Christian Metz: The Carpenter Who Led a Community Across an Ocean
Near Amana Colonies, Iowa
Christian Metz was born in seventeen eighty-nine in Hesse, the son of a craftsman, trained as a carpenter. He became a Werkzeug of the Community of True Inspiration in eighteen seventeen, one of the prophets through whom the community believed God spoke. Over nearly five decades he delivered three thousand six hundred fifty-four documented spiritual messages, guiding the community's doctrines, its decisions about where to live, and its structures of communal life.
It was Metz who recognized that the community's future lay outside Germany. In September of eighteen forty-two, he led a scouting committee that traversed potential sites in Pennsylvania and New York before selecting land near Buffalo, New York. The community established the Ebenezer Society there in eighteen forty-three, purchasing land, building communal houses, and adopting a formal constitution that pooled resources, eliminated private property, and required collective labor without individual wages.
When Buffalo's growth began encroaching on Ebenezer and the isolation the community needed eroded, it was Metz who directed the search for new land and the decision to move to Iowa. He died on July twenty-fourth, eighteen sixty-seven, in the village of Amana, having spent his life as the instrument through whom a persecuted German minority built something lasting on the American frontier. A community of craftspeople, farmers, and weavers, guided by a carpenter, had crossed an ocean and made themselves a home.
