The Moravian Revival at Herrnhut

The people who filled Herrnhut had been running for a hundred years. They were the spiritual children of Jan Hus, the Bohemian preacher burned at Constance in 1415, and of the Unitas Fratrum, the Unity of the Brethren, organized in 1457, sixty years before Luther. After the Protestant defeat at White Mountain in 1620 their church was crushed and their worship outlawed. Small families kept the faith in secret for generations and called themselves the hidden seed.

In 1722 a carpenter named Christian David began leading them out. He walked them across the Moravian border into Saxony, to land belonging to a twenty-two-year-old nobleman, Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf. They felled the first tree on June 17, 1722, and built a village on a hill called the Hutberg. They named it Herrnhut, which means the Lord's Watch, a place under God's protection, and a place where a watch is kept.

Within four years it was a mess. About three hundred people had gathered there from mismatched traditions, Moravian Brethren, Lutherans, Reformed, Separatists, Schwenkfelders, and they fought over baptism, predestination, and who had the right to lead. One man was teaching that Zinzendorf himself was the beast of Revelation. The count gave up his post at the Saxon court and moved into the village to deal with it in person.

He went house to house. For weeks he visited, listened, argued, and prayed with families one at a time. On May 12, 1727, the whole community adopted what they called the Brotherly Agreement, a written covenant to stop quarreling, to bear with each other, and to live as one people. Everything that followed came after that document, not before it.

Then the summer turned strange. On August 5 the count stayed up praying through the night with about a dozen men. On August 10 the Berthelsdorf pastor, Johann Andreas Rothe, was overcome in the middle of a service and the meeting ran on until midnight. Something was already moving before the day everyone remembers.

On Wednesday, August 13, 1727, the community walked the mile down to the parish church at Berthelsdorf for communion. Two young men who had been at odds went in together. Zinzendorf's own account says the congregation left the church hardly knowing whether they belonged to earth or to heaven, they had, he wrote, learned to love. Moravians have called that morning their Pentecost ever since. It is worth saying plainly that the record of it is the community's own: Zinzendorf's account, the congregation's diary, and the lives written by people who were there. No outsider wrote it down.

Two weeks later they did something about it. On August 26 twenty-four men and twenty-four women agreed to take one hour each, around the clock, so that prayer at Herrnhut would never stop. Their text was Leviticus 6:13, the fire that must not go out. By the community's own records the hourly intercession went on for generations; the famous line about a hundred years without a break is Moravian tradition rather than a verified count, but the practice itself is thoroughly documented.

The praying pushed them outward almost immediately. In 1732 Leonard Dober and David Nitschmann sailed for St. Thomas in the Caribbean to reach enslaved Africans; in 1733 Christian David and two companions went to Greenland. Dober and Nitschmann said they were willing to sell themselves into servitude if that was the only way in, the willingness is real and documented, and the sale itself never actually proved necessary, so the beloved version of the story goes one step further than the record does. Within about thirty years this village of a few hundred had sent out more than two hundred missionaries.

One of the people they reached was John Wesley. Moravians were on his ship to Georgia in 1735, and when a storm split the mainsail and the English passengers screamed, the Moravians went on singing; Wesley never forgot it. In Savannah, August Gottlieb Spangenberg asked him whether he knew Jesus Christ. Back in London, a Moravian named Peter Bohler pressed him further, and on May 24, 1738, Wesley's heart was strangely warmed at Aldersgate Street. That August he traveled to Herrnhut to see the place for himself.

The revival never really ended; it changed shape. Zinzendorf was banished from Saxony in 1736 and spent eleven years abroad planting Moravian settlements. The community also went through a strange stretch in the 1740s, sometimes called the Sifting Time, when their devotion to Christ's wounds turned extravagant and sentimental, Zinzendorf himself later called it out and pulled it back. Herrnhut's honest history includes that correction, and the movement was healthier for it.