Philipp Jakob Spener

Philipp Jakob Spener was the senior Lutheran minister in Frankfurt when he concluded that his church had sound doctrine and cold members. In 1670 he began inviting people to his house twice a week to read the Bible together and talk about it — the collegia pietatis, or gatherings for piety, which put an open Bible in the hands of laypeople instead of leaving it in the pulpit. Five years later he set out the program in Pia Desideria: more Scripture among ordinary Christians, real practice of the priesthood of all believers, Christianity as life rather than argument, gentleness in controversy, and preachers trained to build faith rather than display learning. It made him famous and it made him enemies; theologians accused him of undermining the church, and he moved on to Dresden and then Berlin under pressure. The movement he started fed the Halle institutions, the Moravians, and through them the Protestant missionary era. He was godfather to Zinzendorf.