The Enlightenment & Awakening Era · 1722-1815 · Saxony, then global
The Moravian Church at Herrnhut
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About This Movement
In 1722 a handful of families slipped over the Bohemian border into Saxony. The remnant of the Unity of the Brethren, which had survived underground for nearly a century after the Habsburgs outlawed the Czech reform church. Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf let them settle on his estate, the village they built was called Herrnhut, and after years of quarrelling among the refugees and the other seekers who joined them, a communion service on 13 August 1727 became the moment the community always afterwards dated its renewal from. What followed was extraordinary for a settlement of a few hundred people. A prayer watch kept in shifts around the clock, a congregation organized into 'choirs' by age and situation, a diary written up every single day, and thousands of ordinary members setting down their own life stories. From 1732 they began sending missionaries — to the enslaved people of St Thomas, to Greenland, to Suriname, to the Native congregations of Pennsylvania and New York. On a scale nothing else in Protestantism came near: a village of a few hundred people sending out more missionaries in twenty years than the whole of Protestant Europe had sent in two centuries.
Sources
- The Herrnhut congregational record: Gemein-Diarium (daily diary), Brotherly Agreement (12 May 1727), the 13 August 1727 communion account, choir records, the Losungen (printed annually since 1731) (primary) — A community writing itself down daily. The Unity Archives are largely untranslated.
- The Lebenslaeufe: thousands of member memoirs, incl. women's (selection in Faull, Moravian Women's Memoirs, Syracuse, 1997) and formerly-enslaved members' (Rebecca Protten's letters and memoir materials) (primary) — An unusually deep record of ordinary voices.
- Zinzendorf's corpus: discourses, litanies, hymns (primary) — Zinzendorf's own writings, kept distinct from the congregation's communal record. The excesses of the Sifting Time (1743-50) are named and corrected in the community's own records.
- Mission diaries: St Thomas (from 1732; Friedrich Martin's diaries; the 1739 enslaved converts' petition-letters), Greenland, Shekomeko/Bethlehem Native congregations; Oldendorp's Historie (1777) (primary) — The converts' words survive only as recorded by missionaries, within contexts of slavery and dispossession.
- Craig Atwood, Community of the Cross (Penn State, 2004), with Jon Sensbach, Rebecca's Revival (Harvard, 2005) (secondary) — Sensbach's book recovers Rebecca Protten's story.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 7, 'Evangelical awakenings in the North Atlantic world' (Ward), with 'Continental Protestant Europe' (Lehmann) (reference) — Both are a direct fit for this movement.