Moravian Church in America

Heritage

The Unitas Fratrum — the Unity of the Brethren — formed in Bohemia in 1457 among followers of the martyred Jan Hus, and has carried an episcopate since 1467, before Luther was born. Nearly destroyed by persecution, the hidden seed was renewed in 1722 when refugees settled at Herrnhut on Count Zinzendorf's Saxon estate; after a transforming communion in August 1727, the community began a prayer watch that continued unbroken for a century and, in 1732, sent its first missionaries to enslaved Africans in St. Thomas — launching Protestant missions as a movement six decades before William Carey. Moravians founded Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1741 and Salem, North Carolina in 1766, and evangelized Alaska's Yup'ik villages from 1885; RCMS 2020 rows for the three American provinces — Northern, Southern, and Alaska — sum to 154 congregations.

Theological family

Warm-hearted, Christ-centered Pietism within historic order: the crucified Savior at the center, doctrine held simply, and the famous rule of essentials and non-essentials — in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things love — lived as actual policy.

Who decides what

Episcopal in orders, conciliar in government: bishops serve as pastors of pastors while elected provincial synods govern; the American provinces belong to a worldwide Unity whose members now live mostly in Africa and the Caribbean.

What a first-time visitor would find

A visitor finds liturgical but unstuffy worship — strong congregational song from one of Protestantism's deepest hymn traditions, often with brass; lovefeasts of buns and coffee shared in worship; the Daily Texts, published continuously since 1731, on the kitchen tables; and at Easter, the sunrise service Moravians began in 1732, with the famous one at Winston-Salem gathering thousands.

What it has always cared about

Missions before missions were a movement; community — Bethlehem and Salem were whole towns ordered around the Lamb; music, from trombone choirs to hymnody; and fellowship across confessional lines, which Zinzendorf pursued a century early.

Its gift to the wider church

The heart-religion that lit other churches' fires: Moravians aboard a storm-tossed ship and Peter Böhler in London led John Wesley toward Aldersgate, where his heart was strangely warmed at a reading of Luther — so Methodism, and all that flowed from it, carries a Moravian spark; and their 1732 sending remains the template of every Protestant missionary society since.

Commonly confused with

With the Church of the Brethren and other German Brethren bodies, unrelated despite the shared word; with the Czech-Texan Unity of the Brethren, a sister heir of the same Hussite root treated separately on this map; and Moravia the place with the church — most American Moravians have no Czech ancestry.

Range of views inside it

The Northern and Southern provinces differ in culture and in current questions — including sexuality, where provinces have discerned separately; Alaska's Yup'ik congregations are their own world; the hymnal and the lovefeast bind them.

Where Moravian Church in America churches are on the map

30 Moravian Church in America congregations appear on The Church Map, across 9 states.

• North Carolina — 9
• Pennsylvania — 9
• New York — 3
• Wisconsin — 3
• Alaska — 2
• District of Columbia — 1
• Michigan — 1
• Minnesota — 1
• New Jersey — 1

Moments this body was part of

• 1735–1741 — Moravians: the first great missionary church

  Moravian settlers arrived in Georgia in 1735 and founded Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1741 as a base for missions to Native Americans and enslaved Africans — the first sustained Protestant missionary effort in the colonies. On the crossing to Georgia, their calm in a storm unsettled a young Anglican priest named John Wesley, whose heart-warming conversion at a Moravian meeting in 1738 lit the fuse of Methodism.

  A tiny refugee church discipled the founder of another tradition entirely — the traditions have been passing gifts to each other from the beginning.

• 1997–2009 — The healing documents

  On Reformation Day 1999 at Augsburg, the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, declaring that the sixteenth century's church-dividing condemnations on justification no longer apply — the World Methodist Council joined in 2006, and Reformed and Anglican bodies have since associated themselves with it. In the same years American churches signed full-communion agreements in a lattice: ELCA with the Presbyterians, Reformed and UCC (1997), with the Moravians (1999), with the Episcopal Church (2001), and with the United Methodists (2009).

  The argument that broke Western Christianity in 1517 was declared, by its own heirs, no longer church-dividing. Unity here arrived not as merger but as mutual recognition — churches remaining themselves and calling each other true.