last week in week four we looked at two catholic missionary movies that changed the world the franciscans and the jesuits the franciscans were formed in the 13th century their medieval movement they are still with us today and the jesuits were formed in the 16th century in what we might call the early modern period and many people have asked when we think about early modern missions we think about the spread of the gospel around the world particularly to the jesuits and the franciscans and other catholic missionary orders people begin to put the dates together and say hey the protestant reformation started in the early 16th century where are my protestant missionaries and the reality is there weren't many and that's something that many protestants have to reckon with when we think about the the very exciting history of protestant missions which we're going to talk about in this session but why it started two centuries later than the earliest two centuries later than the catholics and there are many many reasons smither talks about this in the in the textbook but if i were to identify two if i were to boil down to two reasons why protestant missions started so late and again they became became a wonderful uh god-honoring wave of missionaries but it started so much later than the catholic missionary movement it's really theological and geopolitical theologically and that's perhaps the most important thing to identify most early protestants including martin luther not all but most early protestants starting with luther believed that the great commission in matthew 28 was only meant for the original twelve apostles jesus was talking to them that was their commission and they obeyed and as we know from church tradition we talked about it a little bit in the earlier weeks those 12 apostles went north south east and west as far as they could humanly go perhaps as far east as india with saint thomas and as far west as spain so they went everywhere and luther you know 1500 years after that commission is given said they did it i'm here in germany the gospels come to us in germany which is way far away from jerusalem the original apostles obeyed that commission it was a specific time and place and that's what most protestants believed and sort of coupled with that perhaps less uh less theologically uh um common for everyone but also one of those things that was there this idea of you know if god is going to redeem or save other peoples in other places he's going to do it by his providence he's sovereign he can do it without us so let's just let god do those things there wasn't this urgency to go and be participant in that we'll talk about how that was confronted by william carey a little bit later so first is theological this idea that the great commission is not for everyone it was a specific time and place and it was obeyed but the second one we also have to consider in in connection with that is is it's a geopolitical reason the reality is is that the earliest adapters to this age of exploration this moment where there is significant ship building significant global trade significant exploration that was pioneered by the spanish and the portuguese and both of those were catholic nations on the atlantic coast so there's a reason why they they were jesuits and franciscans on their ships because they were catholic nations two protestant nations who would later get in this game were the british and the dutch but they would get in the game several centuries later so that's part it's a geopolitical thing when you think about the fact that process information happened in central europe in germany there are no seaports there they didn't they couldn't just hop on a ship and had to be a missionary somewhere they were an inland landlocked movement originally so there's both a theological reason and geopolitical reason why mission started so late as the textbook references there was a trickle in the 17th century trickle in the 18th century a trickle in the 17th century um i'm not aware of any there may have been some in the 16th century with a trickle in the 17th century the textbook identifies a few of those but basically nothing really happens to the 18th centuries you have almost two centuries of protestantism and there's been very little missionary activity when as we know from last week catholic missionaries are going to the ends of the earth and aggressively discipling and preaching the gospel and sacrificing their lives you have two centuries of catholic missions remarkable catholic missions before the protestant ways gets going so this week we're going to talk about that protestant wave and we're actually going to look at one of the proto movements one of the the movement before the movement and and i i debated a lot do we talk about the modern missionary movement and really emphasize the big famous movement in the 19th century or do we talk about the early wave that numerically wasn't the biggest but i would argue sort of historically was the most consequential and i'll explain why that's the direction we're going to go partially because the textbook does a great job covering an entire long chapter on the 19th century in this great era of missions for protestants but i'm going to drill down on something that the textbook only gives probably a page to and i i argue it's less well it's known vaguely but we're going to dive deep into the moravian missionary movement in this lecture in the next lecture we'll talk about the impacts kind of how that wave had that domino knocked down many many more dominoes and kind of see the connections and then finally we'll end with a case study which is uh going to be a painful case today i'll just warn you a painful thing to grapple with and think about so the moravian missionary movement let's begin there in the year 1700 right almost two centuries after the advent of the protestant reformation there's a young man named ludwig von zindendorf and he was born to a high noble family in central new york what would be now modern-day germany but it was the holy roman empire then very high noble and he was raised in a devout lutheran home and i clarify this even further he was deeply influenced by his grandmother who was a pietist and pietists you may be very familiar the pietist movement was a renewal movement within the lutheran church they weren't their own church they were lutherans but it was a renewal movement in the lutheran church that really emphasized your heart your individual transformation and sort of heart religion over an intellectualized cold dead faith so pietist emphasized rigorous bible study personal piety small group bible study they would help organize small groups within pre-existing lutheran churches it was a renewal movement they're all lutherans there's a renewal movement in germany zundadorf's zinsendorf's grandmother was a pietist and his godfather was one of the founders of the pietist movement so he was deeply formed by this pietistic lutheranism and this emphasis of religious affections and personal pies he was raised discipled well his father died when he was young so he was raised by a number of other family members and he went to a university in hala in germany which was the uh center of the pietist movement it was it was uh some several famous most famously august frank was the uh leader of german pietism and he was zinzendorf's mentor right so he was schooled deeply in this at home and he goes to university and really gets initiated in this thing while he's in university and this should feel kind of eerily similar right to john wesley a few decades later at oxford he's schooled in this pietist uh religious orientation he joins a student group called the order of the grain of the mustard seed right these young students who are committed to personal holiness committed to world missions but he knows as any noble wood at the time that his life calling was to be uh was to work for the government he was going to work at court he was being trained to be a nobleman in the holy roman emperor's court and he felt called the mission he really felt this tug so he ends his studies at the age of 2021 and he decides he's going to buy a royal you know a noble estate home he bought his grandmother's estate so he he's 20 21 you know a wealthy man he's a noble he buys his state home and he kind of goes back and forth between his home in the country and doing work in the court but he still feels deeply inspired and called to mission something he knows he can't do but he really wants to do and his life would change the next year in 1722 when unbeknownst to him a group of 10 protestant refugees from moravia which is modern-day czech republic show up at his estate asking for help it was six adults four children and the caretaker of his property said yeah you guys can stay here you're fine and just keep in mind right we're in the 18th century at this point the wars of religion have ended and europe has been divided up into protestant and catholic states so the area he's in germany is protestant it's lutheran and he's in eastern germany right on the border what's not modern day czech republic moravia is right they're like neighboring uh they're bordering states but there are protestants there who are religious refugees they're suffering persecution and they're leaving and going to a lutheran area and they're asking for help his caretaker of his property allows them to come he's riding home he sees them he introduces himself and he feels his immediate spiritual connection with this group of foreign religious refugees they didn't have the same language right they were czech they were slavic people and he's a german speaker but he feels his connection and then they begin saying hey we need to invite our friends he said yeah you're welcome to stay here i have all this land i'm a single guy in my early 20s so moravian refugees and again they're from an old protestant route in that area of central europe begin coming and over a five four five year period the group grows from 10 to 300 moravians settling in what they would later call hernhut which is uh which means under the lord's watch right they created this small community zinzendorf says you guys can have the land i'll help you establish a new place to live you as refugees and he encourages them they're all by trade craftsmen they're carpenters they're builders they begin building homes building churches building schools cincinnath is very generous to them and there's this refugee community that begins the word begins to spread and this is a time again where if you aren't of the if you're a religious minority in any european state you have a very very difficult life so they would often religious refugees are are moving if you're a protestant in the catholic place you're trying to move to a catholic nation you had lots of uh english uh refugees in the netherlands because there is more freedom of religion there you end up with a lot of religious refugees during this time they begin to swell so you end up with like separatists reformed anabaptists even some heretics ending up in hernh in this community because zizendorf is welcoming all of them it's this it's this eclectic bunch of refugees most of them are moravians this this group of what we might now say czech protestants there mostly artisans mostly carpenters and and there becomes scissors had this vision what if we could have this intentional christian community it's this it's this beautiful collection of refugees but as the community grows there begins to be dissension in the community there begins to be something of a breakdown they reached a critical mass where they couldn't really govern themselves they had different languages different religious traditions they all just began coming there it wasn't an actual town they're sort of creating a town and zizendorf feels like the entire experiment may five years in just implode things are not working in fact there was one there's one heretic from some neighboring state he was actually a heretic and he had they'd let him come in because they let anyone come in and he began inciting the people at hernhood against zizendorf who let them stay there right so it's this tenure situation and in 1727 at the age of 27 zenizendorf and his wife make a pivotal decision they decide to leave their manor house their mansion on the estate and move in to hernheit into the village of the refugees they decide to come there and live with them and be among them as this is what proposed is a series of sort of a community covenant they're all going to embrace if they're going to live there and he leads by example there's this remarkable moment where the whole thing shifted and there's a a group that's galvanized around this decision we are a religious community we ultimately love jesus and we need to be a united brethren during this time you know scissors dwarf is actually a lutheran there are many other people with other denominations there and then most the moravians are from a protestant you know a bohemian protestant denomination that's quite old but they created a new church later called the moravian church which is something of a misnomer because not all of them were ethnically from there that was where the core was from but they they created a church the uni the unity of the brethren that was the the name the united states everything changed for them on august 13 1727 where they had a prayer meeting and this is part of zinzendorf trying to bring some sort of spiritual scaffolding into this community they had a prayer meeting and they later referred to it as their own pentecost remarkable things happen in this prayer meeting there's this sense of great unity but also a sense of mission that they have and there are two things that i think are fascinating about this prayer meeting on august 13 17 27 first of all it never ended when i say what i mean by that is they decided they were going to do a prayer watch as a community that at least one person's community was praying every hour of the day every day of the week and it lasted for 100 years so if you think there are several 24 7 prayer movements that all began like in the 90s do you think that's impressive let's see who's still doing it in uh the 22nd century and you come back to me the moravians in this small refugee community in eastern germany collection of refugees they begin this prayer meeting and they don't stop praying and this is a community of several hundred don't think like that is several hundred people they're all so committed to being unified together in prayer as a community not only unified them as a people not only created this sense of a shared spiritual inheritance in dna that god was bringing them together for a particular purpose but it also kicked off one and i would argue of the most consequential missionary movements in all of world history it does not have the same numbers of the franciscans or the jesuits and it does not have the same longevity right the moravians still exist but they are not the main mission force in the world in the 21st century 300 years later but we'll talk about how consequential it was in just a moment but out of that prayer meeting there began to be this sense of not only is god healing divisions within a small refugee community and bringing people together he is pointing them and positioning them outward with this deep heart for the rest of the world at a time where protestant catholics were still fighting in europe and most protestants didn't believe that missions to the rest of the world was necessary it was subordinate good at best to making sure your nation is sufficiently protestant or sufficiently catholic or sufficiently reformed there was still a lot of upheaval from the reformation so that the sense was maybe even if missions is a good thing we have so much work to do to disciple these former catholics in our borders but i will linking all the way back to week one note that it's interesting that the moravian movement at hernhut was a group of refugees there's a diaspora movement there are people who are at a place but it wasn't their home and i always i think when we look at this we need to recognize that diaspora peoples are always poised uniquely to be sent out on mission because they're already already gone they've already left somewhere a few years after this pentecost moment that brings great unity but also a sense of mission in 1731 zinzendorf was on a diplomatic mission keep in mind he's still a noble at court in the holy roman empire meaning he does diplomatic work he's by trade a noble politician if you will he's doing this on the side he meets a former african slave from saint thomas in copenhagen this former slave had become a christian and in the early days any safe who became a christian was manumitted they shut that down pretty quick but that was the original scheme in these early in these early uh slave situations he meets him and zinzendorf is so compelled by meeting this former slave in copenhagen he go he begins telling the story back at hernhood and saying i think we need to send missionaries there and two members two young men in their 20s of the group feel that call and they volunteer themselves to go but the only problem was and i've shared this before those who took leadership 15 will know a bit of this story in the west indies whether it's the french or the british or the danish they didn't allow missionaries on those plantation islands because they did not want the slaves becoming christians and becoming free of becoming freedmen he didn't want missionaries messing around with their lucrative sugar plantation so there is a a challenge for these would-be missionaries and what they decided to do uh and the most famous is leonard dobert he decided i'm going to sell myself into slavery as an indentured servant so i can get on to saint thomas and i'm a i'm a potter by trade or i'm a woodworker by trade so i can work to be on the island use my skills for the plantation owner and also reach the slaves because i'll be in their status i don't know if i said this in the in leadership 15 the legend often goes and they got on the ship and they were never seen again they actually were seen again they had some great hardships and great triumphs on st thomas those first two moravian missionaries who sent out in 1732 but it was such a galvanizing thing for this community of refugees imagine a few hundred they've only been together for 10 years they've been praying together for five years and they say we're gonna go to the most we're in the middle of europe they're not near a seaport we're going to send two of our young men all the way across the atlantic as slaves to saint thomas to reach slaves it's just a remarkable inspiring story of this missional zealand passion they had one thing i have to throw in there's just fun about the moravians they had two ways of making decisions and they were connected right you had to submit it to the community so there are actually two who volunteered and then they only let one go and the other way after the community kind of discerns and prays then they casted lots that was how they made decisions so they cast lots and lettered over they're like you can go and the other guy they said you have to stay he eventually was able to go a few years later but but dover takes another another one of the an older man in the community with him they go to two of them go but one of the originals was not able to go so the moravians cast lots they think about the franciscans who had all sorts of bizarre ways of making decisions walk around in circles and just go that way and see where the lord leads you moravians are kind of like that so 1732 they send out their first two missionaries and that begins and i love it when zin zinzendorf prays for them he lays his hands on this great account he says let yourself always be led by the spirit of jesus amen that was the the moravian way be led by the spirit and go but this would kick off what many would call the golden age this golden moment in moravian missions that was really unprecedented in the protestant world for about a decade right they began praying in 1727 1732 five years ago they sent out their first two missionaries on this kind of crazy i met a slave i was really compelled he lives over there in the in the caribbean we should send some guys there kind of one of those things but let me just run down the decade that followed of their missionary sending and keep in mind it's a few hundred religious refugees basically who are squatters on zinzendorf's noble estate that he's moved into and he's sort of organizing as this missionary uh lean missionary machine 1732 they send missionaries to the west indies 1733 they send missionaries to the eskimos of greenland 1734 they send missionaries to reach native americans in georgia and eskimos in finland 1735 they sent missionaries to suriname in south america 1736 they send missionaries guinea in west africa 1737 they sent missionaries to a leper colony in south africa 1738 they sent missionaries to the jewish quarter of amsterdam 17 39 they said missionaries algeria 1740 this is only eight years they said missionaries to north american reach native americans to sri lanka to romania and to istanbul in those 10 years they do more in the coming decades but in just 10 years this fledgling refugee community sends people literally to the ends of the earth places they have no business going they have no like it's not like the jesuits catching a ride i'm not demeaning them not like the jesuits catching a ride on a heavily armed portuguese ship going to do trade in south india these guys are wanderers and nobodies who have no connections no government backing them no colonial muscle they're just going but in this golden era in this sort of initial burst and again it's not huge volume but just think about this in a community of 600 people that includes children there were 70 full-time missionaries sent out of there to the ends of the earth so more than one in like one in nine you're in this refugee community one in nine go to the foreign mission field and they don't go too easy cities think about the reach of the eskimos in finland like what on earth the greenland it is a it is a stunning thing that they did and there's this stunning uh missionary zeal that was formed in that diasporic refugee community led by zinzendorf and he funded and organized and he actually started several other communities like that several in europe and actually several in north america he traveled people say scissors had this estate but he traveled parsley as a diplomat but parsi as a mostly later in life as a missionary mobilizer mobilizing these moravian missionaries all over the world in 1760 when zinzendorf died the moravian experiment at hernhood had was 28 years old they've been gone for 28 years and they had sent out 226 missionaries so there's no missionary move in all of world history missionary moves to send out more missionaries but relative to the size of the community to the number of missionaries they sent there's never been a movement like the moravians never the only one i'd say was jesus original two apostles they you know they were 11 out of 12 became missionaries judas didn't but everyone else became missionary so they were almost perfect other than that the gap between the sending community and those scent was much larger this one is just it's hard to imagine and i actually am attaching a pdf of a christian history magazine issue that's all about the moravians so you can learn so much more about them their prayer meeting about some of the early missionaries there's so much to learn about about that community and just imagine what kind of community does that what kind of people are like that where they become these crazy they're not cosmopolitan people from london they lived in a rural refugee commune in the on the border of eastern germany and czech republic that's crazy when we think about the legacy of zinzendorf and the moravians it's hard to overstate it but in the next lecture we're going to talk about how uh two of the dominoes that were knocked over almost inadvertently by this moravian missionary movement but i'll close by reading a quote from william wilberforce who lived the generation after the initial moravian movement but he was deeply inspired among among many other english protestants and he said this about the moravians they are our body who have perhaps excelled all mankind in solid and unequivocal proofs of the love of christ and of ardent active zeal in his service it is a zeal tempered with prudence softened with meekness and supported by a courage which no danger can intimidate in a quiet certainty no hardship can exhaust my prayer is that we as we hear these words and as we read and ponder the moravian missionary movement that that would be true of us wherever we are that we would have that zeal for christ's service that we would have that courage which no danger can intimidate that we would have that quiet certainty that no hardship can exhaust let's pray lord i thank you for the moravian missionary movement i thank you for the leadership of zinzendorf but more than anything the work of your holy spirit that permeated that prayer meeting on august 13th and 17-27 we thank you for all that you did 300 years ago in that community and all the ways we are still benefiting from their legacy of love for you and love for their neighbor i pray that you would give us that zeal i pray that we would be deterred not by hardship we would not be deterred by any fear or any love of ourselves but i pray that we would take their example the heart and we'd go to the ends of the earth jesus name amen [Music]