Herrnhut, a small village in Saxony founded in 1722, is the birthplace of the renewed Moravian Church, and its importance is out of all proportion to its size.
A refuge and a renewal
The village was founded on the estate of Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf as a refuge for Protestant exiles from Moravia and Bohemia, spiritual heirs of the pre-Reformation reformer Jan Hus. Under Zinzendorf's leadership the community, at first fractious, underwent in 1727 an experience of reconciliation and spiritual renewal that Moravians regard as the founding event of their renewed church, marked by a communion service and followed by a round-the-clock prayer watch said to have continued for a hundred years. The name Herrnhut means "the Lord's watch" or "under the Lord's care".
The mission
From this base the community began, from 1732, the first sustained large-scale Protestant missionary effort, sending members overseas to the Caribbean, Greenland, the Americas, Africa and beyond while the whole settlement still numbered only a few hundred people, a ratio of missionaries to members unmatched in Protestant history. The Moravians' warm, Christ-centred piety also influenced others; John Wesley's encounter with Moravians was formative for the rise of Methodism.
The Daily Texts and the quiet village
Herrnhut still publishes the Daily Texts, a book of scripture verses drawn by lot, which has appeared every year since 1731 and now comes out in dozens of languages worldwide. The village remains a Moravian centre, and its burial ground, called God's Acre, is laid out in flat identical stones because the dead are held to be equal before God, a plain expression of the community's ideals.