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Moravian Church

Protestant Christian denomination dating back to the 15th century

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The church's heritage can be traced to 1457 and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, which included Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and previously the Hussite movement against several practices and doctrines of the Catholic Church. Its name is derived from exiles who fled from Moravia to Saxony in 1722 to escape the Counter-Reformation, establishing the Christian community of Herrnhut. Hence, it is also known in German as the Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine [sic] ("Unity of Brethren of Herrnhut").

The modern Unitas Fratrum has about one million members worldwide, continuing their tradition of missionary work, such as in the Americas and Africa, which is reflected in their broad global distribution. The Moravian Church is part of historic evangelicalism. Moravians continue many of the same practices established in the 18th century, including placing a high value on a personal conversion to Christ, called the New Birth, and piety, good works, evangelism (including the establishment of missions), nonresistance, ecumenism, and music. The Moravian Church's emblem is the Lamb of God (Agnus Dei) with the flag of victory, surrounded by the Latin inscription "Vicit agnus noster, eum sequamur" ('Our Lamb has conquered; let us follow Him').

Apart from the Moravian Church, the more conservative Unity of the Brethren, based in Texas, as well as the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, based in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, are denominations in the same Hussite-Moravian theological tradition.

History

Jan Hus and the Bohemian Reformation

The Hussite movement that was to become the Moravian Church was started by Jan Hus (English: John Huss) in early 15th-century Bohemia, in what is today the Czech Republic. Hus objected to some of the practices and doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. Specifically, he wanted the liturgy to be celebrated in Czech, married priests, and eliminating indulgences and the idea of Purgatory. Since these actions predate the Protestant Reformation by a century, some historians claim the Moravian Church was the first Protestant church.

The movement gained support from the Crown of Bohemia. However, Hus was summoned to attend the Council of Constance, which decided that he was a heretic. Hus was released to the secular authority, which sentenced him to be burned at the stake on 6 July 1415. From 1419 to 1437 were a series of Hussite Wars, initially between various Roman Catholic rulers and the Hussites. Then there was a Hussite civil war, between the more compromising Utraquists and the radical Taborites. In 1434, an army of Utraquists and Roman Catholics defeated the Taborites at the Battle of Lipany. The Utraquists signed the Compacts of Basel on 5 July 1436.

Within 50 years of Hus's death, a contingent of his followers had become independently organised as the "Bohemian Brethren" (Čeští bratři) or Unity of the Brethren (Jednota bratrská), which was founded in Kunvald, Bohemia, in 1457. A brother known as Gregory the Patriarch was very influential in forming the group, as well as the teachings of Peter Chelcicky. This group held to a strict obedience to the Sermon on the Mount, which included non-swearing of oaths, non-resistance, and not accumulating wealth. Because of this, they considered themselves separate from the majority Hussites that did not hold those teachings. They received episcopal ordination through the Waldensians in 1467.

These were some of the earliest Protestants, rebelling against Rome some fifty years before Martin Luther. By the middle of the 16th century, as many as 90 percent of the subjects of the Bohemian Crown were Protestant. The majority of the nobility was Protestant, and the schools and printing-shops established by the Moravian Church were flourishing.

Protestantism had a strong influence in the education of the population. Even in the middle of the 16th century there was not a single town without a Protestant school in the Bohemian Crown Lands. Many had more than one, mostly with two to six teachers each. In Jihlava, a principal Protestant centre in Moravia, there were five major schools: two German, one Czech, one for girls and one teaching in Latin, which was at the level of a high/grammar school, lecturing on Latin, Greek and Hebrew, Rhetorics, Dialectics, fundamentals of Philosophy and fine arts, as well as religion according to the Lutheran Augustana.

Counter-Reformation

With the University of Prague also firmly in hands of Protestants, the local Roman Catholic Church was unable to compete in the field of education. The Jesuits were invited, with the backing of the Catholic Habsburg rulers, to come to the Lands of the Bohemian Crown and establish a number of Roman Catholic educational institutions. One of these was the university in the Moravian capital of Olomouc. In 1582, they forced the closure of local Protestant schools.

In 1617, Emperor Matthias had his fiercely Roman Catholic brother Ferdinand of Styria elected as King of Bohemia. In the year that followed, Protestant Bohemian noblemen, in fear of losing their religious freedom, instigated a revolt with the unplanned Defenestrations of Prague. The Protestants were defeated in 1620 in the Battle of White Mountain near Prague, known as the first battle in the Thirty Years' War. As a consequence, the local Protestant noblemen were either executed or expelled from the country, while the Habsburgs placed Roman Catholic, and mostly German-speaking nobility in their place. The war, plague, and subsequent disruption led to a decline in the population from over 3 million to some 800,000 people. By 1622, the entire education system was in the hands of Jesuits, and all Protestant schools were closed.

The Brethren were forced to go underground, and eventually dispersed across Northern Europe as far as the Low Countries, where their bishop, John Amos Comenius, attempted to direct a resurgence. The largest remaining communities of the Brethren were located in Leszno (German: Lissa) in Poland, which had historically strong ties with the Czechs, and small, isolated groups in Moravia. The latter are referred to as "the Hidden Seed", which John Amos Comenius had prayed would preserve the evangelical faith in the land of the fathers.

In addition to the Renewed Unitas Fratrum or Moravian Church, which preserves the Unitas Fratrum's three orders of episcopal ordination, the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren and the Czechoslovak Hussite Church also continue the Hussite tradition in the Czech Republic and Slovakia today, as with the Unity of the Brethren in the United States; these are denominations in the same Hussite-Moravian theological tradition. They only account for 0.8% of the Czech population, which is 79.4% non-religious, and 10.4% Catholic.

Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine, 18th-century renewal

In 1722, a small group of the Bohemian Brethren, the "Hidden Seed", who had been living in northern Moravia, as an illegal underground remnant surviving in the Catholic setting of the Habsburg Empire for nearly 100 years, arrived at the Berthelsdorf estate of Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf in present-day Saxony in the eastern part of present-day Germany. Out of a personal commitment to helping the poor and needy, von Zinzendorf, a nobleman who had been brought up in the traditions of Pietistic Lutheranism, agreed to a request from their leader, Christian David, an itinerant carpenter, that they be allowed to settle on his lands in Upper Lusatia in Saxony. The Margraviates of Upper and Lower Lusatia were governed in personal union by the Saxon rulers and enjoyed great autonomy, especially in religious questions.

The refugees established a new village called Herrnhut, about 2 miles (3 km) from Berthelsdorf. The town initially grew steadily, but major religious disagreements emerged and by 1727 the community was divided into factions. Count Zinzendorf worked to bring about unity in the town, and the Brotherly Agreement was adopted by the community on 12 May 1727. This is considered the beginning of the renewal. On 13 August 1727, the community underwent a dramatic transformation when the inhabitants of Herrnhut "learned to love one another", following an experience that they attributed to a visitation of the Holy Spirit, similar to that recorded in the Bible on the day of Pentecost.

Herrnhut grew rapidly following this transforming revival and became the centre of a major movement for Christian renewal and mission during the 18th century. The episcopal ordination of the Ancient Unitas Fratrum was transferred in 1735 to the Renewed Unitas Fratrum by the Unity's two surviving bishops, Daniel Ernst Jablonski and Christian Sitkovius. The carpenter David Nitschmann and, later, Count von Zinzendorf, were the first two bishops of the Renewed Unity. In 1756, Zinzendorf founded a Brüdergemeine that still exists today in Neuwied on the Rhine. Moravian historians identify the main achievements of this period as:

  • Setting up a watch of continuous prayer that ran uninterrupted, 24 hours a day, for 100 years.
  • Originating the Daily Watchwords.
  • Establishing more than 30 settlements internationally on the Herrnhut model, which emphasized prayer and worship, and a form of communal living in which simplicity of lifestyle and generosity with wealth were held to be important spiritual attributes. The purpose of these communities was to assist the members resident there in the sanctification of their lives, to provide a meeting place for Christians from different confessional backgrounds, to provide Christian training for their own children and the children of their friends and supporters and to provide support for the Moravian Mission work throughout the world. As a result, although personal property was held, divisions between social groups and extremes of wealth and poverty were largely eliminated.
  • Being the first Protestant church body to begin missionary work.
  • Forming many hundreds of small renewal groups operating within the existing churches of Europe, known as "diaspora societies." These groups encouraged personal prayer and worship, Bible study, confession of sins and mutual accountability.

The Moravians arrived in England in 1728, "basking in the warm glow of a revival that had taken place on Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf's estate at Herrnhut in Saxony the previous year, who provided the most attractive and compelling form of heart religion." The Fetter Lane Society of the Moravian Church introduced its evangelical theology to the Anglican priests John Wesley and Charles Wesley; members of the Holy Club (which sprung up the Methodist movement) learned from the Moravians "the nature of genuine saving faith, which began a process by which many of them moved towards more decided evangelical convictions". In the 18th century, the Evangelical Revival came to be led by three different groups: the Wesleyan Methodists, the Calvinistic Methodists, and the Moravians. These three evangelical groups, in 1739, saw the Fetter Lane Society as the hub of the Evangelical Revival.

Missions

Along with the Royal Danish Mission College, the Moravian missionaries were the first large-scale Protestant missionary movement. They sent out the first missionaries when there were only 300 inhabitants in Herrnhut. Within 30 years, the church sent hundreds of Christian missionaries to many parts of the world, including the Caribbean, North and South America, the Arctic, Africa, and the Far East. They were the first to send lay people as missionaries, the first Protestant denomination to minister to slaves, though some communities also owned slaves, and the first Protestant presence in many countries.

Owing to Zinzendorf's personal contacts with their royalty, the first Moravian missions were directed to the Dano-Norwegian Empire. While attending the coronation of Christian VI of Denmark-Norway in 1730, Zinzendorf was profoundly struck by two Inuit converts of Hans Egede's mission in Greenland and also by an African from the West Indies. The first Moravian mission was established on the Caribbean island of Saint Thomas in 1732 by a potter named Johann Leonhard Dober and a carpenter named David Nitschmann, who later became the first bishop of the Renewed Unity in 1735. Matthaeus Stach and two others founded the first Moravian mission in Greenland in 1733 at Neu-Herrnhut on Baal's River, which became the nucleus of the modern capital Nuuk.

Moravians also founded missions with the Mohicans, an Algonquian-speaking tribe in the colony of New York in the Thirteen Colonies. In one instance, they founded a mission in 1740 at the Mohican village of Shekomeko in present-day Dutchess County, New York. The converted Mohican people formed the first native Christian congregation in the present-day United States of America. Because of local hostility from New Yorkers to the Mohicans, the Moravian support of the Mohicans led to rumors of them being secret Jesuits, trying to ally the Mohicans with France in the ongoing French and Indian Wars.

Although supporters defended their work, at the end of 1744, the colonial government based in Poughkeepsie, New York, expelled the Moravians from the Province of New York.

In 1741, David Nitschmann and Count Zinzendorf led a small community to found a mission in the colony of Pennsylvania. The mission was established on Christmas Eve, and was named Bethlehem, after the Biblical town in Judea. There, they ministered to the Algonquian-speaking Lenape. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is today the seventh-largest city in Pennsylvania, having developed as a major industrial city in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1772, the first European-Native American settlement of what later became Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, occurred when Reverend John Ettwein, a Moravian missionary, arrived there with a band of 241 Christianized Lenape.

In 1771, Moravians established a settlement at Nain, Labrador, which became a permanent settlement and the Moravian headquarters in Labrador. The mission stations expanded to Okak (1776), Hopedale (1782), Hebron at Kauerdluksoak Bay (1830–1959), serving also Napartok Bay and Saeglek Bay, Zoar (1864–1889), Ramah (1871–1908), Makkovik (1896), and Killiniq on Cape Chidley island (1905–1925). Two further stations were added after this period at Happy Valley near Goose Bay (1957) and North West River (1960).

Colonies were founded in North Carolina, where Moravians led by Bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg purchased 98,985 acres (40,058 ha) from John Carteret, 2nd Earl Granville. This large tract of land was named die Wachau, or Wachovia, after one of Zinzendorf's ancestral estates on the Danube River in Lower Austria. Other early settlements included Bethabara (1753), Bethania (1759), and Salem, now referred to as Old Salem (1766) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

In 1801, the Moravians established Springplace mission to the Cherokee Nation in what is now Murray County, Georgia. Coinciding with the forced removal of the Cherokees to Oklahoma, this mission was replaced in 1842 by New Springplace in Oaks, Oklahoma. Due to Civil War-related violence, New Springplace closed in 1862 and resumed during the 1870s. In 1898, the Moravian Church discontinued their missionary engagement with the Cherokees and New Springplace, now the Oaks Indian Mission, was transferred to the Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church.

The start of far-flung missionary work necessitated the establishment of independently administered provinces. So, from about 1732, the history of the church becomes the history of its provinces.

Eventually, the Moravian missions in Australia and Greenland were transferred to the local Presbyterian and Lutheran Churches, respectively.

The first mission station in present-day South Africa was established by the Moravian Georg Schmidt at Genadendal in 1738. The mission at Wupperthal, established by the Rhenish Missionary Society, was eventually transferred to the Moravian Church. From 1792 onwards, the Church sent missonaries to evangelise among the Khoikhoi.

The Moravians sought to unify the converts into "one people" living together with the same religious beliefs. Zeisberger, a significant Moravian missionary, implored the converts to remember that they were "one people not two."

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