CHAPTER 58
Colin A. Grant
Colin A. Grant was a missionary in Sri Lanka for 12 years with the British Baptist Missionary Society. He was also chairman of the Evangelical Missionary Alliance and home secretary of the Evangelical Union of South America.
From “Europe’s Moravians: A Pioneer Missionary Church,” evangelical Missions Quarterly 12, no. 4 (October 1976), published by Missio Nexus. Used by permission.
Sixty years before William Carey set out for India and 150 years before Hudson Taylor first landed in China, two men, Leonard Dober, a potter, and David Nitschmann, a carpenter, landed on the West Indian island of St. Thomas to make known the gospel of Jesus Christ. They had set out in 1732 from a small Christian community in the mountains of Saxony in Central Europe as the first missionaries of the Moravian Brethren. In the next twenty years Moravian missionaries went to distant lands in southern Africa to peoples living in North America. They went to China, to Persia, to peoples in the heights of the Himalayan mountains.
All this was just the beginning. In the first 150 years of its endeavor, the Moravian community was to send no less than 2,158 of its members to distant lands overseas. In the words of Stephen Neil, “This small church was seized with a missionary passion which has never left it.”
The Unitas Fratum (United Brethren), as they had been called, left a record without parallel in the post-New Testament era of world evangelization, and we do well to look again at the main characteristics of this movement and learn the lessons God has for us.
Spontaneous Obedience
In the first place, the missionary obedience of the Moravian Brethren was essentially glad and spontaneous, “the response of a healthy organism to the law of its life,” to use Harry Boer’s words. The source of its initial thrust came as a result of a deep movement of God’s Spirit that had taken place among a small group of exiled believers. They fled the persecution of the anti-Reformation reaction in Bohemia and Moravia during the seventeenth century and took shelter on an estate of Nicolas Zinzendorf, an evangelical Lutheran nobleman.
The first tree for their settlement, which was later to be named Herrnhut (“The Lord’s Watch”), was felled in 1722 to the strains of Psalm 84. Five years later, the new tides of the grace and love of God ran so deeply among them that one of their number wrote: “The whole place represented truly a tabernacle of God among men. There was nothing to be seen and heard but joy and gladness.” This was God’s preparation for all that was to follow.
During a visit to Denmark for the coronation of King Christian VI, Dober and Nitschmann were challenged to go to the West Indies through meeting an African slave from St. Thomas. They volunteered and were the first to be commissioned. To them it was a natural expression of their Christian life and obedience.
The missionary obedience of the Moravian Brethren was essentially glad and spontaneous,
A. C. Thompson, one of the main nineteenth-century recorders of the early history of Moravian missions, wrote:
So fully is the duty of evangelizing the heathen lodged in current thought that the fact of anyone entering personally upon that work never creates surprise. . . . It is not regarded as a thing that calls for widespread heralding, as if something marvelous or even unusual were in hand.
There was no clamor, no platform heroics, no publicity but rather an ardent, persistent desire to make Christ known wherever his name had not been named. This became so knit into the ongoing life and liturgy of the Moravian Church that a large proportion of public prayer and hymnology was occupied with this subject.
Passion for Christ
In the second place, this surging zeal had as its prime motivation a deep, ongoing passion and love for Christ, something that found expression in the life of Zinzendorf himself. Born in 1700 into Austrian nobility, he came early under godly family influences and soon came to a saving knowledge of Christ. His early missionary interest was evidenced in his founding, with a fellow student, what he called “The Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed” for the spreading of Christ’s kingdom in the world.
He was not only host but also the first leader of the Moravian believers, and he himself made visits overseas in the interests of the gospel. “I have one passion, and it is Him, only Him,” was his central chord and it sounded through the more than two thousand hymns he wrote.
William Wilberforce, the great evangelical English social reformer, wrote of the Moravians:
They are a body who have perhaps excelled all mankind in solid and unequivocal proofs of the love of Christ and ardent, active zeal in his service. It is a zeal tempered with prudence, softened with meekness and supported by a courage which no danger can intimidate and a quiet certainty no hardship can exhaust.
A full theological understanding of our motivation in mission and an adequate grasp of what we believe is not enough. If there is no passionate love for Christ at the center of everything, we will only jingle and jangle our way across the world, merely making a noise as we go.
Courage in the Face of Danger
As Wilberforce indicated, a further feature of the Moravians was that they faced the most incredible of difficulties and dangers with remarkable courage. They accepted hardships as part of the identification with the people to whom the Lord had sent them. The words of Paul, “I have become all things to all men” (1 Cor 9:22 NIV), were spelled out with a practicality almost without parallel in the history of missions.
Most of the early missionaries went out as “tentmakers,” working their trade (most of them being artisans and farmers like Dober and Nitschmann) so that the main expenses involved were in the sending of them out. In areas where White domination had bred the façade of White superiority (e.g., Jamaica and South Africa) the way they humbly got down to hard manual work was itself a witness to their faith. For example, a missionary named Monate helped to build a corn mill in the early days of his work in the eastern province of South Africa, cutting the two heavy sandstones himself. In so doing, he not only amazed the people among whom he was working but was enabled to “chat” the gospel to them as he worked.
To go to such places as Surinam and the West Indies meant facing disease and possible death; the early years took their inevitable toll. In Guyana, seventy-five out of the first 160 missionaries died from tropical fevers, poisoning, and such. The words of a verse from a hymn written by one of the first Greenland missionaries express something of the fiber of their attitude: “Lo through ice and snow, one poor lost soul for Christ to gain; Glad, we bear want and distress to set forth the Lamb once slain.”
The Moravians resolutely worked to learn new languages without many of the modern aids, and numbers of them went on to become outstandingly fluent in them.
Tenacity of Purpose
We finally note that many Moravian missionaries showed a tenacity of purpose that was of a very high order, although it must immediately be added that there were occasions when there was a too hasty withdrawal in the face of a particularly problematical situation (e.g., early work among the Aborigines in Australia in 1854 was abandoned suddenly because of local conflicts caused by a gold rush).
The Moravians resolutely worked to learn new languages without many of the modern aids, and numbers of them went on to become outstandingly fluent in them.
One of the most famous Moravian missionaries, known as the “Eliot of the West,” was David Zeisberger. From 1735, he labored for sixty-two years among the Huron and other tribes. One Sunday morning in August 1781, after he had preached from Isaiah 64:8, the church and compound were invaded by marauding bands of Indians. In the subsequent burnings, Zeisberger lost all his manuscripts of Scripture translations, hymns, and extended notes on the grammar of Indian languages. But like William Carey, who was to undergo a similar loss in India years later, Zeisberger bowed his head in quiet submission to the providence of God and set his hand and heart to the work again.
Of course, Moravians had their weaknesses. They concentrated more on evangelism than on the planting of local churches and they were consequently weak on developing Christian leadership. They centered their approach on “the missionary station,” even giving them a whole succession of biblical place names, such as Shiloh, Sarepta, Nazareth, Bethlehem, etc.
Despite all this, the words of J. R. Weinlick bring home the all-pervading lesson we have to learn from the Moravians today. “The Moravian Church was the first among Protestant churches to treat this work as a responsibility of the Church as a whole (emphasis mine), instead of leaving it to societies or specially interested people.” 
RETURN TO LESSON 8: Pioneers of the World Christian Movement
The Hundred-Year Prayer Watch Jason Hubbard
Dr. Jason Hubbard is director of International Prayer Connect, a global prayer network with the vision to “Exalt Jesus, catalyzing united prayer across nations, denominations, and generations for the fulfillment of the Great Commission.”
In the early 1700s, several persecuted Protestant families fled to an estate in southeast Germany, where they were protected by a wealthy aristocrat, Count Zinzendorf. He encouraged them to build a small community on his estate, naming the community Herrnhut, which means “the watch of the Lord.”
The people of this young community experienced tensions, disputes, and controversies. At one point Zinzendorf went from home to home, begging the community members to forgive one another, practice reconciliation, and grow in love for one another. As a part of resolving the community dispute, they signed what they called the “Brotherly Agreement,” in which they each dedicated their lives to serving Jesus Christ.
A few months later, the Moravians experienced a powerful visitation of the Holy Spirit during a communion service. It was described as a “baptism of love.” They sensed the Holy Spirit invite them to continuous, united prayer.
Children Lead the Way
Zinzendorf had a special love for children and youth since he had encountered and experienced God a great deal in his youth. He spent significant time discipling the children and praying for God’s Spirit to fill them. One of the children, an eleven-year-old girl had spent three days in prayer. On the last night, she was filled with indescribable joy at one in the morning. She awakened her father, telling him, “Father, now I am a child of God.” Her father went the next morning to Zinzendorf and told him what had happened. When Zinzendorf heard the news that, in the same night, three other girls also had wept for grace in prayer, he called them all to himself and prayed with them. These children along with the adults began praying for a mighty move of the Holy Spirit.
Continual Prayer Begins
The Moravians began a continuous united prayer that initially started with twenty-four men and twenty-four women, each praying for one hour daily. They called this “hourly intercession” and continued in it for many days. Dozens more soon joined them. Most of them were simple, ordinary believers. This prayer chain continued, lasting over one hundred years.
These children along with the adults began praying for a mighty move of the Holy Spirit.
The Moravians did not pray in just one location. They prayed as they went about their normal lives in their homes, on walks, and during work breaks. They would often pray in groups of two or three during committed times of prayer. Their mission statement was “one on the field, one at home, one to pray, and one to go.”
What They Prayed
After continuing for several months in constant, hourly prayer, Zinzendorf helped focus their prayers by giving them a verse from Scripture, a watch-word to guide their prayers for the next day. Eventually, watchwords were compiled and published, one for each day of the year. It is now called Moravian Daily Texts. This helped them pray in agreement with one another in Scripture-based prayer. Zinzendorf also gathered the committed “hourly intercessors” once a week to share prayer points. Rather than simply praying for individual needs, they would cry out for other communities, for missionaries on the field, and for the gospel to go forth in power to reach the world’s remaining unevangelized parts.
As they continued in Christ-exalting prayer, God began to set apart some to go as missionaries. Moravians were some of the first Protestants involved in cross-cultural mission. They went to many more places around the globe than any other group of people in their day. These early missionaries helped to establish over five thousand missionary settlements around the world in a relatively short time. They also impressed other mission leaders, such as John Wesley and William Carey.
One of the first Moravian workers to be sent called out from the boat that was departing, a cry that was long remembered: “May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward of His suffering.” The steadfast devotion to the suffering lamb of God sustained the Moravian movement. They prayed and worked under the motto: “Our Lamb has conquered. Let us follow Him.” This reflected their joy and passion, which sustained their prayer and mission efforts.
RETURN TO LESSON 8: Pioneers of the World Christian Movement