Revolution

[InTheFlame]

Hmmm... this topic just keeps coming up in my life at the moment. The Moravians and their 24/7 prayer. Read the excerpt and note how long the 24/7 prayer session went..

​

God’s Happy People Revolution:
Count Zinzendorf and The Moravians
by Aaron White
(excerpted from the new REVOLUTION book by Credo Press)
​

Count Zinzendorf and the Moravians. Sounds like a good name for a rock band. So who were they?

Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf not only had an incredibly sweet name, but also a very influential and wealthy family. Born in Germany in 1700, Zinzendorf had an unusually deep faith as a child and a desire to influence the world for Jesus. This is precisely what he did, alongside a community of people called the Moravians, when a 100-year prayer meeting ended up changing the world for Christ.

Chairos

In August of 1722 a group of Moravian refugees asked a young Count Zinzendorf if they could settle a village on his estate. As a teenager Zinzendorf had formed The Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed with a number of his friends, all of them from families of great influence and power. The aim of the order was to spread the gospel of Christ around the world, and one of the vows they made to one another was to be kind to everyone. So Zinzendorf was honour-bound to allow the Moravians onto his estate. They founded the town of “Herrnhut”, which means “the Lord’s Watch.”

Unfortunately, once settled the community began to bicker and fight. After five years of this, Zinzendorf decided to step in. He instituted daily bible studies, settled disputes, and at one point brought everyone together to confess and apologise to one another.
Together they created the “Brotherly Agreement” which set out how Christians were supposed to live and treat one another. Everyone in the community had to sign the agreement and abide by its principles. This timely and godly intervention from Zinzendorf set the stage for one of the most incredible moves of God the world has yet seen.

Charisma

Religion is not about God or Christ or the Spirit, it is God and Christ and the Spirit. It consists of a living relationship with them.—Zinzendorf

On August 13, 1727 the entire community gathered for a prayer and communion service. The air was full of prayers of confession, repentance, and cries for unity. Then Holy Spirit came in power on everyone present.

The change was monumental. All previous differences were instantly washed away, and the community was united by the presence of God. This experience has come to be described the “Moravian Pentecost”.

Then non-stop prayer began. Twenty-four men and twenty-four women decided that they would keep the light of prayer going constantly in the community, and so they divided up the hours and began praying without ceasing. That prayer meeting lasted over a century. Adults and children, men and women, all came together to speak with God and to intercede for the world.

The Holy Spirit had gotten a hold of this community’s collective heart, and there was to be no stopping their drive to honour God through prayer and mission. This was because Zinzendorf himself stressed a Christ-centred “heart religion”, one that encouraged an emotional understanding of salvation and a personal relationship with the Trinity. He knew that a simple intellectual understanding of godly principles would never motivate anyone to change the world. You had to fall in love with God, and know that God was in love with you.

This connection with the Holy Spirit filled the Moravians with so much joy they came to be known as “God’s Happy People.”

Conviction

The noted historian, Kenneth Latourette, said of the Moravians:

Here was a new phenomenon in the expansion of Christianity, an entire community, of families as well as of the unmarried, devoted to the propagation of the faith. In its singleness of aim it resembled some of the monastic orders of earlier centuries, but these were made up of celibates. Here was a fellowship of Christians, of laity and clergy, of men and women, marrying and rearing families, with much of the quietism of the monastery and of Pietism but the spread of the Christian message as a major objective, not of a minority of the membership, but of the group as a whole. (www.zinzendorf.com/agolden.htm)

The conviction of the Moravians is pretty much what they are known for. A one hundred year non-stop prayer meeting is the definition of conviction as far as we’re concerned. In the two hundred years following the Moravian Pentecost, over three thousand evangelists were sent out from Herrnhut. These guys were passionate about seeing the world reached for Christ. Two Moravian missionaries are even believed to have sold themselves into slavery in order to pass the gospel onto other slaves in the West Indies.

No sacrifice was considered too great for these revolutionaries. They were sometimes known as “Mad Moravians” for their zeal and their willingness to go anywhere and try anything. Many Moravians were tortured and martyred as a result of their missionary work, but others would always come in to take their places. They literally took the gospel from one end of the world to the other, and all points in between.

Cadre

We have already mentioned how Zinzendorf set up the Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed as a teenager. Later on in life Zinzendorf re-launched this society, and its membership included some of the most influential leaders of Europe, such as the Archbishops of Canterbury and Paris, and the King of Denmark. The Order was united by a three-fold vow:
Be true to Christ;
Be kind to people;
Take the gospel to the nations

As a sign of their membership in the Order, each person had a ring which bore the inscription: “No man liveth unto himself.” (There are still people today who wear rings with this message on it, and even a few crazies who have joined the Order by having the words tattooed on their bodies.)

The Moravians were clearly also part of Zinzendorf’s cadre, and were remarkably effective at spreading his message of a Christ-centred life around the world. It was two Moravians, Leonard Dober and David Nitschmann, who went to a place called St. Thomas to live and preach amongst the slaves there. As mentioned above, it is likely that they had to sell themselves into slavery to accomplish this goal.

The community considered everyone to be equal, and allowed children and women to play a large role in worship, prayer and missions.

Anna Nitschmann was only twelve years old when her passion for the Lord caused her to be elected chief eldress of the community. She created the “single sisters”, a group of women who would commit themselves to Christ and put marriage second, and later was part of the “Pilgrim Congregation”, a group that would go anywhere in the world to share the Gospel. She herself went on mission all around the world, and also wrote thirty published hymns at a time when this was not considered the role of women. In 1757, she was married to Zinzendorf (whose first wife had died).

The Moravian missionaries had a massive impact on the Christian revivals in the 18th century, both in England and in the Americas. The Moravians’ cadre could probably include John and Charles Wesley. John Wesley was converted by Peter Boehler, a Moravian missionary in England, and both Wesleys had close relations with Zinzendorf and the Moravians for the rest of their lives.
Once again, the impact of the Moravians on the world, even through John and Charles Wesley, cannot be accurately measured on this side of heaven.

Consequences

Zinzendorf died in 1760, thirty-eight years after the founding of Herrnhut. By that time, the Moravians had already sent out 226 missionaries and baptized over 3000 converts. Thousands of missionaries were eventually sent out, and the number of converts, as well as the impact on the societies they evangelized, is truly incalculable.

William Carey is known as the “Father of Modern Missions”, but he himself understood that it was really the Moravians who began the Protestant World Missions movement. The Moravians sent missionaries to nearly every country in Europe, to Africa, the Americas, Russia, Asia, the Caribbean, and even Greenland.

It was not just where they went with the gospel, but also how they chose to communicate it. One story has Zinzendorf travelling into the wilderness in to meet with Native Americans, something other missionaries at the time were very leery of doing. In addition, the Moravians were not interested in competing with other Churches.

They would often set up Churches and then hand them over to whichever denomination was already working in the area, so that they could focus on getting the Word out to even more unreached people.

Every Protestant evangelical movement in existence today can probably trace their roots back in some way to the Moravians and their revolutionary zeal for missions. Every denominational history you read will probably feature, at some point during the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, the appearance of a crazy Moravian missionary who inspires or even converts a key leader in the movement.

Even today one of the most exciting new movements in youth prayer and missions has been directly influenced by Zinzendorf and the Moravians. 24-7 Prayer—which we will be profiling in the “Way Forward” section of this book REVOLUTION, available at armybarmy.com eStore) —cites the one hundred year prayer meeting as its inspiration for non-stop prayer, and looks to the Moravians’ passion for mission as a model for the future, and even scheduled its international gathering in Herrnhut, Germany.

Their commitment to prayer, their love for each other, and their undying desire to reach the whole world for Jesus sets the Moravians apart as true revolutionaries who have had a powerful and lasting impact on our world.