pacifism and their refusal to give allegiance to Hitler. The community was expelled from Germany in 1937 and spent years in England and then Paraguay before eventually establishing communities in multiple countries. Arnold himself died in 1935 before the worst of the persecution came, but the community he had planted survived it all. Today the Bruderhof has nearly three thousand members living in twenty-three settlements on four continents, still sharing all their possessions, still welcoming the poor and the stranger, still trying to live by the Sermon on the Mount.
Paul's instruction to condescend to men of low estate — to bend down toward those with less status, not to be proud — is exactly what Arnold spent his life practicing. He left status behind. He chose the low place. And what grew from that choice is still alive a hundred years later.
Prayer: Lord, give us the courage to leave behind the things that separate us from one another — status, comfort, pride — and to build community the way You intended it, with no one left out. Amen.