Erika Brinkmann Barth 1987 –

Erika grew up in the Bruderhof alongside her eight sisters, attended public high school, and spent the better part of the next decade studying in Albany, New York, and Erfurt, Germany, where she completed her master’s degree in education. In 2016 she married Johann and their daughter was born in 2018. 

University classmates would often ask, “Do you have to do what you’re asked? Do you have to move where the community tells you, and work where you’re told to work?” I’d always turn those questions around: “Look, I chose this life and freely affirmed my willingness to be used wherever my services are needed.”

It was my decision to put myself at the disposal of the community, and the community is honoring that decision. I was the one who said I wanted to live this life; to give my faculties, time, and energy to help create a just society where everyone is treated with love and respect.

Society is obsessed with the hyphenated self words: self-expression, self-determination, self-actualization, and self-fulfillment. But it’s the wrong orientation. 

The self isn’t what gives a person true freedom and empowerment. The apostle Paul describes the “glorious freedom of the children of God,” the freedom that Christ’s followers – those who deny themselves for their fellow human beings – can be assured of. I am liberated in the certainty that God loves me for who I am, as I am, and that is what empowers me.