A Living Tradition of the American Heartland

In the low, rolling hills of Decatur County in southern Iowa — a landscape of farms and small towns a few miles from the Missouri border — a community of sixty people built wooden houses with no plumbing, electricity, or running water. They observed Wednesday as the Sabbath, studied the Dead Sea Scrolls with their children, ate food they grew themselves, and answered to a man their leader called the teacher of righteousness. Fifty miles to the northeast, in Fairfield, fifteen hundred Transcendental Meditation practitioners sat in golden domes to achieve group coherence for world peace, in a movement with three billion dollars in assets and hundreds of academic studies to its name. Both communities were expressions of the same Aquarian impulse: the refusal to accept that the inherited forms of religion were adequate containers for the sacred. They arrived at opposite conclusions about almost everything else.

I. Origins in the Reorganized Church

The Brotherhood of Christ Church traces its beginning to the early 1980s and to a dissatisfaction with institutional religion that has generated new religious communities in every era. Ron Livingston — the group's founder, its spiritual authority, and eventually its "teacher of righteousness" — was a minister in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Missouri-based Latter Day Saint denomination now known as Community of Christ. The RLDS church, with its headquarters in Independence, Missouri, and its historic heartland in the farmland of Iowa and Missouri, had long distinguished itself from the Utah-based LDS church by its emphasis on democratic governance, openness to women in the priesthood, and progressive theological interpretation. By the early 1980s, those progressive tendencies were accelerating in ways that troubled conservative members who felt the church was drifting from its founding commitments.

Livingston's break was not primarily doctrinal in the modernist sense — he did not leave because the church was too conservative, or because it ordaining women troubled him, or because of any single policy shift. His break was about the gap between proclaimed and practiced faith. The RLDS church, in his reading, was preaching a radical communitarian gospel — drawn from the same Joseph Smith revelations that had established early Mormon communities as experiments in shared property and consecrated living — while its members lived, in practice, like everyone else: private property, ordinary consumer life, Sunday religion safely contained against the rest of the week. He could not tolerate the distance.

Around 1981 or 1982, Livingston and five others left the RLDS congregation they attended and formed an informal pastoral group. They began holding Bible study classes in the Lamoni, Iowa area — Lamoni being the town where the RLDS founder's son, Joseph Smith III, had lived, and where the Community of Christ still maintains historical properties. The classes grew. By 1987, the group had purchased 240 acres of land near the town of Davis City in southern Decatur County, approximately 25 miles south of Lamoni. By the early 1990s, they had adopted the name "Essenes" for their community — or accepted the name the outside world was using for them — and had come to think of themselves as practitioners of the original religion of Jesus, restored.

The community registered as the Brotherhood of Christ Church, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. The formal nonprofit records give an EIN of 31-1725462 and place the address in Davis City, Iowa.

II. The Essene Identity

The claim that Jesus was an Essene is not original to the Brotherhood of Christ Church. It has circulated in liberal Protestant biblical criticism, Theosophy, alternative spirituality, and popular writing since the nineteenth century. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in 1947 — and the subsequent scholarly consensus (though not unanimous) that the Qumran community was Essene — gave the claim new energy. John Allegro, popular writers, New Age teachers, and a generation of spiritual seekers argued that Jesus had been trained by, influenced by, or was himself a member of the ancient Jewish sect. The historical evidence for this is thin at best — the Essenes, as described by Josephus and Philo, required celibacy and property renunciation in ways that seem inconsistent with Jesus's Galilean ministry — but the identification carries enormous appeal: it explains Jesus's baptism (John the Baptist is sometimes identified as Essene or Essene-adjacent), his communal meals, his teachings on poverty and purity, and his distance from the Temple establishment.

For the Brotherhood of Christ Church, the Essene identification is theological and practical, not merely historical. They believe that Jesus was an Essene — that the religion he practiced and taught was the Essene way of life — and that the correct form of Christian observance is therefore the reconstruction of that way of life. The Dead Sea Scrolls are read as scripture, or something approaching scripture: evidence of how the earliest followers of the Way actually lived. Communal property, ritual purity, separation from the wider world, a strict penal code, hierarchical governance under a "teacher of righteousness" — these are understood not as the cultural peculiarities of an Iron Age Jewish sect but as the eternal pattern of life in covenant with God.

This is a distinctly Christian Essenism. Unlike the ancient Qumran community, which practiced strict celibacy (at least in the discipline's most austere expressions), the Brotherhood of Christ Church is organized around families. Married couples and children are the community's core unit. The communal life is not the life of monks but the life of a village — families living separately in one-room wooden houses, sharing work and property and worship, raising children in the community's ways. The community maintained adult and children's education classes, using Dead Sea Scrolls materials as curriculum.

The central organizing principle, as the community's own website states, is "the First Commandment: I am the Lord thy God." This formulation — choosing the preliminary declaration of the Decalogue rather than the more specific prohibitions that follow — implies that the whole of religious life consists in this single act of orientation: placing God, and nothing else, at the center. All the community's specific practices are understood as applications of this one commitment. Property held in common, because private accumulation is a form of idolatry. Food grown by hand, because dependence on industrial systems is a form of worldly entanglement. Discipline enforced through the community, because the individual will is insufficient to sustain covenant life alone.

The Wednesday Sabbath, observed on the basis of a solar calendar rather than the lunar calendar of Jewish tradition, is another expression of this independence from both conventional Christianity and conventional Judaism. The community interprets the solar calendar as the original, pre-Babylonian calendar of the biblical tradition — the calendar of Enoch, of the Jubilees, of the Qumran sectarians themselves, who are now understood by many scholars to have observed a solar calendar distinct from the Temple's lunar reckoning.

III. Community Life

At its peak in the early 1990s, the Brotherhood of Christ Church community numbered approximately sixty people — a figure that seems consistent across multiple independent press accounts from 1992. The community lived on its 240-acre property near Davis City in what one press account described as "wooden enclaves": one-room houses built from natural materials, without plumbing, electricity, or running water. Water was drawn from a well. Heat came from wood. Light came from fire. The community's commitment to separating from "worldly" systems — the electrical grid, municipal water, consumer supply chains — was understood as spiritual discipline, not mere primitivism. The same pattern that led the ancient Essenes to the Judean desert led these Iowa Essenes to the edge of a small town in Decatur County.

Daily life was structured around morning and evening prayer, agricultural labor, and community education. The community grew its own food, preserved it for winter, produced textiles, and maintained blacksmithing capacity. Members dressed simply — overalls and patchwork clothing, what a 1992 Seattle Times reporter described as resembling "aging hippies," though the members were a multigenerational community, not a post-counterculture remnant. Their separateness was sustained and intentional, not nostalgic.

The community's governance operated on the principle of "common consent" — decision-making by unanimity rather than majority rule. In theory, every community member's voice carried equal weight. In practice, the community was organized around Ron Livingston's authority as teacher of righteousness, and the common consent structure coexisted with what former members have described as significant personal authority concentrated in his leadership.

The most distinctive feature of the community's internal discipline was its penal code — a system of graduated material penalties applied to members who violated community standards. Using slang incurred four days of reduced food rations. Jealousy incurred thirty days. Public displays of anger incurred thirty days. The penalty was not starvation — members were not denied food entirely — but the reduction of rations was enforced as a spiritual corrective, a material reminder that appetites of all kinds are to be disciplined in covenant life. Former members who left the community have described this system as more coercive than it sounds: in a small community with no outside employment, communal meals, and no private food supply, even modest ration reductions carried social weight.

Livingston was known within the community as "Grampa" — a name that carries both affection and a claim of patriarchal authority. In the Essene framework he constructed, he was the teacher of righteousness: the term used in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Hebrew moreh ha-tzedeq) to describe the founder and leader of the Qumran community, understood in scrolls scholarship as a priestly figure of disputed historical identity. For the Brotherhood of Christ Church, the application of the title was literal: Ron Livingston occupied the same structural position that the Qumran founder had occupied, leading his community in its separateness from a corrupt world toward a restored covenant life.

IV. Mormon Roots and New Revelation

The Brotherhood of Christ Church occupies a specific and underappreciated place in the broader Latter Day Saint movement's history of prophetic claims. The RLDS tradition from which Livingston came carries, in its own DNA, a theology of ongoing revelation — the belief that God continues to speak through prophets, that scripture is not closed, and that the restoration begun by Joseph Smith is not complete. The RLDS church itself received new revelations through its presidents; the question was always what kinds of revelation were legitimate, through what channels, with what institutional safeguards.

Livingston's revelation was of a kind that the RLDS establishment could not accommodate. Like Joseph Smith, he claimed to have received divine inspiration from inscribed tablets — a founding narrative that explicitly echoes Smith's account of receiving the Book of Mormon from golden plates, reading them by means of interpreting stones called the Urim and Thummim, and translating a text that had been sealed from ordinary comprehension. Livingston's revelation became the community's primary canonical text: The Sealed Portion of the Brother of Jared.

The Sealed Portion — published in two volumes by Leathers Publishing in 2001 (Volume I, 698 pages) and 2002 (Volume II) — claims to be the section of the Book of Mormon that Joseph Smith translated but was instructed to keep sealed: the fuller vision of the Brother of Jared, the pre-Israelite patriarch who, according to the Book of Mormon, was shown the full history of the world by the Lord and instructed to record it but not reveal it until the latter days. The text presents itself as the completion of what Smith began — a continuation and fulfillment of the Latter Day Saint scriptural project. The author attribution in the published volumes is "The Brotherhood of Christ Church," not Livingston's personal name, though the revelation's source is understood within the community to be Livingston's encounter with the inscribed tablets.

The Sealed Portion is commercially available through retail book channels (Amazon, Powell's, AbeBooks) and under active copyright. It is not archivable. Its existence as a two-volume published work — distributed through ordinary commercial channels while simultaneously serving as the sacred scripture of a community that lives without electricity — reflects a characteristic tension in the movement's self-presentation: separate from the world, yet engaged with it enough to publish books and maintain a website.

V. Controversy, Opposition, and Legal Action

The Brotherhood of Christ Church's relationship with its surrounding community in Davis City and Lamoni has been marked by hostility from neighbors and deliberate legal action against outside observers. Press accounts from the early 1990s describe vandalism of community property — grass fires set on the land, the community's truck damaged — reflecting a level of local hostility uncommon even for unconventional religious communities in rural Iowa. The community's members attributed this hostility to misunderstanding and the kind of social pressure that falls on any group that refuses to participate in the normal life of a community.

The community's own legal responses have drawn as much attention as the hostility it received. An Iowa State University graduate student who wrote a thesis about the community was the subject of a lawsuit — or a threatened lawsuit — that resulted in ISU settling the matter, removing the thesis from circulation. The settlement was reported in the Des Moines Register in May 1993. This episode illustrates a recurring pattern: the community asserts First Amendment protections for its own religious practice while seeking legal remedies against scholarship and journalism it finds unwelcome.

Former members have spoken publicly about control exercised by Livingston over the community's finances and family relationships. The specific allegations include: management of individual members' economic assets through the communal structure in ways that made departure financially difficult; influence over marriage decisions and family arrangements; and the use of spiritual authority to discourage members from maintaining relationships with relatives outside the community. These allegations have not resulted in criminal proceedings, and the community disputes them. The pattern — a small, tightly bounded intentional community under the authority of a charismatic founder, with allegations of manipulation and difficulty leaving from ex-members — is familiar from the study of new religious movements and requires neither dismissal nor uncritical acceptance.

The community has taken legal action in response to press coverage on at least two documented occasions, suggesting that it regards litigation as a legitimate tool for managing its public image. This itself is notable for a community that professes separation from worldly systems.

VI. The Iowa Cluster and the Aquarian Landscape

To place the Brotherhood of Christ Church properly in the Aquarian landscape, it helps to situate it geographically. The community is located in Davis City, Decatur County — a county with a 2020 population of approximately 7,000 people, in the poorest region of Iowa. Fifty miles to the northeast, across the rollings hills of central Iowa, is Fairfield — the seat of Jefferson County and home to the North American center of the Transcendental Meditation movement. Maharishi Vedic City, incorporated in 2001 adjacent to Fairfield, is the world's most complete physical instantiation of an Aquarian community's cosmological vision: a municipal entity with Sthapatya Veda building codes, all-organic agriculture, and a permanent population of approximately 300 TM practitioners.

The contrast between these two communities is instructive. The TM movement in Fairfield has approximately $3.5 billion in global organizational assets, an accredited university, five hundred published scientific studies, a history of beatle endorsements and celebrity practitioners, and an institutional machinery designed to interface with every regulatory and academic structure of the modern world. The Brotherhood of Christ Church has sixty people, wooden houses without running water, a two-volume scripture sold on Amazon, and a history of lawsuits against the academics who tried to study it.

Both communities represent Aquarian responses to the same underlying condition: the sense that the inherited forms of religious and social life in America are inadequate, that something older and truer is available, and that it requires separation from ordinary life to be lived fully. Maharishi offered his separation through the inward turn: twenty minutes of silence twice daily, the retreat from worldly identification into pure awareness, and then back into the world transformed. Livingston offered his separation through physical withdrawal: 240 acres, no grid, no consumer entanglement, a community small enough that every member knows every other member by name and face.

Whether these two communities have ever been in contact, or whether either is aware of the other's existence, is not known. They are 50 miles apart. They are separated by everything except the impulse that generated them.

VII. Current Status and Academic Documentation

The Brotherhood of Christ Church's official website (brotherhoodofchristchurch.org) was active as of early 2026, offering audio teachings on prophecy, end-times material, covenant-taking, and spiritual community formation. The community maintains a presence in the Foundation for Intentional Community directory. Tax records accessible through nonprofit databases (EIN 31-1725462) confirm the organization's continued legal existence.

Current membership is difficult to verify from external sources. The community's historically low visibility — a deliberate policy, confirmed by its legal responses to outside scrutiny — means that recent population figures are unavailable. The peak membership of approximately sixty, reported in 1992, may not reflect the community's current size. Several families are documented to have left in the early years; the community's austere discipline and geographic isolation make sustained membership demanding.

The Sealed Portion of the Brother of Jared remains commercially available in both volumes, suggesting the community continues to publish and distribute its canonical text.

Academic study of the Brotherhood of Christ Church is essentially absent. The ISU thesis suppression in 1993 removed what may have been the only academic monograph on the community. No peer-reviewed study has been identified. The community appears in no major scholarly survey of new religious movements; it is too small, too isolated, and too legally aggressive toward researchers to have attracted sustained scholarly attention. The primary documentation comes from newspaper accounts from 1992 to 1993 (Tulsa World, Seattle Times, associated wire services) and from the community's own limited self-presentation online.

This absence of academic documentation is itself significant. The Brotherhood of Christ Church is arguably more representative of the Aquarian phenomenon in its small, local, practically demanding form than many of the large institutional movements that attract scholarly attention. A community that actually lives without electricity in order to honor the First Commandment is making a more radical wager than a movement that teaches meditation for stress reduction while quietly transmitting Hindu initiation. Whether the wager is wise is another question. That it is genuine appears not to be in doubt.

Colophon

Ethnographic profile researched and written by Mishael (מִישָׁאֵל), Living Traditions Researcher (Life 15), Good Work Library, New Tianmu Anglican Church, March 2026. Sources: Urban Utopias (Heartland Utopias Part 5, 2021); Tulsa World archive ("Iowa Essenes Live as Ancient Jewish Cult of 2 Millenia Ago," 1992); Seattle Times archive ("Ancient Sect Makes Comeback in Heartland," December 27, 1992); KCRR ("When a Jewish Cult in Southern Iowa Got National Attention"); Foundation for Intentional Community directory; Cause IQ / Charity Navigator nonprofit records (EIN 31-1725462); Brotherhood of Christ Church official website (brotherhoodofchristchurch.org); Open Library / Amazon / AbeBooks / Powell's (Sealed Portion of the Brother of Jared bibliography); Cultnews101 archive; LDS Movement Wiki. The Sealed Portion of the Brother of Jared (Leathers Publishing, 2001–2002) is under active copyright and is not archived here. No academic monograph on this community is known to exist.

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