Page 14 - C.A.L.L. #46 - Summer 2020

Bruderhof, UK

Peter Mommsen
March 25th

It’s astounding just how much has changed in the four weeks
since we sent the latest issue of Plough to press. Way back
then, the COVID-19 virus was a distant threat centered on

Wuhan, China. Now it has brought a shocking halt to normal
life around the globe, taking thousands of lives, threatening
millions more, and plunging the economy into turmoil. Here in
upstate New York, I’m working from home, where my family has self-isolated to protect the
elderly and vulnerable in our multigenerational household.

Much has changed in daily life; yet more fundamentally, questions of faith and politics have
only become more pressing in light of the pandemic. Self-sacrifice for the common good is no
longer merely a slogan in political campaigns: thousands of doctors and nurses are literally
risking death to test and treat others. Less dramatically but just as crucially, hundreds of

millions of ordinary citizens have upended their lives to help slow the spread of the virus.
For Plough, as for other publishers, this crisis means changed realities. Like most New York
State nonprofits, last week we received orders to shutter our main office as part of the
containment effort. By then, actually, most of our staff had already begun working remotely
or taken time to care for family.

As early as January, Bruderhof physicians were tracking news of the virus closely, with our
community in South Korea the first to be directly affected by travel restrictions in late
February, followed by our community in Austria. In the United States and United Kingdom,
where most Bruderhof members are located, many in communities of two to three hundred
people, we soon decided to refrain from all but essential travel.

At the same time, we – just like our neighbors in the wider community – were having animated
discussions about the pros and cons of taking more radical measures to contain the virus. The
hallmark of our life together, inspired by the example of the early church (Acts 2 and 4), is
to work and share together in daily fellowship, meeting each day for common meals and
worship. To self-isolate as individual families seemed to contradict our vocation; it’s a step
we’d never taken in a century of community living.

Yet by March 12, we concluded we needed to take decisive action to protect the elderly and
vulnerable among us, and to do our part to halt the pandemic. We closed our schools, asked
all Bruderhof members to remain at home, and halted all community gatherings, while rapidly

trying to invent fresh ways to care and look out for each other. Here in New York, we went
further, reaching out to local and state officials to offer assistance in building out additional
medical capacity to contend with the peak impacts of the pandemic in regions where we have
Bruderhof locations.

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