Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760) was a German nobleman and Pietist who gave refuge to persecuted Moravian believers on his estate in Saxony. Under his leadership their village, Herrnhut, became a center of prayer and renewal that sent out missionaries to enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, the Inuit of Greenland, Native Americans, and many others. The Moravians were the first Protestant church to treat world missions as the work of the whole community, and their example shaped John Wesley, William Carey, and the modern missionary movement.
A Young Nobleman With One Passion
Zinzendorf was born in Dresden on May 26, 1700, into a powerful family of Austrian and Saxon nobility. His father died when he was an infant, and he was raised largely by his grandmother, Henriette Katharina von Gersdorf, a devout and educated woman connected to the Pietist movement. Pietism was a renewal movement within German Lutheranism, the church shaped by Martin Luther, that stressed a personal, heartfelt relationship with Jesus, Bible study in small groups, and a faith that showed itself in love and action.
At age ten he was sent to the school of August Hermann Francke in Halle, the heart of the Pietist world. He wasn’t popular there, but he was already forming prayer groups with other boys. With a few friends he founded the “Order of the Mustard Seed,” whose members pledged to be true to Christ, to be kind to others, and to spread the gospel. Its emblem showed Jesus crowned with thorns, with a motto that echoed the prophet Isaiah: “His wounds our healing.”
Isaiah 53:5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
That focus on the suffering Savior marked Zinzendorf for the rest of his life. His family pushed him toward law and government, so he studied at Wittenberg and then took the customary tour of Europe. In an art gallery in Düsseldorf he stood before Domenico Feti’s painting Ecce Homo (“Behold the Man”), which showed Christ crowned with thorns. The Latin inscription beneath it asked, in effect, “I suffered this for you; what are you doing for me?” Zinzendorf already followed Jesus, so the moment is better described as a rededication than a conversion, but he never forgot it. As he put it in a line his biographers loved to repeat, “I have but one passion: it is He, only He.”
Refugees on a Hill Called Herrnhut
In 1722 Zinzendorf bought the Berthelsdorf estate in eastern Saxony and married Countess Erdmuthe Dorothea Reuss, who would become a key partner in his ministry. That same year a carpenter named Christian David arrived with a small group of Protestant refugees from Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic. Zinzendorf let them build on a corner of his land, and they named the settlement Herrnhut, meaning “the Lord’s watch.”
Many of these refugees traced their spiritual roots to the Unity of the Brethren (Unitas Fratrum), a church formed in 1457 by followers of the Czech reformer Jan Hus. After the Catholic Habsburgs crushed Protestantism in Bohemia following the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, the Brethren were driven underground. A remnant kept the faith in secret for about a century, praying for the day their church would be renewed.
Herrnhut grew quickly, and not peacefully. Lutherans, Reformed believers, Anabaptist sympathizers, and Moravians all brought their own convictions, and by 1727 the community was torn by arguments. Zinzendorf took a leave from his government post, moved in, and went house to house, studying Scripture and praying with the residents. On May 12, 1727, the community agreed to a set of rules called the Brotherly Agreement, committing themselves to live together in love around Jesus.
The Moravian Pentecost and a Hundred-Year Prayer Meeting
What happened next became the defining memory of the Moravian Church. On August 13, 1727, the community gathered for Communion at the Berthelsdorf parish church. Those present described a powerful sense of the Holy Spirit’s presence, deep repentance, and reconciliation between people who had been quarreling for months. Moravians still remember the day as their “Pentecost.”
A few weeks later, twenty-four men and twenty-four women covenanted to pray in shifts, one hour each, so that prayer would rise to God around the clock. Others joined, and according to historians of the movement, the hourly intercession continued in some form for more than a hundred years. The Moravians took Paul’s words literally.
1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
This wasn’t prayer as an escape from the world. The Moravians prayed for the nations, and their prayers soon became plans. Months after the prayer watch began, Zinzendorf spoke to the community about places where no one had heard the gospel, and volunteers stepped forward immediately. If you’ve ever wondered whether prayer and action compete with each other, Herrnhut is a powerful answer: their prayer meeting became a launching pad.
Sent to the Ends of the Earth
In 1731 Zinzendorf traveled to Copenhagen for the coronation of the Danish king. There he met Anthony Ulrich, an enslaved man from the Danish colony of St. Thomas in the Caribbean, who described how his sister and others on the island longed to hear about God but had no one to teach them. Zinzendorf brought Ulrich’s story back to Herrnhut.
In 1732 two young men, a potter named Leonhard Dober and a carpenter named David Nitschmann, set out for St. Thomas. A popular story claims they planned to sell themselves into slavery to reach the enslaved, but historians find no evidence that they did. The real story is remarkable enough. Ordinary craftsmen, with little formal training, crossed an ocean to share Jesus with people the colonial world treated as property. Missionaries went to Greenland the following year, and over the next decades Moravians served in Suriname, South Africa, Labrador, and among Native American nations in Pennsylvania and Ohio. A phrase associated with these early missionaries became a Moravian watchword: that the Lamb who was slain would receive the reward of his suffering.
Revelation 5:9-10 And they sang a new song, saying: “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth.”
That vision of people from every tribe and nation drove the Moravians, and the story was never only about European missionaries. On St. Thomas, a formerly enslaved young woman named Rebecca, later known as Rebecca Protten, became one of the mission’s most effective evangelists. She walked rural roads to plantation quarters, teaching enslaved men and women about Jesus, and hundreds came to faith. When colonial authorities imprisoned her and the missionaries in the late 1730s, Zinzendorf arrived on the island in 1739 and pressed for their release. Rebecca later served among the Moravians in Germany and spent her final years in the Gold Coast, present-day Ghana. Some historians now call her a “mother of modern missions.”
A Spark for the Great Awakening
The Moravians also left a deep mark on the English-speaking world. In 1736 a young Anglican priest named John Wesley sailed to Georgia and watched a group of Moravians calmly sing hymns during a violent Atlantic storm while everyone else panicked. Their peace exposed his own lack of assurance. Back in London, the Moravian Peter Böhler counseled him to trust Christ alone, and in May 1738 Wesley felt his heart “strangely warmed” at a meeting on Aldersgate Street. Wesley later translated Zinzendorf’s hymn “Jesus, Thy Blood and Righteousness” into English. You can trace that thread in our lesson on the Great Awakenings and in Wesley’s own teaching on Christian perfection.
Zinzendorf himself traveled to Pennsylvania in 1741, where he tried to unite German-speaking Protestants and met with Iroquois leaders. On Christmas Eve 1741 he helped name the Moravian settlement of Bethlehem, which still bears that name today.
Exile, Excess, and Blind Spots
Zinzendorf’s life wasn’t smooth. His unusual community and blunt opinions made enemies, and in 1736 the Saxon government banished him. He spent years traveling between Germany, the Netherlands, England, and America, leading what he called a “pilgrim congregation.” In 1737 he was consecrated a bishop of the renewed Moravian Church.
The Moravians had real weaknesses too. During the 1740s, a period they later called the “Sifting Time,” devotion to the wounds of Christ in some communities drifted into strange, overly emotional language, and Zinzendorf was slow to rein it in. He eventually corrected the excesses, and the church recovered. More troubling to modern readers, the Moravians preached freedom in Christ to enslaved people without challenging slavery itself. Zinzendorf urged enslaved believers to obey their masters, and the mission itself later owned enslaved workers. Honest Christians can admire the Moravians’ courage while admitting that they, like every generation, had blind spots that Scripture should have corrected.
A Life Poured Out for Jesus
Zinzendorf died at Herrnhut on May 9, 1760. By the end of the century the small Moravian community had sent out hundreds of missionaries, a staggering number for a church of its size. When William Carey argued in 1792 that Christians should take the gospel to the world, he pointed to the Moravians as proof that it could be done. You’ll meet him in Lesson 2.
What made Zinzendorf matter wasn’t his title or his money. It was his settled conviction that knowing Jesus is worth more than anything else, and that such a Savior is worth telling the whole world about. Paul said it this way.
Philippians 3:7-8 But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ…
That single-minded love for Christ turned a quarreling refugee village into a praying, sending church. It still can. You don’t need a noble title to pray for the nations, welcome outsiders, or tell someone about Jesus. You simply need to let your heart be captured by the One who suffered for you.
The Takeaway
Count Zinzendorf was a German nobleman whose passion for Jesus turned his estate into a refuge for persecuted Moravian believers. After a powerful renewal in 1727, the community at Herrnhut began a prayer meeting that lasted a century and sent ordinary craftsmen and women around the world with the gospel. Zinzendorf had flaws and blind spots, but his life shows how prayer, community, and love for the crucified Christ can launch a missionary movement.
https://www.pursuegod.org/history-makers-of-world-missions/
