The Missionary Era · 1815-1880 · Switzerland, France, Netherlands, Germany
The Reveil & Inner-Mission Awakening
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About This Movement
After the Napoleonic wars a wave of personal religious awakening ran through the Protestant churches of Switzerland, France, the Netherlands and Germany — in Geneva against a comfortable rationalist establishment, in the Netherlands to the point of secession from the state church in 1834, everywhere with an insistence that faith had to be felt and not merely inherited. What distinguished it was what it built. Johann Hinrich Wichern's Rauhes Haus for street children in Hamburg (1833) grew into the Inner Mission, a whole programme of organized Christian social work. At Kaiserswerth in 1836 Theodor and Friederike Fliedner founded a deaconess motherhouse that trained women as nurses and teachers, and one of its visitors in 1851 was Florence Nightingale. By the time the generation was over, awakened piety in these countries had turned into a permanent network of hospitals, orphanages, schools and training houses.
Sources
- Geneva/French Reveil voices: Malan's Chants de Sion (1841); Adolphe Monod, Les Adieux (1856); Felix Neff's Alpine letters; Merle d'Aubigne's histories; Bourg-de-Four/Oratoire society records (primary) — Les Adieux was dictated on a deathbed, worth reading with that in mind; d'Aubigne writes advocacy history, not a disinterested account.
- The Dutch leg: da Costa, Bezwaren tegen den geest der eeuw (1823); Groen van Prinsterer's writings; the Afscheiding (1834) secession acts and persecution record (primary) — Real state pressure — fines and forced billeting on the separatist congregations — appears throughout, alongside the seceded churches' own minutes.
- German Inner Mission and the deaconess motherhouses: Wichern's Denkschrift (1849) and Rauhes Haus records; Fliedner's Kaiserswerth records (from 1836) - deaconess annals, training registers, sisters' correspondence (primary) — The motherhouse's own pen frames the sisters' record here, not the sisters' own unmediated voice.
- Timothy C. F. Stunt, From Awakening to Secession (T&T Clark, 2000), with Nicholas Hope, German and Scandinavian Protestantism 1700-1918 (OUP, 1995) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8: 'Christianity and the Creation of Germany' (Steinhoff), and David Bebbington's writings on the evangelical awakening (reference) — Its several national strands are kept distinct here by design, rather than merged into one composite story.