We are a people committed to living the First Commandment. In 1988 a group of friends bought land and built a community in order to remove the distractions of the world. They had found it difficult to love the Lord with all their heart, thoughts, and energy while they worked jobs making money. So they decided to live each day in the simplicity of loving the Lord, asking Him about everything, and being guided by His Spirit. Within a few short years, being guided by the Spirit, they were led to discover the writings of the Dead Sea Scrolls only to find that many of the teachings contained there had already been established in our community, being led only by the Spirit. We, in essence, discovered that we were Essenes. The Scroll of the Rule, or the Community Rule as we call it, was established as daily practice shortly thereafter, and it stabilized our relationships greatly - allowing us to grow spiritually by maximizing our virtue.
Our Mission
Our Community is a place for the Lord to rest and to focus on blessing Him. We are to purify ourselves and live separately from worldliness so that at His appointed time, when He has the need, we will ask Him to reveal His Arm to the world.
“Man in his fallen state does not think of God as God is, but leans toward viewing God as man is, and sees God only as the God of man. But God has the ability to penetrate this blindness, and reveal Himself to man, so man can see God as God is.”
— Book of Remembrance: First Book of Achee
Why the "Brotherhood of Christ?"
We are often asked, "why do you call yourselves the Brotherhood of Christ?" People think it is sexist and patriarchal. Actually, we are not referring to ourselves at all, but rather to Messiah's kinship relationship with us and our broader kinship relationships because of Him.
Being Essene, we have always felt a great reverence and kinship with the Jewish people. The original Essenes were an ancient Jewish sect, and we also use the Dead Sea Scrolls as scripture, as well as Hebrew names and words which we find are more expressive of the feelings of things. We also have a kindred feeling for all the Messianic believers due to our common faith in Jesus/ Yeshua our Messiah.
What is strange to most people, however, is our respect, affinity, and kinship with peoples of indigenous cultures and faiths: First Nations religions, traditional Polynesian, and the Yazidi, for example. What kinship do we have with these cultures? They all respect and reverence the Creator who built the earth out of His love for us, to be ever near us and give us a beautiful place to live. That respect is built into their worship, as it is in ours. This knowledge was lost to Christianity very early on. The Lord attempted to restore this knowledge to Christians in the 1830's and the Restoration movement has built within it the knowledge that the Lord is "in and through all things." This creates a bond between us also.
While each of these faiths and cultures have widely varying practices and doctrines, and may have picked up corruptions in their traditions over time, they all have core seeds of Truth. That Truth binds us together as children of the Great Holy One and the Man that He became is a Brother, Friend and Redeemer to us all.