Moravian Church

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Moravian Church carries a lamb on its emblem. The animal holds a flag of victory, and around it runs a Latin inscription: "Vicit agnus noster, eum sequamur." In English, that means "Our Lamb has conquered; let us follow Him." The church behind that emblem is also called the Moravian Brethren, and formally the Unitas Fratrum, Latin for Unity of the Brethren. It counts itself among the oldest Protestant denominations anywhere. Its roots reach to 1457 in the Kingdom of Bohemia, about sixty years before Martin Luther began his Reformation. Yet most people have never heard of it. This documentary asks how a small band of believers in central Europe came first, and why they are so little remembered. It asks what drove a nobleman in Saxony to shelter refugees, and what led those refugees to send missionaries to Greenland and the Caribbean. It also asks what a church that began under persecution believes about faith, happiness and the heart.

  529106

• 2. The Fire at Constance

  ›

  On the 6th of July 1415, Jan Hus was burned at the stake. Hus, known in English as John Huss, was a preacher in early 15th-century Bohemia, in what is today the Czech Republic. He wanted church services held in Czech, and he wanted priests to be allowed to marry. He also wanted an end to indulgences and to the idea of Purgatory. The Council of Constance judged him a heretic, and he was handed to the secular authorities, who sentenced him to death.

  His execution did not end the movement. From 1419 to 1437, a run of conflicts known as the Hussite Wars swept the Bohemian lands. At first, Catholic rulers fought the Hussites. Then the Hussites turned on one another. The compromising Utraquists faced the radical Taborites, and in 1434 an army of Utraquists and Catholics defeated the Taborites at the Battle of Lipany. The Utraquists signed the Compacts of Basel on the 5th of July 1436.

  Because Hus challenged Rome a full century before Luther, some historians call his followers the first Protestant church. A smaller group among them, though, thought even the victorious Hussites had not gone far enough.

  131491110

• 3. Brethren of Kunvald

  ›

  Within fifty years of Hus's death, a group of his followers organised themselves independently in the Bohemian village of Kunvald. They called themselves the Bohemian Brethren, or in Czech the Jednota bratrská. Two influences shaped them. One was a brother known as Gregory the Patriarch. The other was the teaching of Peter Chelcicky.

  The Brethren took the Sermon on the Mount literally. They would not swear oaths, they would not fight, and they would not pile up wealth. That strictness set them apart from the wider Hussite majority. In 1467 they obtained episcopal ordination through the Waldensians.

  The movement spread far beyond its small start. By the middle of the 16th century, as many as 90 percent of the subjects of the Bohemian Crown were Protestant, and most of the nobility had joined them. Schools and printing shops flourished. Not a single town in the Crown Lands lacked a Protestant school, and many had several, each with two to six teachers.

  Jihlava, a leading Protestant centre in Moravia, had five major schools. Two taught in German, one in Czech, and one was for girls. A fifth taught in Latin at the level of a grammar school, covering Greek, Hebrew, rhetoric, dialectics and philosophy. But the Habsburg rulers were watching, and they had their own educators in mind.

  910111213

• 4. The Hidden Seed

  ›

  In 1582, the Jesuits forced the closure of local Protestant schools. They had been invited into the Bohemian lands with the backing of the Catholic Habsburgs, and one of their institutions was the university in Olomouc, the Moravian capital. Protestants still held the University of Prague, but their grip was weakening.

  The decisive blow came after 1617, when Emperor Matthias had his fiercely Catholic brother Ferdinand of Styria elected King of Bohemia. Protestant noblemen feared for their religious freedom. In 1618 they provoked a revolt through the Defenestrations of Prague, an event the source describes as unplanned. The Protestants lost at the Battle of White Mountain near Prague in 1620, remembered as the first battle of the Thirty Years' War.

  The consequences were severe. Protestant nobles were executed or expelled, and the Habsburgs installed Catholic, mostly German-speaking nobles in their place. War, plague and disruption cut the population from over 3 million to some 800,000. By 1622 the Jesuits controlled the whole education system.

  The Brethren went underground and scattered across Northern Europe, reaching as far as the Low Countries. Their bishop, John Amos Comenius, tried to direct a revival from exile. The largest surviving communities lived in Leszno, which Poland knew as Lissa. Small isolated groups remained in Moravia. Comenius had prayed that these few would preserve the evangelical faith in his fathers' land, and they became known as the Hidden Seed. Nearly a century later, a handful of them would walk toward Saxony.

  121391011

• 5. Herrnhut

  ›

  In 1722, a small party of the Hidden Seed arrived at the Berthelsdorf estate of Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, in present-day Saxony. They had lived as an illegal remnant in Habsburg territory for nearly a hundred years. Their leader was Christian David, an itinerant carpenter. Zinzendorf, a nobleman raised in Pietistic Lutheranism, agreed to let them settle on his land in Upper Lusatia. A region of great religious autonomy, Lusatia was governed by the Saxon rulers. Their exile from Moravia gave the church the name by which the world knows it.

  The refugees founded a village called Herrnhut, about 3 kilometres from Berthelsdorf. It grew steadily at first. Then bitter religious quarrels split the community into factions by 1727. Zinzendorf worked to reconcile them, and the people adopted the Brotherly Agreement on the 12th of May 1727. That date is regarded as the start of the renewal.

  The real turning point came on the 13th of August 1727. The inhabitants of Herrnhut later said they had "learned to love one another", and they attributed this to a visit of the Holy Spirit like the one at Pentecost in the Bible.

  In 1735, the Unity's two surviving bishops, Daniel Ernst Jablonski and Christian Sitkovius, passed the episcopal ordination to the renewed church. The carpenter David Nitschmann became its first bishop, and Zinzendorf its second.

  The renewed community left Moravian historians a list of achievements. It kept a prayer watch running around the clock for 100 years. It began the Daily Watchwords. It set up more than 30 settlements on the Herrnhut model, where members held personal property yet largely avoided extremes of wealth and poverty. It also formed hundreds of small renewal groups, called diaspora societies, within existing European churches. Above all, it sent people overseas.

  1062132

• 6. Across the Oceans

  ›

  When the first missionaries left Herrnhut, the village had only 300 inhabitants. Within thirty years, hundreds had gone to the Caribbean, the Americas, the Arctic, Africa and the Far East. Moravians were the first to send lay people as missionaries, and the first Protestant denomination to minister to enslaved people. The source adds that some Moravian communities owned slaves themselves.

  The path began at a coronation. In 1730, Zinzendorf attended the crowning of Christian VI of Denmark-Norway. There he was deeply struck by two Inuit converts from Hans Egede's mission in Greenland, and by an African man from the West Indies. In 1732, a potter named Johann Leonhard Dober and the carpenter David Nitschmann founded the first mission on the Caribbean island of Saint Thomas. A year later, Matthaeus Stach and two companions started a mission in Greenland at Neu-Herrnhut, which became the core of the modern capital, Nuuk.

  In North America, the work met danger. In 1740 the Moravians founded a mission at the Mohican village of Shekomeko in present-day Dutchess County, New York. Its converts formed the first Native Christian congregation in what is now the United States. Local hostility bred rumours that the missionaries were secret Jesuits, trying to ally the Mohicans with France. At the end of 1744, the colonial government at Poughkeepsie expelled them.

  By Christmas Eve 1741, David Nitschmann and Zinzendorf had founded a settlement in Pennsylvania and named it Bethlehem. It is now the seventh-largest city in the state. In North Carolina, Bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg bought a large tract of land from John Carteret, 2nd Earl Granville. It was named Wachovia, after an ancestral estate of Zinzendorf on the Danube. Salem, in what is now Winston-Salem, followed in 1766.

  Further north, Moravians settled Nain in Labrador in 1771. Stations at Okak, Hopedale and several other sites followed, and the last two opened in 1957 and 1960. In South Africa, Georg Schmidt founded Genadendal in 1738. Missionary David Zeisberger urged converts to remember they were "one people not two."

  Not every story ended well. The Springplace mission to the Cherokee began in 1801 in Georgia. Removal of the Cherokees forced a move to Oklahoma in 1842, and in 1898 the church ended its work there.

  1819222436

• 7. A Religion of the Heart

  ›

  Moravians describe Christianity as a religion of the heart. Their first emphasis is the New Birth, a personal conversion that they call a joyful experience. After a person accepts Christ as Lord, faith is said to grow daily within them. They hold the Bible to be the source of all religious truths, and they stress the greatness of Christ as a model for living.

  Bishop Clarence H. Shawe of the British Province, lecturing in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, named five marks of the Moravian spirit. They are simplicity, happiness, unintrusiveness, fellowship and the ideal of service.

  Simplicity means focusing on the essentials and caring little for fine doctrinal definitions. Shawe quoted Zinzendorf saying that anyone taught the basic catechism had become a divinity scholar for all time. Happiness came from a contrast Zinzendorf drew between a Pietist and a Moravian. The Pietist stares at his own sin and takes comfort from the wounds of Jesus. The Moravian looks from the wounds toward his sin, and feels shamed by it in his happiness.

  Unintrusiveness rests on the belief that God wills many different churches. No one needs to be won away from another congregation. Fellowship, in Zinzendorf's day, meant bringing artisans and aristocrats together as equal members of one committee.

  Pacifism is part of the heritage. The source points to the Gnadenhutten massacre, where Moravian Christian Indian Martyrs met their execution by singing hymns and praying, without resisting.

  The church recognises many historic statements of faith, from the three ecumenical creeds to the Heidelberg Catechism and the Barmen Declaration of 1934. Its Ground of the Unity dates to 1957. The church also teaches that baptism is single and never repeated, and that Christ's body and blood are present in Holy Communion without explaining how.

  442674234

• 8. Provinces and Synods

  ›

  Tanzania alone holds roughly 800,000 Moravians, more than half of the worldwide total of 1,112,120. Its largest province, Tanzania South West, founded in 1978, reports 300,000 members. The 1891 South province has 203,000. Tanzania is split into seven provinces because of its size and its numbers. In all, Africa accounts for 907,830 members, while the Caribbean and Latin America have 204,980. Europe, where the story began, has just 20,180.

  The church organises this worldwide family into Unity Provinces, Mission Provinces and Mission Areas. A Unity Province is fully independent. A Mission Province works under partial supervision, and a Mission Area under full supervision.

  Each province is run by a synod made up of delegates from every congregation. The synod elects a Provincial Board. Every seven years, the Unity Synod gathers delegates from the provinces. Between synods, the Unity Board acts as executive, and it meets three times in that interval. Its president serves two years and may not hold the post for more than two terms.

  Bishops are the highest order of ministry. Provincial synods elect them, normally by ballot without nominations. They hold no administrative role. Instead, they serve as spiritual leaders and pastors to the pastors.

  The church claims to have kept apostolic succession. To preserve it, three Bohemian Brethren were consecrated by Bishop Stephen of Austria, a Waldensian who had been ordained by a Catholic bishop in 1434. The newly consecrated men returned to Litice in Bohemia and ordained others. The church's motto sums up its approach: "In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; and in all things, love."

  On the 18th of June 2010, the Northern Province of the Moravian Church voted to enter full communion with the Episcopal Church. The Southern Province followed at its synod that September. Each province can make such agreements independently. The two North American provinces are also in full communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. On the 5th of June 2016, they celebrated a covenant partnership with the Presbyterian Church USA at a service in Madison, Wisconsin.

  An ambitious plan in the 1980s fell through. In England, talks sought full communion among Moravians, Presbyterians, Methodists and the Church of England. The Moravians already had the historic episcopate, so they would have changed nothing. The General Synod of the Church of England never gave its approval.

  Zinzendorf dreamed of a fellowship of all Christians, whatever their denominational name. That ideal drove the diaspora work in Germany and Eastern Europe. The Moravians there tried not to win converts, but to deepen the faith of people in the churches they already attended. Suspicion eventually gave way to respect, and workers became valued partners in Poland and the Baltic states. World War II almost destroyed the work in Germany, though it continues there today.

  Sweden shows a different path. When Moravian ideas arrived in the mid-1700s, Lutheranism was the state religion, and a conventicle act banned worship outside it. Priests and lay people who embraced the ideas stayed in the Church of Sweden and formed small societies. Two congregations exist today, in Stockholm and Gothenburg. Their members are called Herrnhutare.

  Then came a surprise from the Baltic. When Estonia and Latvia regained independence, it emerged that much of the diaspora work there had survived decades of Soviet occupation and state atheism.

  2747464845