On Easter morning in 1732 a group of young men from the Herrnhut community walked out to the burial ground before first light and said their confession of faith there among the graves. What began as their own devotion became the congregation's, then the church's, and Moravian congregations across the world have kept it every Easter morning since without a break.
The service has two halves and a walk between them. It opens inside the church while it is still dark, with the minister and congregation answering one another through the first part of the litany. Then everybody goes out, in procession, to the burial ground, and the second half is said there as the sun comes up. The physical movement is the argument: the confession about resurrection is not made in a building but standing on top of the people the claim concerns.
Two details give the service its character. The dead of the congregation from the past year are named, so the litany is always about particular people and not only about a doctrine. And the burial ground itself is laid out flat and uniform, with identical stones set level with the ground, because Moravian practice holds that the dead should be indistinguishable from one another in the ground whatever they were above it. A visitor who arrives expecting a sunrise service of the general Protestant kind finds instead a doctrinal statement made in a graveyard, at speed, by a whole town.