Moravians

The Moravian Church, also known as Unity of Brethren or Unitas Fratrum, is a small Protestant denomination with roots in the fifteenth-century Czech Reformation and in eighteenth-century German Pietism. It came into being in 1457–1458 in Bohemia when a small number of religious dissenters banded together to live according to Christ's rules from the Sermon on the Mount. The name “Unity of Brethren” expressed the group's strong sense of accord and cohesion. In the sixteenth century, the church numbered tens of thousands of members in Moravia, Bohemia, and Poland, and enjoyed friendly relations with the Reformation leaders in Wittenberg and Geneva. Almost extinct after the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), the Unity experienced a renewal in the 1720s when persecuted members found refuge on the estate of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760) in Saxony, Germany. Influenced by the German Pietist movement, Zinzendorf was eager to devote his life to the cause of Christ's kingdom and to build a community of like-minded believers who would support this endeavor. The settlement Herrnhut (the name means “under the Lord's watch”) was founded in 1722 and grew into a [Page 936]Pietist colony aspiring to be a true community of awakened believers according to the example of the New Testament church.

After a severe spiritual crisis, Herrnhut residents experienced a profound moment of reconciliation and unification during a Holy Communion service in 1727. This event, characterized by the exclamation “we learned to love” (Hahn 1977, p. 107), resulted in a powerful sense of unity and purpose and transformed the Herrnhut community into an evangelistic renewal movement of international scope. Mission work was begun in 1732, additional Moravian congregations and Moravian societies were established throughout Germany, in the Netherlands, in Great Britain, and in Pennsylvania in the United States. In 1735, the last surviving bishop of the old Unity consecrated a brother from Herrnhut as a Moravian bishop, thus ensuring the continuity of its ministerial orders, and in 1749 the Moravians were recognized by the British parliament as an ancient Protestant episcopal church. By the time of Zinzendorf's death in 1760, the Moravians counted several thousand members, about twenty settlement congregations, and numerous mission stations in Africa, Asia, and North and South America. Subsequent generations continued the missionary effort and organized the Moravian Church as a worldwide denomination with various regional provinces. Today, there are eighteen different provinces with altogether 800,000 members, including about 50,000 members in North America.