The First Decade: 1728–1737

Abstract

The story of the English Evangelical Revival begins in Central Europe. In 1722, three men, awakened by the revivalist Christian David, left their native Moravia with their families and made their way into Saxon Upper Lusatia, eventually settling on the newly-purchased Berthelsdorf estate of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf. The exiles who established Herrnhut were descendants of the Unitas Fratrum or Church of the Bohemian Brethren. The gathering of the congregation for Holy Communion in the parish church at Berthelsdorf gained a renewed sense of unity. This quasi-pentecostal experience, which completed and sealed the inauguration of the new community of Herrnhut, can be taken as the birth of the Moravian Church. Members of this distant community, including August Gottlieb Spangenberg, were to visit England four times during the ensuing decade, and continuing contacts resulted in the first Moravian congregations in England being established in 1742. Moravian involvement in English religious life sparked off the English Evangelical Revival.