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Discussion Forum : Articles and Sermons : Behold the Lamb, The Story of the Moravian Church, by Peter Hoover

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pastorfrin
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Joined: 2006/1/19
Posts: 1406


 Re: Behold The Lamb

Behold The Lamb
By Peter Hoover


Chapter 15
To The South

Bambey

Early in 1763 the community at Saron, thriving once more in the Saviour’s love, hosted three unusual guests. Black guests, and very shy, they came from a twenty-two day journey up the Saramakka River.

At first the guests, who knew some Indian words and English creole (the language used by slaves), did not talk much. They only said they came from large villages up the river where they planted yams and sugar cane, where they kept chickens and pigs, and found wild game in abundance. But the more they questioned them, the more convinced the believers at Saron became that they were the very men who had fallen on Saron earlier and destroyed it.23 Knowing this, they became immensely interested in them and tried to learn more.

What had brought about the change in the Bosneger’s attitude toward them? What did they know about God, and how could one get there?

Following the instructions their black visitors left them, Ludwig Dehne with two young brothers, Rudolf Stoll from Winterthur in Switzerland and Thomas Jones from England, left in 1765, to travel up the Saramakka River.

Several weeks travel upstream, having found their way through five sections of raging white water, the brothers reached the settlement where Abini, one of the men who had visited them, lived. In his diary Ludwig wrote:

On the 24’th of December, around two in the afternoon we arrived at the village where Abine lives. Roars and screams of joyful welcome, along with the firing of guns, followed us until we were inside one of the lodges. Close to it sat the council house. As soon as the elders had gathered there they summoned me. The head elder stood in the middle of the circle and spoke to all about what he had in mind for us and our work. Everyone was very happy and thanked him. After the meeting Abini came and invited us to live with him. We accepted his offer and I began to tell them about their Creator, and the one who loved them enough to give his blood for their peace. “Well,” he said, “You must be talking about our Gran Gado!”

“That is right,” I told him. “I am talking about the one who made heaven and earth, the one whom all men must honour and obey.” At this the Bosneger trembled and feared that their gods would be unhappy.

Several nights later a terrible roar echoed through the Bosneger village. No one knew where it came from, but the people did not doubt their gods were angry and staged a three day feast to pacify them. Even Ludwig, who had spent many years among the heathen, had never seen or heard anything like it. The Bosneger were not gentle, peace-loving people like the Arawaks. One could not even talk with them as to the stern Caribs. Pounding on drums, shouting in unearthly voices in unison, and dancing until they wallowed in the dirt, rolling their eyes back into their heads, the Bosneger worshipped cruel spirits and seemed in bondage to them. Women ruled the village, often through dark spiritual powers, and even little children took part in wild celebrations.

Unlike the Indians, the Bosneger (still remembering the horror of slavery) held no respect for white men. Some demanded guns from the brothers, and on not receiving them became angry. But Abini showed himself friendly and placed his grandson, a twelve-year-old boy named Schippio, into Rudolf Stoll’s care.

The brothers settled close to the village and began to plant peanuts. After two months Thomas Jones died, but Christ’s presence became ever more powerful. Arrabini, a leader among the Bosneger, began to question the power of their gods and show serious interest what the brothers had to say about the Saviour and his blood.

Early one morning Arrabini took a decorated wooden obeah (cult figure) and burned it to see what would happen. Then he took his gun, went down to the river and trained it on a lazy crocodile, worshipped by the villagers. “If you are really a god,” he told the crocodile, “I will not hit you. But if you are just an animal, I will shoot and kill you.”

A shot rang out and the crocodile dropped dead.

The whole village reacted in horror. “What will happen to us now?” the people wailed. “Arrabini has slain the body of a god!”

Before long Arrabini lay in his house, deathly sick. Everyone believed the gods had cursed him. The witch doctor cursed him too and said he could never have children again. But Arrabini recovered. When he found a Boma snake in his house one night (another supposed god) he killed it too, and a year later his wife gave birth to a little boy. They named him Isaak.

The unconverted villagers, led by their chief priestess, did what they could to hinder the brothers and drive them away. One man became possessed by a spirit identifying himself as Jesus, and tried to convince the villagers to listen to him instead of to Ludwig and Rudolf. But more and more began to hunger after the truth. Grego, the son of the chief priestess herself, began to come to the brothers’ evening meetings for Bible study and prayer. The Saviour touched his heart. With tears in his eyes he promised to go back to the village and tell everyone about Christ.

Thoni and Fonso, Grego’s friends, began to come, followed by a boy named Jessu, and with great joy, Rudolf noticed their hearts becoming tender before the Lamb as they learned how to read and write. When Schippio had a sore foot, an infected puncture wound, he prayed for it to get better. On his slate he wrote, “Jesus meki mi foette kom boen.” On the day Arrabini, the first believer among the Bosneger, received baptism in the name of Christ a great crowd of villagers converged upon the meeting with cutlasses, loaded guns, terrible shouts, and curses. But Arrabini, baptised Johannes, gave them a calm and beautiful testimony and the crowd faded away in fear. Schippio received baptism some time later as David, and Grego as Christian, followed by many more.

With Johannes Arrabini’s help the brothers built a community at Bambey on the Saramakka River. Once more they planted cassava and bananas. Once more they built a Saal and celebrated great love feasts in holy joy—not infrequently with visitors from the Saron Indian community they had once destroyed.

Continued:

 2008/7/16 21:36Profile
pastorfrin
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Joined: 2006/1/19
Posts: 1406


 Re: Behold The Lamb

Behold The Lamb
By Peter Hoover


Chapter 15
To The South

“Christ’s Sacred Nearness”

Johannes Arrabini, beloved leader of the Saramakkan Christians, became known in the communities of the rain forest as a quick and wise counsellor. When a careless man told him he did not fear hell because he would have much company there, Johannes told him: “Go stick your hand in the fire. Does it hurt any less to burn all your fingers at once?” No matter what the evil one and his followers brought up against him, Johannes overcame their opposition with the blood of the Lamb, and the Saviour’s healing power spread through Suriname.

In 1767 the brothers bought a large wooden house in Paramaribo itself. With a well and water tank, a garden, and numerous outbuildings, they began a Christian community unlike any they had attempted before. Johann Gottlieb Krohn from Stettin on the North Sea, Johann and Eva Penner from Schwerin, and other believers from Germany began to make clothes. They hired free blacks to help them and loaned slaves from masters in the city. Their business prospered. Learning songs and listening to stories about Jesus while they worked together, the employees of the clothing factory soon became a band of earnest seekers—a black brother, Cupido, who took the name Christian, becoming the first to receive baptism.

But even in Paramaribo, the heat, the opposition, and the challenge of their racial diversity, kept the believers struggling for survival—both physically and spiritually. Those not sick unto death were always hot, itchy, molested by stinging bugs day and night, or suffering from eye infections. Steady rain could last up to forty-eight hours or more, sometimes beating down so hard no one could hear what the brothers said in their meetings. After Johann Penner and most of the other Europeans at Paramaribo, including her husband Jesse, had died, Charlotte Petersen wrote a letter home in 1762:

All the men have gone home, and now Sister Weber has gone home too. Regina (Frau Millies) and I are the only ones left. We cry much and our hearts could dissolve in lamentation for all the brothers and sisters we have lost. It is very hard on the tent [the body] here, especially for people already over forty. Such people, like us, cannot take the climate and are soon delivered off. When one comes here the air is so hot and heavy it feels like one will suffocate. Then one is soon sick and it goes between life and death.24

In all the communities of Suriname and Berbice, the list of those who “went home” [died] grew rapidly longer, and in constant need the brothers and sisters of all races—black, brown, and white—learned to share their suffering with Christ and one another. One night the believers at Pilgerhut heard terrified wailing (klägliches Geschrei) outside as the Arawak brother, Philip, came running with his little daughter, just bitten by a snake. During a meeting at the same place, the sisters suddenly noticed two abaras, the most poisonous snakes of all, under their benches. Another one appeared among the children during a love feast, and at Saron an eight-foot-long kunukusi bit the Arawak brother Elias.

Fields, laboriously cleared by hand in rain forest communities, soon lost their fertility and the brothers at Pilgerhut had to search far and wide, some travelling all the way to the Demerara colony, for enough cassava to feed themselves. Even so they had barely enough. Ants and blight destroyed what they planted, and faced with the need to pay all their own expenses (the European communities having enough debts of their own) the brothers lived simply and worked hard. They also experimented with whatever they thought might bring extra income. Theophilus Schuman collected spiders, scorpions, and centipedes to preserve in alcohol and send to Europe in case they had medicinal properties. He also offered to supply a German pharmacy with regular shipments of snake fat, and tried raising vanilla. Others made shoes and did carpenter work.
Travel, both on South America’s wide rivers and at sea, involved dangers. When the brothers on the Corentijn bought a boat they sunk it with everything inside on the way back from the Demerara. On another occasion they soaked two hundred pound sacks of flour and the sisters had to bake it all right away—making Zweiback to last for months.

Spanish and French pirates lurked along the coast. On one occasion when they fell on a group of believing Indians the Arawak brother Stephanus startled them. He had lived along the Orinoco River and in good Spanish told them about the Lamb of God. In 1781 Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice fell to the English under Sir George Rodney. A year later they passed into French hands, then back to the Dutch. Then all the colonies became English until their final partition to France, the Netherlands and England after the Napoleonic war.

During these disorders the brothers Hans-Georg Jorde and Kaspar Pfeiffer suffered capture at sea. Carried off with three hundred prisoners (eighty of whom soon died) they suffered unspeakable thirst and brutal treatment. Hans-Georg died too but Kaspar kept his courage and did what he could to preserve his dignity among the wild and filthy men. One day he tried to wash his clothes. A big wave came in and swept them away. After months at sea, wasted beyond recognition with starvation and disease, long hair flapping about his face and nothing but a rag tied around his loins, he arrived on Barbados.

Pirates also caught Ludwig Dehne when he finally returned to Europe with a one-year-old black child. But no one, perhaps, had a more eventful ride across the Atlantic than Elisabeth Möser.

Coming to Suriname from Europe as a young bride, Elisabeth soon found herself a widow and decided to return. The English, at war with the Netherlands, captured her ship, kidnapped her, and gave her a berth in a cabin with six rough men. At first they tried to make her participate in wild parties on deck. But they soon came to respect her firm convictions, and left her alone to pray. When the ship docked at a West Indian port and Elisabeth realised it was Bridgetown, Barbados, she asked to see the pilgrim Johann Gottlieb Klose, then living on the island.

Bruder Klose, at first her captives did not understand, and told her, “Yes, yes. You may keep your clothes!” But when Elisabeth persisted and pointed to the town, they let her go with two friendly girls who said they knew where to take her. The girls led Elisabeth deep into the worst part of town and into a tavern. They took her upstairs and showed her a room. To her horror, when Elisabeth stepped inside, she found a man lying in bed, waiting for her. Crying to the Saviour for help, she turned and fled. A friendly captain took her to the island of St. Christopher. From that place she found passage with another ship to Cork in Ireland. There the people took her, with her plain dress and head covering, for a Quaker. But a Dutch captain could understand what she said and put her on a ship for Amsterdam from where she found her way back to the believers’ communities.

Far more serious than the threat of snakes, poverty, and pirates, however, were white planters’ continual attempts to ruin the believers’ communities. Because the brothers would not swear oaths or bear arms, the planters said, they would exile them and drive all their Indian converts back into the woods. The planters did all they could to turn the Indians against the brothers, saying Pilgerhut was nothing but a trap through which the brothers would capture them. They said the brothers planned to take them all to Europe to sell as slaves. They gave the Indians rum and warned the Dutch government the Moravians were planning a rebellion.

The Dutch Reformed church circulated a warning against contact with the Moravians because they were “doctrinally unsound.” At the same time, colony authorities tried to force the brothers to enslave all Indians living on their land, claiming it was illegal to farm in the colonies without doing so. Time after time, Dutch planters chased their cattle onto the believers’ crops, and Lauerens Storm van s’Gravensande, governor of Essequibo and Demerara threatened to kill every Moravian that would set foot on his territory.

The Indian believers, far from turning against the brothers because of the planters’ threats, lived in constant fear that white colonists would capture them. None of the pilgrims in the rain forest knew the extent of this fear until an Arawak boy saw a strange boat coming up the Wironje Creek one day at noon. He shouted an alarm and within minutes Pilgerhut stood empty. But real danger did not come, in the end, from white planters.

It came from Cuffy.

On March 1, 1763, a strange band of refugees appeared in Pilgerhut. In bedraggled clothes, their hair dishevelled and nearly senseless with fright they were a Dutch planter’s wife with six household slaves and all her children, escaping the greatest slave revolt in the history of the Guiana colonies. On February 23, in a massive uprising at the Magdalenenburg plantation on the Canje Creek, a slave named Cuffy and his supporters established black rule in Berbice. In quick succession the Juliane, Lelienburg, Elisabeth, and Hollandia plantations had fallen, followed by twenty-five others in rapid succession.

Cuffy, an intelligent and educated man, set up black rule at Fort Nassau. The tables turned. Suddenly white gentlemen and ladies worked in the fields under the whips of black masters. White arms lifted against them got chopped off. Whites trying to run away lost a leg. White women everywhere suffered violation with a vengeance and the heads of many planters stood on pikes along the road. In a wave of unspeakable savagery swarms of black men and women ravaged Berbice colony, looting, burning and killing. They beat drums and danced. In wild feasts they roasted white children to eat with their parents’ wine.

Hearing the roar of cannons on the nearest plantation, only an hour downstream, Heinrich and Elisabeth Beutel, Johann Heinrich Clemens, Georg Meisser, Friedrich Vögtle, Johann Nitschmann, Gottlieb Schultz, the Indian believers Christoph with his wife Akale, Ruth with her two children, Michael, Christian, Martin, Gottlieb (a lame boy), and the rest at Pilgerhut fled.25

In some ways, the flight from Pilgerhut reminded Heinrich Beutel of his escape from Jägerndorf in Silesia, years before. But now he was old. His wife had a hard time keeping up. Some of the group was sick and they had to leave the work of many years behind them—clothing, cattle, linen, furniture, tools, even the carefully maintained archives of the Pilgerhut community.

Stumbling through the rain forest on narrow trails in the dark, the brothers and sisters split up into smaller groups. Old Georg Meisser, pioneer at Combé, widowed for the second time, slipped on a rotten log and fell into a creek. A small group of blacks patrolling the Berbice frontier fell on them and stripped them of the few things they had managed to save—including the handwritten Arawak dictionary Theophilus Schuman had spent years to prepare—but let them escape with their lives.

Weeks later the first survivors came straggling into the plantations of the Demerara colony. Johann Heinrich Clemens wrote: “Brother Beutel and his wife . . . Gottlieb and I were almost six weeks in the forest. The brothers Vögtle, Meisser, and Nitschmann reached Demerara by Green Thursday, but the rest of us had the grace of being fed with the body and blood of Jesus Christ while still in the wilderness. . . . In all this the Saviour was unspeakably close to me.”

Pilgerhut, after Cuffy’s rebellion, lay in charred ruins. So did Ephrem, and black marauders repeatedly raided Saron—killing Nathanael (Old Hanna’s great-grandson) who served as a leader in the congregation. But as long as the believers kept their eyes on the Lamb, they flourished no matter what happened. Sixty years after Georg Piesch, Georg Berwig, and young Christoph von Larisch set foot at Fort Zeelandia, the pilgrim Hans Wied, visiting Hoop on the Corantijn, wrote:

On the day of our Gedenktag der Gemeine (day of communal remembrance), after our morning blessing at the house, Brother Lösche led the first meeting. The place was full and the worshippers reverent. At ten in the morning the whole congregation came together for a baptismal service. Those to be baptised sat in white clothes, on chairs in front of the audience. After the liturgy, led by Brother Fischer, he baptised a young Indian woman, Smerra, and gave her the name Zippora. I baptised Arowa, naming him Manasse, and Brother Lösche baptised Sebaygu, naming him Cleophas. The sacred nearness of Jesus’ presence surrounded us. It built me up to see the Indian brothers’ and sisters’ active participation and how they came, after the service, to congratulate the newly baptised ones and greet them with the kiss. In the evening we celebrated communion, in beautiful silence and order, with all the members.26

The Lamb, in the eighteenth century, built his church in South America.

1 Brief Spangenbergs an Zinzendorf, Amsterdam, d. 7. Dec. 1734
2 The site of Mara, south of New Amsterdam, Guyana, today.
3 Hans Güttner an seinen Vater, Johann Güttner, in Herrnhut, 7. December 1738
4 Hans Güttner an Leonhard Dober, 8. Februar 1740
5 Brief Rosina Berwich an Anna Nitschmann, 1738
6 Theophilus Schumann, Pilgerhut in Berbice, an Ludwig von Zinzendorf, 27. December 1748
7 Nov. 26, 1740
8 Johann F. Reynier an die theure und ehrwürdige Kreuzgemeine, 16. September 1741
9 Georg Meisser an Bruder Götz in Heerendyk 27. Januar 1742
10 With whom she travelled to America on the first “sea congregation” where she lost her life in the attack on Gnadenhütten on the Mahoney. She lay sick, upstairs, the night the Indians came.
11 Hans Güttner an die theure und liebe Kreuzgemeine, 5. December 1741
12 Bericht Zanders über seine Thätigkeit in Suriname, 1742
13 Diarium von Pilgerhut, 31. März 1748
14 Fritz Stähelin
15 From a letter to Ludwig von Zinzendorf, December 27, 1748.
16 Diarium von Pilgerhut, 31. März 1758
17 Wilhelm Zander an Ludwig von Zinzendorf, 29. November 1745
18 Theophilus Schumann an die Societät in Zeist, 23. Juli 1749
19 December 27, 1748
20 Diarium von Pilgerhut, 18. März, 1757
21 Ludwig Dehne, Lebenslauf
22 ibid.
23 Seven years later when a band of Bosneger visited Saron, the brothers wondered about an Indian man among them. It turned out he was Gottlieb, the son of the Arawak brother Ignatz, kidnapped on the day of the massacre in 1761. He had become totally absorbed in Saramakkan black society and married there.
24 September, 1762, from Paramaribo
25 Johann Heinrich Clemens wanted to ask the Saviour first (with the use of the lot) whether they should abandon Pilgerhut, but none of the rest felt that was necessary.
26 Reise der Geschwister Hans Wied von Paramaribo nach Hoop . . . im Jahre 1794, Gemein Nachrichten, 1795

Continued with Chapter 16

 2008/7/17 23:41Profile
pastorfrin
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Joined: 2006/1/19
Posts: 1406


 Re: Behold The Lamb

Behold The Lamb
By Peter Hoover

Chapter 16

To The East And Other Places

“As pilgrims on earth and friends of the whole world, we can be at home anywhere,” a meeting of the brothers decided in Germany, in 1749. From Labrador igloos to a bark shelter on an island in Canada’s St. Clair River (where Christian Friedrich Dencke lived among the Ojibwas who “let the dogs lick their dishes clean and ate one another’s fleas like sunflower seeds”) to leaf houses without walls in the rain forest, they had already found this true. But vast regions of the world still remained, to them and other Europeans, unknown. Untold numbers of “heathen” still needed to be won as friends, and all the Moravian believes could hear was the Saviour telling them: “Go!”

David Nitschmann and Christian Friedrich Eller had already sailed, by way of the Cape of Good Hope and Zanzibar, to Ceylon, in 1738. At Mogurugampelle (Shady Spot in Which to Rest by the Way) in the centre of the island, they had discovered an open door for the Saviour’s message. But white Protestant preachers serving Dutch traders on the island, drove them away.

Nine years later Friedrich Wilhelm Hocker (a doctor) and Johann Rüffer found their way with an Armenian trader overland from Syria to Baghdad. At Aleppo they joined a camel caravan following the Euphrates River. More and more traders joined until the caravan included two thousand camels. But numbers did not guarantee safety. Kurds fell on them near Shermakhan and robbed them of everything they had—even their clothes. In the confusion, the two brothers from Herrnhut lost each other. Severely wounded and barefooted on the burning sand, Friedrich walked for a day until he arrived, nearly dead with thirst, at a village. Kind people gave him clothes. Others brought him water, bread, and grapes, and in the village Friedrich found Johann again. After another month of travel bandits attacked them again. This time they left Friedrich with his underwear, and Johann with a shirt, but they had to travel nine days with only a little bread and water until they came to Ispahan, in Persia.

For two years the brothers lived in Persia, seeking contact with old Christian churches, and telling the Muslims what they could about Christ. When they left Ispahan bandits attacked them once more and stole everything they had. Johann Rüffer died and Friedrich made his way to Egypt. In Cairo he learned Arabic. The Muslims tolerated him because he knew medicine, but when he set out with a band of traders to Abyssinia their dhow sank off the coast of Mecca and he lost all his supplies.

After a trip back to Europe, Friedrich returned to Egypt with Johann Heinrich Danke, and Hans Antes (son of Heinrich, of the brothers on the Skippack, in Pennsylvania). This time they made their way up the Nile. Fighting between desert tribes kept them from reaching Abysinnia, but young Hans made clocks and Friedrich attended the sick—while demonstrating life in the Saviour’s wounds—until he died.

Before Friedrich Hocker left for Egypt the second time, fourteen single brothers from Herrnhaag, under the leadership of Johann Stahlmann and Adam Völker, made their way around Africa to the rainy Malabar Coast of India. There, at Tranquebar, where rice paddies lie between the ocean and the Western Ghats, they established a small community they named Brüdergarten (Garden of Brothers). One of the young men, Christoph Butler, began to learn Malabar and Portuguese at once. The rest, even though suffering under the heat, set about erecting buildings and planting crops. A year later a group of families arrived under the leadership of Nicolaus Andreas Jäschke. Many died. Six brothers that survived moved onto the island of Nancowry in the Bay of Bengal. In 1771 others moved to Serampore, near Calcutta.

Russia

Thirty-five years after the first brothers from Herrnhut found their way on foot to Archangelsk on the White Sea, Peter Konrad Fries and Johann Erich Westmann (just returned from the West Indies) travelled to St. Petersburg. Russian authorities no longer wanted to capture or imprison them. In fact, their new empress, Catherine II (a German noblewoman by birth), was asking Moravian settlers to come.

In St. Petersburg, Catherine II gave the brothers a document promising them great freedom and exemption from bearing arms. She also granted them a tract of nearly eleven thousand acres, far to the south-east, in the lower Volga region. The brothers saw it as a miracle of grace. Not only would that place them in the midst of the heathen Kalmuk tribes. It would give them a base from which to reach Persia, China, and Mongolia.

Daniel Heinrich Fick and four companions from the single brothers’ choir at Herrnhut travelled overland to Nizhny Novgorod in 1765 and sailed down the Volga to get the place ready. They came prepared to fell trees and build with logs. But to their amazement they left the last forests behind at Saratov and entered treeless steppes. What lumber they needed had to come floating down the Volga. Their land proved salty and largely unfit for growing crops. But with four married couples, a widower, twenty-five single brothers and seventeen single sisters that came from Herrnhut a year later, they built a new community called Sarepta.

The brothers and sisters planted many trees. They built large choir houses, a Gemeinhaus and a Saal, in a protected place along the river. Even though swarms of mosquitos bothered them in the summer and harsh winters buried them in snow, the trading post they set up proved an excellent way of getting to know their neighbours, and they soon felt at home. Kalmuk tribesmen brought horses, beef and furs to trade for goods the brothers shipped in from St. Petersburg. The young men in the community also set up shops where they wove cloth, baked bread, built carriages, dyed wool, tanned leather, and made shoes, clothing, locks, and candles. Joachim Wier, the community doctor, not only cared for patients from far and wide, he discovered a mineral spring near Sarepta. This brought even more patients, many of whom had money and paid well for the hospitality the brothers offered them.

In the midst of all the work necessary to build their new community, the brothers did not neglect what they had come for. Gottfried Grabsch and Georg Gruhl made their into the Caucasus and Muslim lands. Johann Gottfried Schill and Christian Hübner translated large portions of the Scriptures into the Kalmuk language. The priests of these nomad tribesmen, followers of lamaist Buddhism, opposed them. When a group of twenty-three Kalmuks, touched by the mercy of the Lamb, moved to Sarepta the priests notified Russian authorities. Claiming the Moravians could not legally receive converts, they came and took them away. But faithful pilgrims, like Konrad Neiz, did not give up. And in his wandering life among the Kalmuks he made a discovery that would change Sarepta forever.

He discovered mustard.

Using the Kalmuk’s recipe the believers at Sarepta began to cook and sell a delicious mustard spread. Russians all over the country, including the tsar Aleksandr I, tasted it and wanted more. Before long Sarepta’s mustard and vegetable oil factory supplied the whole community with a stable income.

In spite of disastrous fires and revolutions on the steppes (that caused the whole community to flee in 1774), Sarepta came to stand as a witness of the Saviour’s peace. Russians came from far away to visit it. Other German colonists along the Volga and in the Ukraine—Lutherans, Mennonites, and Hutterites—looked to it for spiritual direction and believers from there began the branch communities of Schönbrunn and Gnadenthal (Beautiful Fountain and Valley of Grace) nearby.

Continued:

 2008/7/18 21:47Profile
pastorfrin
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Joined: 2006/1/19
Posts: 1406


 Re: Behold The Lamb

Behold The Lamb
By Peter Hoover

Chapter 16

To The East And Other Places


Africa

The year after the awakening to the blood in Herrnhut, in 1735, the Moravian refugee Heinrich Huckoff met a mulatto from the Gold Coast (Ghana). Touched with what he heard, he travelled as soon as possible to the slave trading centre of São Jorge da Mina. Four years later the brother Abraham Ehrenfried Richter entered Algeria. But Georg Schmidt, who fled Kunvald in Moravia as a seventeen-year-old, first established a community after the pattern of Herrnhut on that continent.

He did not come unprepared. On a trip to Moravia with Melchior Nitschmann the Austrians had captured him and handled him roughly in prison for six years. But in his affliction—alone—Georg prayed. He found a sure source of strength in Christ and travelled, on his release, to the Netherlands to learn Dutch. From there he sailed to Africa, landing at Cape Town on July 9, 1737.

In the Cape Colony Georg found white Protestant settlers (Dutch Reformed and Huguenots) greatly outnumbered by the Malays, West African blacks, and local tribes they had enslaved. Cattle ranchers and farmers—the Boers—ruled the surrounding veld. Among them, in squalid kraals lived the Bastaards (the offspring of white settlers and their slaves) the San and Khoikhoin people.

Georg found the Khoi villagers shy and humble. But those living close to large numbers of white settlers feared them (for good reason—men in Cape Town bragged how many “wild” Khoi they had shot, along with zebras and antelopes) so Georg decided to go further inland. He caught a ride with some Dutch settlers in a covered cart drawn by twelve oxen. Along dry river beds and over barren hills they made they way against a cold wind until they approached Stellenbosch. There, in a sheltered gorge along the Sonderend River, Georg found a band of Khoi hunters with whom he decided to stay. Bavianskloof (Monkey Ravine), the Dutch called that place.

Georg’s first challenge was speech. Few of the Khoi women or children knew Dutch. Their language (recognised since then as one of the most difficult in the world) consisted of sharp clicks made with the tongue, with the teeth, with sudden gusts of air, and sounds from the throat or nose. Some of the same sounds meant different things on five different tones.

No Dutch people had tried to learn the Khoikhoin language. They called it Hottentotten speech for the way it sounded, and took for granted these slight brown-skinned people were predestined by God to damnation—good for nothing except work, if even that. Georg set out to prove the contrary. He made friends with the Khoi children and taught them to read and write Dutch, while he learned words in their language. He took in an orphan boy and soon had fifty students in classes he held every day. As communication between them improved he told them about the Saviour. He prayed with the people and taught them songs.

The first Khoi villager to repent and receive baptism, Georg named Willem. He was the boy that lived with him. Following this, he baptised forty-six others, and the Saviour’s love shining from Bavianskloof brought results no one would have expected. Thirty-nine Dutch settlers, marvelling at their neighbours new-found peace repented and became followers of the Lamb as well.

Those that did not repent arrested Georg and shipped him back to Europe.

For fifty years no one from the believers’ communities could come to South Africa. The Dutch, staunchly Calvinist, refused to take them there or let them in. Georg Schmidt died. But in 1792, with Dutch politics in upheaval, the brothers Heinrich Marsveld, Daniel Schwinn, and Johann Christian Kühnel managed to find passage to Cape Town again. They hurried out to Bavianskloof, hardly daring to see what they would find.

They found Lena, the last baptised member of the Khoi congregation, still living.

Lena could not walk anymore. Her eyes had grown dim. But after she understood who the brothers were, she had a grandchild fetch her most treasured possession—a Dutch New Testament wrapped in sheepskins inside a leather bag. Georg Schmidt had given it to her when she was young. For fifty years she had guarded it, even though she could not read, and treasured what she remembered about Christ.

The newly arrived brothers from Herrnhut found the seed planted by Georg Schmidt lying dormant, but far from dead. Some Khoi villagers, even though they did not understand it well, had kept on reading from the Bible, generation after generation. Now that the brothers lived with them again they quickly responded to its message and a new community, Genadendaal (Valley of Grace) took shape in South Africa.

Dutch farmers did not like their Khoikhoin workers “wasting time” at meetings in Genadendaal. They feared what would happen if all of them would learn how to read and “think themselves equal to whites.” So many, who had depended on the farmers for their living, lost their jobs. This, with poor hunting and several dry years in a row, soon brought the believers to the edge of starvation. At Genadendaal they planted fruit trees and worked hard to prepare the land for crops. But a dam they built for irrigation broke, and swept their fields, with most of their houses, away. It ripped up the trees they had planted and buried promising gardens with rocks and sand. Johann Friedrich Hoffman, Gottfried Horning, etc.

Hyenas fell continually on the sheep and goats the Khoi believers tried to raise. But when the brothers Adolf Bonatz and Johann Heinrich Schmidt set out with thirty Khoi hunters to eliminate them, they met a greater danger:

Not far from Genadendaal they discovered a hyena and fired at him, but being only slightly wounded it escaped. After searching for it in vain the brothers left. One of the Khoi hunters heard something in the scrub, however, and called them. Johann Heinrich Schmidt hurried back, dismounted, and entered the bushes with several of the hunters close behind. When they had reached the middle of the scrub their dog roused some animal, but tight foliage prevented them from seeing what it was. Those standing outside, when they saw it was a leopard, fled, leaving Johann Heinrich and one of the Khoi brothers alone. Not knowing which way to get out, and afraid of meeting the leopard head on, they backed up slowly with their guns cocked, ready for attack. All of a sudden the animal sprang on the Khoi brother, pulled him down and began to bite his face. Johann Heinrich aimed his gun at the leopard but at such close quarters he could not get a good shot. Then, when the animal saw him, he let go of the Khoikhoin and jumped at him. Johann Heinrich’s gun went flying and he held up his hand to defend himself. The leopard bit him close to the elbow and hung on. With his other hand Johann Heinrich caught it by the throat, and managed to throw it back, pinning it down with his knee. He called for the Khoi hunters who came running. One of them stuck his gun in behind the brother’s arm and fired. He killed the leopard but the Johann Heinrich had eight ugly wounds from his elbow to his wrist, the teeth having sunk in to the bone.

Drought, hunger, and accidents notwithstanding, the community at Genadendaal became established and flourished in the Saviour’s love. The Khoi women, taught by sisters from Herrnhut, learned how to sew and made handcrafted articles for sale. The brothers planted more trees and vegetables and turned to raising grapes. They also built a blacksmith shop, a furniture factory, and a mill. Seekers came from far and wide and in slightly more than twenty years, 256 mud-and-wattle houses, plastered white, with doors and windows, and thatched roofs, stood along the wide, flat street of Genadendaal. Peach and pear trees bordered the street. The believers planted many rose bushes, and their village became home to more than a thousand baptised Khoi believers.

At their regular meetings the believers made room in the Saal for visitors from many places, and their love feasts drew joyful crowds. Once again their lives spoke to the Dutch farmers, one of them who told the Khoi brother Philip who worked for him: “You Hottentots surprise me very much. No matter how wretchedly and drunkenly you live before coming to Genadendaal, once you are there and hear the Word of God you become utterly different. You seem to receive mercy and grace. I was born and raised a Christian. I have a Bible and read it often, yet I find those blessings still escape me.”

Philip answered him, “Even though I cannot read the Scriptures myself, I remember much of what I hear.” Then he related to his boss the parable of the workers in the vineyard, applying it in a fitting way to the situation of the Dutch and Khoikhoin believers. The farmer listened carefully. “You know,” he said when Philip was done, “I never understood that parable before. But now I do!”

This farmer was only one of many Dutch colonists to humble himself before the Lamb and become a supporter of the Khoikhoin congregation.

Continued:

 2008/7/19 11:49Profile
pastorfrin
Member



Joined: 2006/1/19
Posts: 1406


 Re: Behold The Lamb

Behold The Lamb
By Peter Hoover

Chapter 16

To The East And Other Places


Antigua

Johann Töltschig, pilgrim to England, found one Yorkshire boy particularly eager to hear what he had to say. Night after night Samuel Isles came to meetings of the believers at the Lammsberg until 1743, when he left his parents’ home, surrendered everything to the Saviour, and went to live among the brothers in the Netherlands and Germany.

From Germany Samuel left for St. Thomas in 1748. French pirates captured the ship he travelled on and took him to Martinique. When he managed to leave that island Dutch pirates overtook him, and the Spanish narrowly missed capturing him again before he slipped into the St. Thomas harbour. Eight years later, newly married, and with his wife Molly expecting their first baby, Samuel landed on Antigua.

Samuel and Molly did not know anyone on the island. They had thirty pounds sterling with them and looked at once for a means of supporting themselves. Behind a rickety wooden house they rented, they planted kale, cabbage, and turnips. They used hollowed out gourds for dishes. Within a year Samuel baptised the first awakened slaves on the island, Joseph and Abraham. Then Molly died. John Bennet, a tailor from England, came, and Samuel married Maria Margarethe Zerb from the brothers’ community at Bethel, in Berks County, Pennsylvania.

The believers on Antigua lived in serious poverty, often stitching clothes by candlelight until late at the night. But with the help of those who brought a few stones every time they came to meeting, they built a Saal just north of St. Johns, at a place they named Spring Gardens. Samuel and Maria Margarethe had a child they named Joseph. But Samuel, already deathly sick when he arrived, died soon afterward. Then she married the brother Paul Schneider. A week later he died too (some tropical fevers hit suddenly) and the brothers married her for the third time to Johann Christian Auerbach. With him she had one daughter that died.

By this time Peter Braun, a brother from southern Germany, Benjamin Brookshaw from England and Johann Meder from Livonia had joined the fourteen believers on Antigua. Benjamin soon died and a hurricane devastated the island. But like John Holmes wrote later:

The catastrophe seemed to have a positive effect on the black people, teaching them the necessity of knowing the Lord who hides from the wind and is a refuge in the time of storm. An awakening broke out among the slaves, spreading like a fire in every direction. Those who came to the meetings at Spring Gardens increased every year so that by 1775 they numbered around two thousand and not a month went by without the baptism of ten or twenty more.1

Altogether serious in their desire to know the Lamb, some slaves walked as far as ten miles after their day’s work in the fields to attend meetings in Spring Gardens. They did this week after week even though their masters beat them for it and the pilgrims living there soon found themselves answering the door day and night. So many came “their hearts tender to the Saviour’s mercy” that the brothers had little time left over to earn money or eat.

A new community, Grace Hill (Gnadenberg) took shape on Antigua, where the brothers soon baptised two thousand believers. Another four thousand attended meetings, or took part in instruction classes throughout the week. In 1778 hardly any rain fell, and famine struck the island. Some planters fed their cattle rather than their slaves (thinking the slaves could find food on their own) and a time of terrible thievery began. Many of the believers, coming home from work, found all the food and other possessions gone. Four years later the French attacked. One believing slave found himself carried to Guadeloupe, but he took it as the Saviour’s leading and preached the Gospel there.

Little by little, as their slaves persisted in following Christ, the Antigua planters came to believe in their sincerity. One master tried for ten years to entice the believers working on his land to commit fornication. He did everything he could to tempt them. But not one of them, neither old or young, fell into his trap. Neither could other slaves lead them astray.

After nearly everyone on their plantation professed Christ, a young slave named Richard and his friend planned a dance. They planned it on the Lord’s Day and hoped to distract the believing young from going to meeting. But it did not work. No one came to the dance and the boys decided they might as well go to meeting too—if nothing else than to have some fun.

They went to laugh and make trouble. But they stayed to pray. So powerfully did conviction fall on Richard, and so earnestly did he call on the Lamb for mercy that the brothers soon baptised him and he became a leader in the congregation. With unswerving faithfulness he served the Saviour and his Gemein until he turned ninety-nine years old. Then he went home.

All Antigua changed. Where as many as twenty or thirty slaves had commonly been hanged on Monday mornings for weekend fighting or stealing, crime almost disappeared. Murders became unheard of, and the practice of witchcraft died out. The brothers began a school for eighty students. Almost before they knew it, they had seven hundred students eager to learn how to read and write. Because not nearly everyone could come during the day, they began to have classes during the night as well. Both at Spring Gardens and Grace Hill crowds had grown to where communion had to be served on shifts. By 1788 more than six thousand baptised members met there for worship, and the brothers began a third community they named Grace Bay. Membership there grew to rapidly to more than a thousand as well.

During the war with America in 1812 another famine struck Antigua and two hundred from the Spring Gardens community alone, died from hunger. But with their eyes on Christ the enslaved believers did not lose hope. More than anything else, they liked to sing. Those who could read, like the black leader, Jacob Harvey, carried their hymn-books with them and learned hundreds of songs by memory. One day, after a brother from Europe saw Jacob’s hymnal crammed with blades of grass, dried leaves, cane tops, bits of paper, and rags, he said in surprise, “Why Jacob, you will break your book apart.”

“But massa,” Jacob answered apologetically, “Dem me partikler hymns!”

After a Good Friday service at Spring Gardens, another European brother, Joseph Newby, wrote:

From where I sat in my room I had a good view of the roads leading from different plantations. From every direction I could see groups of people come running at various distances, and as it occurs when people eagerly haste after something from which they expect much pleasure, one may see the attitude of the mind in the bent of the body. So it was here. They took every short cut, the young and healthy passing the aged and the lame, and the latter pressing on with all their might, every effort telling of the eagerness of their souls to be present at a place where they might hear the marvellous of Jesus giving himself a sacrifice for sinners.

When I considered that many, if not all, of these people had thrown down their hoes in the middle of the day, left their noon meals, and foregone the little rest of which they stood so much in need for the suppprt of their bodies, under hard labour, I broke out almost involuntarily in this ejaculation: “Oh Lord Jesus! Feed these poor hungry souls with the precious word of thy sufferings and death. Oh enable thy poor unworthy servant to give them their meat in due season!”


Sowing in Tears, Reaping with Joy

The brothers Andreas Rittmansberger and John Wood landed on Barbados on 1765. Andreas promptly turned sick and died. But others came and a circle of believers formed around them until the great storm of 1780 struck the island. Hardly any house stayed standing. Absolute chaos reigned as black and white survivors struggled for survival among the ruins. When the brother John Montgomery and his wife (parents of James, the hymn writer) arrived from England in 1784 they found only fourteen believers surviving.

After six years the Montgomerys left to begin a new congregation on the island of Tobago. Daniel Gottwald and James Birkby began to work among the slaves on St. Christopher and a congregation of more than two thousand baptised believers took shape—this in spite of French invasion and a tidal wave that carried the town of Basseterre into the sea.

Christian Heinrich Rauch, who first lived among the Mohicans at Shekomeko, travelled to Jamaica where he died in 1763. But once again, his efforts bore fruit. Within a year of the arrival of the first brothers in Jamaica eight hundred or more slaves attended their meetings.

Jamaica, like Antigua, was an English Island. Some of the plantation owners were Methodists (or had come under Methodist influence) and allowed the brothers to establish the Carmel community on seven hundred acres at St. Elizabeth, and later on, Emmaus. Mesopotamia and Eden, followed, and one of the pilgrims reported:

The number of our hearers increases all the time. The preaching of the Gospel works powerfully in the hearts of the black people and changes the way they act. Some walk in true fellowship of Spirit with our Saviour and have received the assurance of the forgiveness of their sins. Others mourning because of their sins seek salvation in Jesus. Of the latter class there are about two hundred. Recently, on a Lord’s Day, a black man from an estate about fifteen miles from here [Carmel] brought me a stick marked with seven notches. Every notch he told me stands for ten slaves on that estate that pray to the Lord. About twenty of them attend meetings at a plantation called Peru. They are all unbaptised but want to receive holy baptism. The awakening spreads, and we hope that our Saviour will gather a rich harvest.2

The believers on Jamaica lived in the hope they had in Christ, but far from everything went as they would have liked. “The people of this island have all sunken in ungodliness,” wrote one of the first pilgrims on the island. “Either they serve the god of money, or else the god of their flesh.” French pirates captured Nathanael, son of Peter Braun, coming with his new wife from Pennsylvania, and took them to Sainte-Domingue (Haiti). In 1780 a hurricane flattened the Mesopotamia community and severely damaged the rest. In their first fifty years on the island, forty-seven believers from Europe died of tropical fevers. But their afflictions, compared to those of their black brothers and sisters, were light. One of them described life on the plantations:

Every morning at dawn, a shell is blown to call the slaves to work, and they all have to appear at once to join their gangs. Every gang walks off to the field under the direction of the driver, also a black man, armed with a long whip. The children, from six to twelve years old, under the care of a black woman, also armed with a rod, form another gang and go to clean the pasture or any other work suited to their strength. These black drivers are steeled against all pity and compassion, being generally as brutalised as can be. The gangs go to work all day in the sun, their only covering being a cloth tied around their loins. In digging cane holes they have to keep in line and anyone getting behind feels the driver’s whip. There is no let-up in the work, except at noon when they eat. Late in the evening, after the sun goes down, they come back weak and faint. Not infrequently they also have to keep on working by the light of the moon. Then the overseer who has kept track of how much they worked flogs those men or women with whom he is dissatisfied. They have to lie on the ground and before the whip comes down the third time, they are already covered with blood. . . . Not an evening passes without us hearing the crack of the whip and the screams of the victims. But what can we do? We are as much despised as the slaves. If we write a line to the overseer begging him to have mercy, it sometimes, but not often, helps to save one of the poor creatures. Day after day, the same toil, the same scenes continue.3

Slavery continued on the British West Indian Islands until events in England changed the situation forever. Hannah Moore, an English Christian deeply troubled by what she heard, wrote against slavery. So did William Wilberforce, a Member of Parliament, and others. Many people in England stopped buying sugar produced by slave labour, and revolts in Haiti and the Demerara Colony (at that time the world’s largest cotton producer, and one of Great Britian’s wealthiest overseas possessions) convinced the government to call for change.

In 1833 the British government—against all opposition of the planters—voted to set the slaves free. Five years later, on the stroke of midnight, August 1, 1838, when the act went into effect, three hundred and twelve thousand slaves, only on the island of Jamaica, prepared to celebrate. Thousands of them baptised believers, clothed in white, gathered at their chapels shouting, “If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed,” and praising God.

That same night, hundreds of thousands more in Barbados, Demerara, Berbice, and other British islands celebrated the end of their slavery. But nowhere did the brothers feel more deeply grateful than on the dry island of Antigua, lit up that night with the almost continual flashes of a great thunderstorm. Of the thirty thousand free men and women rejoicing in the rain, almost all belonged to the Saviour’s Gemeine.

Like Samuel Isles, pioneer of the Spring Gardens community said there before his death: “As little as one can accomplish, one likes to do what the Saviour would most have liked to do.”


1 John Holmes, Historical Sketches of the Missions of the United Brethren, pg. 340

2 Brother Lang, letter from Carmel of March 15, 1813

3 Henry Whitley’s account from J.H. Buchner, The Moravians in Jamaica, London, 1854


Continued with chapter 17

 2008/7/20 20:39Profile
pastorfrin
Member



Joined: 2006/1/19
Posts: 1406


 Re: Behold The Lamb

Behold The Lamb
By Peter Hoover

Chapter 17

Of One Blood

“You children of the Most High, how is your love one for another?” an eighteenth century Moravian hymn writer asked, “How do you follow the true impulse for unity? Do you stand tied together as one? Has no division of spirits occurred among you?” In answer to his own questions he wrote:

Our Father in Heaven knows our hearts. Without love we have no reason to call ourselves brothers. . . . But as soon as we are born from above we become brothers and sisters in Christ. We have one Father, one faith, one Spirit, one baptism, one way to heaven that we all travel together in full unity of heart. In our unity we find nothing but sweetness, for all suspicion, hatred, and offences have flown away.

Our Mother that is above [the Holy Ghost] holds us together and baptises us with heavenly fire. No difference finds place among us because humility has united our hearts. Where selfishness, quarrelling and hatred survive we cannot feel the grace of love, neither can we prosper in the choir of foreign thrones.

Zion’s fellowship brings us to leave our earthly kindred and sets our brothers and sisters in Christ in the place of former acquaintances. The one still enchanted by love of the world, even though he wants to have a place in the brotherhood, can in no way be accepted by it until he makes himself small at the foot of the cross. . . . On the other hand, see what a blessing it has been for the redeemed to be counted as brothers! Praise the Father, for he brought it about! Sing to him with united hearts and voices! Do not let one hour pass without love and praise! We stand before the Lord as one in his covenant.

What I am, brother, you are too! Through the Lamb’s wounds and bruises we share our inheritance. With all that we have we struggle toward the same fatherland. The church as one strives toward Christ and we must be ready, brother, to die one for another like Jesus who made us his heirs. One member feels the other’s pain.

Let us remind and point one another to the crown of life! If Babylon thirsts for the blood of the saints, let us stand, watch, and defend ourselves together. The crying of the children will yet be heard and with the force of unity Babylon will be destroyed among us! Who can resist the power of unified spirits?

Let us love and rejoice in our hearts, making life sweet one for another, even though in pain. Let us press into innermost fellowship with Christ, illuminated by the blood. . . . In the world to come it will go even better with us. Our whole brotherhood before the Father, ablaze with love, will rejoice in his blessing. Oh let us give one another our hands and hearts and pray that Zion may soon be rescued to where love knows neither beginning nor end!1

In no other way did those who went out from Herrnhut testify more powerfully to the Saviour’s love, than through their lives in brotherly community. Even though they had settled in places around the world and their influence had spread into all branches of Christianity, they renewed their commitment—at a meeting in Marienborn in 1764—to building Ortsgemeinen (communities at specific locations) as bases from which pilgrims could work. Without the Ortsgemeine, they believed, their pilgrims would have nothing to set before the world as an example. They saw the Ortsgemeine as a continuation of the early Christian community, preserved in part by Catholic orders, but long fallen into ruin, and looked to the Saviour for help in restoring the “little places he has chosen for his people’s special abode, the communities on which his Shekina rests.”

The Ortsgemeine, the Moravians believed, should be a model for all members of the great Church of Christ (seekers of all denominations) to learn from and follow. It should be the prototype of the truly awakened communy, where brothers and sisters “live only by the rule of Christ” and “possess the spirit and understanding required for life together.” As such, the members of the Ortsgemeine enjoy a “special grace that sets them apart from all other children of God,” but only as long as they gave their minds and hearts to the furtherance of the common good.

If a member finds that the pursuit of his career does not contribute to this, he shall not insist on continuing it, but willingly and without resisting forsake even what means very much to him. It must also be remembered that outstanding economic success for one brother easily creates problems for all. Even though he may have been poor and humble, the brother who becomes economically very successful may no longer feel motivated to concern himself with the welfare of all. We must take great care that economic success—even though we must thank those who bring it about—does not distract us from our most important work.2

Genadendaal in South Africa, Sarepta in Russia, Saron in Suriname, Lichtenfels in Greenland, Lamb’s Hill and Ockbrook in England, Friedensfeld on St. Croix, Salem in North Carolina—every Moravian community told the world in its own way what the brothers and sisters believed: “In commune oramus, in commune laboramus. In commune patimus, in commune gaudimus (we pray and work together, we suffer and rejoice together).” But nowhere did the ideal of the Ortsgemeine reach happier fulfilment, or shine brighter in a dark world, than at Bethlehem in Pennsylvania. One who recorded their story wrote:

Every man, woman, and child became part of one household. Everyone worked for the good of the whole. They gave their time and labour, receiving in return shelter, food, and clothing. No one was paid any wages. The church owned all the land, all the buildings, even the tools with which the people worked. Yet no one was forced to surrender his private property. Anyone who disliked the system was free to leave. As it was pointed out, there was no wall around Bethlehem.3

When families moved to Bethlehem (that operated as one household with Nazareth and surrounding settlements) they signed a document releasing everything they owned to the “General Economy” of the church. But when anyone left, the church took it as its Christian obligation to give them back as much as they had brought in.

Because of the risk involved in this arrangement, both for the church and those joining, the believers accepted new members only after careful proving. “Better make the door coming in very small,” they said, “and the door going out very large, than the other way round.” At a meeting in Bethlehem they decided in 1742:

Applicants for membership, even those considered outstanding brothers, and who have spoken publicly in the congregations from which they came, must be tested, examined, and treated in an impartial way. Only if this is done with humility and discernment may the congregation keep itself pure. All denominations and sects strive to grow larger and stronger. But our rule must be to keep the door wide open for everyone wanting to leave, and to be very cautious in letting them in. It is more likely that our church will turn sick from being too large than from being too small.4

Even after newcomers passed the congregation’s approval, the brothers used the lot to discern the Saviour’s will about receiving them. They also made sure that everyone knew, before joining, what to expect. In 1744 they put the rules of their General Economy into writing:

1. The Lord’s people shall serve him in two divisions: the Pilgergemein and the Ortsgemein. The pilgrims shall tell the good news of Christ to all. Those who stay home shall take care of the children, the lands, the buildings, and the livestock.

2. In the beginning, the pilgrims are to have the community at Bethlehem as their home base. But they shall move about like a cloud before the wind of the Lord so that all places may bear fruit. They shall establish small congregations wherever needful and possible.

3. At Bethlehem there is to be a Hausgemeine formed of representatives from every calling and division of labour (the builders, the educators, those who buy provisions, those who prepare food, those who see to the clothing, the sanitation, the record keeping, etc.) The Hausgemeine shall see to the needs of the whole congregation, and in particular the needs of the Pilgergemeine.

4. The single sisters shall have their own dwelling, as well as the single brothers, and they shall be organized in their respective choirs.

5. In America, where getting married is not so complicated, partners shall be found for the young people as soon as expedient.

6. The purchased lands [the Whitefield tract] shall be divided into six agricultural communities: Nazareth, Gnadenthal, Christiansbrunn, Friedenthal, Gnadenhöh, and Gnadenstadt.5 At Bethlehem the brothers shall carry out their trades.

7. The Whitefield house at Nazareth shall become the nursery6 and school of the small children.

8. We shall use no denominational name other than Evangelische Brüder or Brüdergemeine (“evangelical brothers” or “community of brothers”).

9. Our purpose is not to make everyone Moravian. Not everyone we reach with the Gospel shall be expected or even encouraged to join our communities. But if another Ortsgemein takes shape it may follow our pattern.

10. We shall take the Gospel to the Indians in an apostolic way (without regard to denominations). Those who have become baptised into other groups shall be allowed to remain there, and we will concentrate on baptising those who are awakened through our work.

11. The Wyoming Valley shall not be forgotten.

12. The Zusammenkünfte [general meetings like the one held at Theobald Endt’s house in Germantown] shall continue to be open to all Christians. They shall continue to represent the Church of God in the Spirit.7

Jacob John Sessler, a descendant of the first believers in Bethlehem wrote years later:

The only ties that bound them together were their promises, their good will and the sense of a mission that was peculiarly theirs. . . . Members donated their time and labour in exchange for nothing more than food, clothing, and shelter for themselves and their children, and received no other reward than the joy of seeing the Gospel preached and the salvation of their souls. . . . Material reward in the form of wages in such a spiritual enterprise as theirs was for them much beneath the holiness and dignity of their work. They belonged to no man and would accept no man’s wages, for as they said in the Brotherly Agreement of 1754, “We all belong to the Saviour. What we have belongs to him, and he shall dispose of it as pleases him.”8

Enemies of the believers in Bethlehem accused them of living “as in a military academy” and suspected they were “papists” of one kind or another. But as long as the brothers and sisters desired nothing but Christ and loved him, they found their Gemeinschaft a source of continual joy.

Only in true Gemeinschaft (community, fellowship) in Christ, the brothers believed, could true equality become theirs. Everyone equal before the Lamb. Equal in life and death, buried under stones of equal size lying flat on the ground. In equality and community the Saviour’s Gemeine would become visible to all, like Heinrich Antes exclaimed on the day the first sea congregation arrived: “Today, at last, a visible church of the Lord can be recognised in Philadelphia!”

Peter Böhler, when the question of continuing the General Economy arose in 1758, declared:

Our communal housekeeping does more to promote the Saviour’s cause than any gold mine he might have given us. If every one that takes part in it serves Christ, then it is for us an inexhaustible treasure. . . . I do not know whether our people would have held out against the spirit of worldliness if the Saviour had not counter-attacked it with our communal housekeeping. Considering this, you may easily guess how I feel about seeing it continue.9

Continued:

 2008/7/21 20:33Profile
pastorfrin
Member



Joined: 2006/1/19
Posts: 1406


 Re: Behold The Lamb

Behold The Lamb
By Peter Hoover

Chapter 17

Of One Blood

“You children of the Most High, how is your love one for another?” an eighteenth century Moravian hymn writer asked, “How do you follow the true impulse for unity? Do you stand tied together as one? Has no division of spirits occurred among you?” In answer to his own questions he wrote:

Our Father in Heaven knows our hearts. Without love we have no reason to call ourselves brothers. . . . But as soon as we are born from above we become brothers and sisters in Christ. We have one Father, one faith, one Spirit, one baptism, one way to heaven that we all travel together in full unity of heart. In our unity we find nothing but sweetness, for all suspicion, hatred, and offences have flown away.

Our Mother that is above [the Holy Ghost] holds us together and baptises us with heavenly fire. No difference finds place among us because humility has united our hearts. Where selfishness, quarrelling and hatred survive we cannot feel the grace of love, neither can we prosper in the choir of foreign thrones.

Zion’s fellowship brings us to leave our earthly kindred and sets our brothers and sisters in Christ in the place of former acquaintances. The one still enchanted by love of the world, even though he wants to have a place in the brotherhood, can in no way be accepted by it until he makes himself small at the foot of the cross. . . . On the other hand, see what a blessing it has been for the redeemed to be counted as brothers! Praise the Father, for he brought it about! Sing to him with united hearts and voices! Do not let one hour pass without love and praise! We stand before the Lord as one in his covenant.

What I am, brother, you are too! Through the Lamb’s wounds and bruises we share our inheritance. With all that we have we struggle toward the same fatherland. The church as one strives toward Christ and we must be ready, brother, to die one for another like Jesus who made us his heirs. One member feels the other’s pain.

Let us remind and point one another to the crown of life! If Babylon thirsts for the blood of the saints, let us stand, watch, and defend ourselves together. The crying of the children will yet be heard and with the force of unity Babylon will be destroyed among us! Who can resist the power of unified spirits?

Let us love and rejoice in our hearts, making life sweet one for another, even though in pain. Let us press into innermost fellowship with Christ, illuminated by the blood. . . . In the world to come it will go even better with us. Our whole brotherhood before the Father, ablaze with love, will rejoice in his blessing. Oh let us give one another our hands and hearts and pray that Zion may soon be rescued to where love knows neither beginning nor end!1

In no other way did those who went out from Herrnhut testify more powerfully to the Saviour’s love, than through their lives in brotherly community. Even though they had settled in places around the world and their influence had spread into all branches of Christianity, they renewed their commitment—at a meeting in Marienborn in 1764—to building Ortsgemeinen (communities at specific locations) as bases from which pilgrims could work. Without the Ortsgemeine, they believed, their pilgrims would have nothing to set before the world as an example. They saw the Ortsgemeine as a continuation of the early Christian community, preserved in part by Catholic orders, but long fallen into ruin, and looked to the Saviour for help in restoring the “little places he has chosen for his people’s special abode, the communities on which his Shekina rests.”

The Ortsgemeine, the Moravians believed, should be a model for all members of the great Church of Christ (seekers of all denominations) to learn from and follow. It should be the prototype of the truly awakened communy, where brothers and sisters “live only by the rule of Christ” and “possess the spirit and understanding required for life together.” As such, the members of the Ortsgemeine enjoy a “special grace that sets them apart from all other children of God,” but only as long as they gave their minds and hearts to the furtherance of the common good.

If a member finds that the pursuit of his career does not contribute to this, he shall not insist on continuing it, but willingly and without resisting forsake even what means very much to him. It must also be remembered that outstanding economic success for one brother easily creates problems for all. Even though he may have been poor and humble, the brother who becomes economically very successful may no longer feel motivated to concern himself with the welfare of all. We must take great care that economic success—even though we must thank those who bring it about—does not distract us from our most important work.2

Genadendaal in South Africa, Sarepta in Russia, Saron in Suriname, Lichtenfels in Greenland, Lamb’s Hill and Ockbrook in England, Friedensfeld on St. Croix, Salem in North Carolina—every Moravian community told the world in its own way what the brothers and sisters believed: “In commune oramus, in commune laboramus. In commune patimus, in commune gaudimus (we pray and work together, we suffer and rejoice together).” But nowhere did the ideal of the Ortsgemeine reach happier fulfilment, or shine brighter in a dark world, than at Bethlehem in Pennsylvania. One who recorded their story wrote:

Every man, woman, and child became part of one household. Everyone worked for the good of the whole. They gave their time and labour, receiving in return shelter, food, and clothing. No one was paid any wages. The church owned all the land, all the buildings, even the tools with which the people worked. Yet no one was forced to surrender his private property. Anyone who disliked the system was free to leave. As it was pointed out, there was no wall around Bethlehem.3

When families moved to Bethlehem (that operated as one household with Nazareth and surrounding settlements) they signed a document releasing everything they owned to the “General Economy” of the church. But when anyone left, the church took it as its Christian obligation to give them back as much as they had brought in.

Because of the risk involved in this arrangement, both for the church and those joining, the believers accepted new members only after careful proving. “Better make the door coming in very small,” they said, “and the door going out very large, than the other way round.” At a meeting in Bethlehem they decided in 1742:

Applicants for membership, even those considered outstanding brothers, and who have spoken publicly in the congregations from which they came, must be tested, examined, and treated in an impartial way. Only if this is done with humility and discernment may the congregation keep itself pure. All denominations and sects strive to grow larger and stronger. But our rule must be to keep the door wide open for everyone wanting to leave, and to be very cautious in letting them in. It is more likely that our church will turn sick from being too large than from being too small.4

Even after newcomers passed the congregation’s approval, the brothers used the lot to discern the Saviour’s will about receiving them. They also made sure that everyone knew, before joining, what to expect. In 1744 they put the rules of their General Economy into writing:

1. The Lord’s people shall serve him in two divisions: the Pilgergemein and the Ortsgemein. The pilgrims shall tell the good news of Christ to all. Those who stay home shall take care of the children, the lands, the buildings, and the livestock.

2. In the beginning, the pilgrims are to have the community at Bethlehem as their home base. But they shall move about like a cloud before the wind of the Lord so that all places may bear fruit. They shall establish small congregations wherever needful and possible.

3. At Bethlehem there is to be a Hausgemeine formed of representatives from every calling and division of labour (the builders, the educators, those who buy provisions, those who prepare food, those who see to the clothing, the sanitation, the record keeping, etc.) The Hausgemeine shall see to the needs of the whole congregation, and in particular the needs of the Pilgergemeine.

4. The single sisters shall have their own dwelling, as well as the single brothers, and they shall be organized in their respective choirs.

5. In America, where getting married is not so complicated, partners shall be found for the young people as soon as expedient.

6. The purchased lands [the Whitefield tract] shall be divided into six agricultural communities: Nazareth, Gnadenthal, Christiansbrunn, Friedenthal, Gnadenhöh, and Gnadenstadt.5 At Bethlehem the brothers shall carry out their trades.

7. The Whitefield house at Nazareth shall become the nursery6 and school of the small children.

8. We shall use no denominational name other than Evangelische Brüder or Brüdergemeine (“evangelical brothers” or “community of brothers”).

9. Our purpose is not to make everyone Moravian. Not everyone we reach with the Gospel shall be expected or even encouraged to join our communities. But if another Ortsgemein takes shape it may follow our pattern.

10. We shall take the Gospel to the Indians in an apostolic way (without regard to denominations). Those who have become baptised into other groups shall be allowed to remain there, and we will concentrate on baptising those who are awakened through our work.

11. The Wyoming Valley shall not be forgotten.

12. The Zusammenkünfte [general meetings like the one held at Theobald Endt’s house in Germantown] shall continue to be open to all Christians. They shall continue to represent the Church of God in the Spirit.7

Jacob John Sessler, a descendant of the first believers in Bethlehem wrote years later:

The only ties that bound them together were their promises, their good will and the sense of a mission that was peculiarly theirs. . . . Members donated their time and labour in exchange for nothing more than food, clothing, and shelter for themselves and their children, and received no other reward than the joy of seeing the Gospel preached and the salvation of their souls. . . . Material reward in the form of wages in such a spiritual enterprise as theirs was for them much beneath the holiness and dignity of their work. They belonged to no man and would accept no man’s wages, for as they said in the Brotherly Agreement of 1754, “We all belong to the Saviour. What we have belongs to him, and he shall dispose of it as pleases him.”8

Enemies of the believers in Bethlehem accused them of living “as in a military academy” and suspected they were “papists” of one kind or another. But as long as the brothers and sisters desired nothing but Christ and loved him, they found their Gemeinschaft a source of continual joy.

Only in true Gemeinschaft (community, fellowship) in Christ, the brothers believed, could true equality become theirs. Everyone equal before the Lamb. Equal in life and death, buried under stones of equal size lying flat on the ground. In equality and community the Saviour’s Gemeine would become visible to all, like Heinrich Antes exclaimed on the day the first sea congregation arrived: “Today, at last, a visible church of the Lord can be recognised in Philadelphia!”

Peter Böhler, when the question of continuing the General Economy arose in 1758, declared:

Our communal housekeeping does more to promote the Saviour’s cause than any gold mine he might have given us. If every one that takes part in it serves Christ, then it is for us an inexhaustible treasure. . . . I do not know whether our people would have held out against the spirit of worldliness if the Saviour had not counter-attacked it with our communal housekeeping. Considering this, you may easily guess how I feel about seeing it continue.9

Continued:

 2008/7/21 20:41Profile
pastorfrin
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Joined: 2006/1/19
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 Re: Behold The Lamb

Behold The Lamb
By Peter Hoover

Chapter 17
Continued:

Community: Body and Soul

Making no distinction between their fellowship in the Spirit, and their daily work together, the Saviour’s Kreuzgemeine (Community of the Cross) at Bethlehem handled both with great seriousness. A committee of brothers decided what to build and who worked where. Other committees decided what to eat, where and what to buy, how to make their clothes, who should care for the sick, and how to keep the settlement clean.

The believers worked seriously, but heaven and earth touched one another at Bethlehem. Worship flowed into work, and work into worship. With extra-ordinary joy the single brothers’ choir celebrated the “Festival of the Tree Cutters” soon after their arrival. Following their love feast, eaten together, they marched to the music of trombones, axes on their shoulders, into the snowy woods. In a few years they cleared seven hundred acres and had most of it under cultivation. By the late 1750s nearly two thousand five hundred acres of cultivated fields surrounded Bethlehem and Nazareth.

The builders and carpenters, likewise set to work with music and a love feast, built seventeen community dwellings (some of them with dozens of rooms on three or more floors), forty-eight farm buildings, five schools, twenty manufacturing shops and stores, five mills, and two inns in a little over fifteen years. Every spring the farm brothers celebrated the Feast of the Sowers, and on the first day of harvest the whole community gathered before dawn for the Reapers’ Love Feast. Those in charge handed out sickles and forks, then all marched in formation—to the music of a full brass band—to the fields. All day long they cut, tied, and stooked the grain while some played music, others shared Scriptures in breaks for rest and prayer, and the children brought water from the spring. Harvest days ended with young men playing trumpets, leading the singing congregation home as the sun went down.

Frequent feasts throughout the year celebrated the work of the spinning sisters (the grandmothers of the congregation), the dairy brothers, the smith and cart making brothers, the cooks and the washing sisters, and whoever else, from the oldest to the youngest at Bethlehem, took part in the General Economy. Every feast called for new songs, fitting decorations, and messages from those in charge. At the celebration of the stable brothers they sang:

May you be praised Jesus Christ, the Lord we love! We praise you for becoming man, you set over all things by God. You lay in a stable at Bethlehem, not only for Shem’s chosen race, but for cursed Ham and Japheth’s tribe as well.10

Brother Josef wrote a song especially for the sisters:

Know sisters, the blessing of your ceaseless work for Christ. Driven by love, you spin and weave. You sew and wash with vigour. Now may the Saviour’s grace and love, be yours in joy forever! You Christ, mover of hearts, the ones who milk, who wash, and reap, look to you. They wait on you and long for the blessing from the wound in your side. While milking, washing, or reaping, all they can see is you! We live for you on earth. We spend our time working for you, day by day, until we may go to see you!11

Jacob John Sessler wrote:

As they made no distinction between secular and religious education, so they did not distinguish between secular and religious work. All work was religious. A religious spirit was put into the most menial tasks. Milking, spinning, washing, knitting, and all other occupations were services unto God, because the purpose of them was not to accumulate wealth but to support the itinerant preachers, teachers, and missionaries. As the apostle Paul worked with his hands that he might preach the gospel without cost to others, so the home congregation was diligent in its task as the chief servant of the pilgrim congregation. The stable caretaker was on a mission for the Lord as well as the missionary among the Indians.

Another reporter of life in the believers’ community wrote:


At Bethlehem the brothers counted it an honour to chop wood for the Master’s sake, and the fireman, Spangenberg [Brother Josef] said, felt his post as important “as if he were guarding the Ark of the Covenant.”12

Visitors to Bethlehem marvelled at the order in which everyone found something to do that fitted him or her exactly. Old men and boys, and sometimes women, herded cattle. A visitor in 1761 reported waking up in the morning to the sound of two sisters driving “a hundred cows, a number of them with bells, a venerable goat and two she-goats, down the street.” And all young people learned trades that transformed Bethlehem into a model of industry on the Pennsylvania frontier. A little Dresden perhaps? Or a Leipzig? Only ten years after the founding of Bethlehem its residents practised two hundred and twenty-seven different trades. They wove linen, taught school, baked bread, dyed and bleached cloth, shoed horses, bound books, tanned leather, butchered cattle and pigs, and made soap, nails, barrels, hats, shoes, clothing, furniture, pots, and nearly everything else a frontier settlement might need. Jacob John Sessler wrote:

Each trade had its masters and apprentices. They held regular meetings to control the quality of their products, to regulate prices, meet outside competition, and provide training. When outsiders came to buy wares, there was to be no bickering about prices. On the contrary, the prices set at the tradesmen’s meetings were to be strictly observed.

The General Economy had become a bee-hive of activity. The brothers wore clothes of fabric their own hands and machinery had woven, among which were to be found eleven qualities of linen. Their large pottery, the products of which were in great demand by outsiders, became famous. . . . Three sawmills converted rough-hewn timber into building materials. . . . The sisters did work suited to their abilities, such as baking, weaving, spinning, dyeing and tailoring. Since the economy was one large family the united strength of the group was exerted where the need was greatest. In busy seasons on the farms, some of the tradesmen left their shops to help in the harvest fields. And when members of the Pilgrim Congregation were not engaged, or were home for a while, they had to work wherever they could be of assistance.

Conscious of the Saviour’s presence among them, the believers at Bethlehem worked hard and kept an honest record of what they did. Every pound of butter, every egg, every leg of beef used in the choir houses got recorded. So did every bushel of grain harvested, and the number of lambs born in the spring. One visitor observed:

They mix the Saviour and his blood into their harrowing, mowing, washing, spinning, in short, into everything. The cattle yard becomes a temple of grace they conduct in a priestly manner.13

Brother Josef wrote:

In our economy the spiritual and the physical are as closely united as a man’s body and his soul, and each has a strong influence upon the other. As soon as all is not well with a brother’s heart we notice it in his work. But when he is rejoicing in Jesus’ wounds, and his love to the Lamb is tender, one takes note of it in his conduct immediately.

Community: The Human Element

“Everyone shares the spring house at Bethlehem,” one visitor wrote. “Each family has its shelf, and even though they place no watch there and the door is not locked, everyone is sure to find his plate of butter or his bowl of milk exactly like he left it when he comes back.”14

That the believers at Bethlehem, united through the Saviour’s blood, should treat one another kindly, could be expected. But not everything took place automatically. Some needed little reminders to keep relationships pleasant, as these announcements made at community meetings show:

No one shall dig through Adolf Meyer’s medicine cupboard when he is not around. . . . Whoever uses tools shall put them back where he got them. All brothers should try to use the tools more carefully. . . . The cows should be brought in early. The night watchman shall wake little Hans Tannenberger to be sure he gets up on time. . . . Sisters shall take off their stockings before coming into the Saal for footwashing. The way they do it now is not modest. . . . Brothers who sleep in Singstunde will get a written reminder from the choir leader.

Animals, the brothers agreed, should all be kept in fences, and they allowed only a few dogs in the community “as needed.” Brothers took turns cleaning streets. No peddlars could come to Bethlehem. No one had permission to stay out late, or loiter in the street. Parents were to keep their children at home and clean their chimneys regularly.

Every choir had its rules. Boys and girls should not mingle freely. No one should enter another’s room without a good reason, and two should never be in a room alone without a light. Idle talk, too much laughing, every sign of straying from Christ met with the prompt concern of brothers or sisters—usually those in charge. If their kind admonitions did not bring results, offenders appeared before the whole congregation to repent of their deeds or else (depending on how the lot fell) to say goodbye.

Within a year of their arrival at Bethlehem the brothers already had to deal with Matthias Hoffman for making vulgar remarks. “It was the brothers’ opinion that he should leave for a time,” the diary reports, “because he did not appreciate the advantages of living in the Saviour’s community enough.”

Even though outsiders thought it looked like “popish confession” the brothers and sisters at Bethlehem considered their monthly interviews one of those advantages. Living in responsibility one to another led them into freedom and peace. It propelled them outward with the good news of Christ and filled them with song. One writer described what happened:

Music was a must. The children in the choir houses ate their dinners off wooden trenchers, but they learned at an early age to play the violin, the viola da gamba, the flute or French horn, and to sing in a chorus. This was quite as important as the three R’s and even more so. The first settlers brought musical instruments with them. On January 25, 1744, a pinet, brought over on The Little Strength from London, reached Bethlehem. “In dulce Jubilo” was sung at a love feast on August 21, 1745, in thirteen different languages: Czech, German, Latin, Greek, English, French, Swedish, Dutch, Wendish, Gaelic, Welsh, Mohawk, and Mohican; and there were three persons there of three more nationalities, Danish, Polish, and Hungarian, who did not sing.15

The Wheel and the Hinge

Exulting in the harmony of their diversity, and with no greater desire than to please the Lamb by bringing more souls to him, the believers at Bethlehem appointed brothers to leave on regular excursions in every direction—like the spokes of a wheel. The Pilgerrad (Pilgrim Wheel) they called it, and looked forward to the day when every branch congregation established through it (like Schoeneck and Lititz toward Lancaster, Bethel in Berks County, and Hebron in Lebanon County) would become the hubs of new wheels. Eventually, they hoped, wheels upon wheels would cover all America, as in Ezekiel’s vision.

At the same time, the community at Bethlehem saw itself as only one leaf of a hinge. All believers, its pilgrims taught, hinge on Jesus Christ, the “nail in the middle” of his church that holds it securely and around which every congregation must revolve. With this in mind they “wandered far and wide through the American colonies, reaching isolated parts of Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia no Christian minister had ever been seen. They penetrated the Alleghenies. They went as far north as Canajoharie in New York and Broadbay in Maine. They visited New Haven, Newport, Long Island, Staten Island, and nearby New Jersey.”16

“Concerning these pilgrims,” the Bishop Christian Friedrich Cammerhof wrote:

every one must be ready for service at all times. If our Saviour tells one of them to get up at 3:45 and go joyfully on his way, he must do so without hesitation. Nothing should keep him back from doing the Saviour’s will. On the other hand, if the Saviour tells any one to stay home and care for the farm, we thank him that he has chosen brothers to that work too. Their work and calling is a noble one too. The pilgrims’ work calls for a crossbearing character. They must be driven by nothing but the love of Christ. They must be ready to give up all other interests and economic pursuits for their calling.

Here in Bethlehem we cannot help but lay down our bodies, souls, and everything we have for the joy of Christ. We work on the foundation of what we feel in our hearts—a desire to do everything to serve the Lamb and his people. For this reason one sees so many busy hands in Bethlehem—in the blacksmith shop, at the wagon maker’s, in the carpenter’s shop, in the tannery, in the stables, and in countless other buildings and corners around the place. No one thinks, “I am doing this for me.” Even for the Indian brothers and sisters among us it would be a great punishment were we to tell them to work and live for themselves. Yes, and if anyone among us should think, “If I would work this hard in the world I could live a comfortable and prosperous life,” he would have to be out of his mind and crazy.

If only you could be here and see what is happening! One week you would see the tradesmen deep in their work and with nice operations going. Several weeks or a month later you would ask: “What happened to the master tanner?” Oh, he has gone to Muddy Creek! “Where is the shoemaker that did such good work?” Out beyond the Susquehanna! “Where is the master weaver?” He has gone to Maryland and Virginia! “What are they doing there? Are they studying to improve their professions or have they gone to earn more money?” No, instead of that they are using up our money to go among totally unknown people to tell them the Lamb of God bled and died for them.

This last winter, right when we had the most weaving to do, Leonhard Schnell (our master weaver) suddenly left for a three hundred mile journey on foot to Canahojarie, not even knowing whether he would get to preach there or not. Right before harvest, Joseph Powell, our assistant farm director, left for Shamokin on the Susquehanna to build a house and blacksmith shop among the Indians. And we gave him our blessing with a thousand joys.17

Two hundred and fifty-one years later I visited Shamokin again. . . .




1 Gesangbuch, 886

2 Marienborn Synod, Protokolle der Sitzungen 4. August, 1764

3 Fredric Klees, The Pennsylvania Dutch, pg. 99

4 Diarium Bethlehem, 31. Oktober, 1742

5 The last two of the six were never developed.

6 Children, after they turned eighteen months old, spent the day in nurseries, supervised by teams of sisters. When the congregation saw that this was not the best, the practice was discontinued and parents again assumed full responsibility for their own.

7 From the rules of the General Economy, adopted in 1744.

8 Jacob John Sessler, Communal Pietism

9 March 9, 1758

10 Auf ein Liebesmahl der Stallbrüder in Bethlehem, 31. Dezember, 1753

11 L. T. Reichel, The Early History of the Church of the United Brethren . . . in North America, Nazareth, 1888

12 Helmuth Erbe, Bethlehem Pa., eine Kommunistische Herrnhuter Kolonie des 18 Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart, 1929

13 Uttendörfer und Schmidt, Die Brüder, Gnadau, 1914

14 Isaac Weld, 1796

15 Fredric Klees, The Pennsylvania Dutch, pg. 103

16 ibid. pg. 98

17 Cammerhof an Wilhelm Zander in Berbice, 21. Januar 1747

Continued with chapter 18:


 2008/7/22 17:34Profile
pastorfrin
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Joined: 2006/1/19
Posts: 1406


 Re: Behold The Lamb

Behold The Lamb
By Peter Hoover

Chapter 18

Dry Grass And Seeds

From Conrad Weiser’s place at Womelsdorf, through Pine Grove and Tower City I crossed the Blue Mountains on the Shamokin Trail. It rained, that cold Sunday afternoon in December. Hurrying to see my wife and new son at an Amish midwife’s place, I feared it would turn dark before I descended the last steep hill—where Brother Ludwig held onto Anna Nitschmann’s coat tails—into Sunbury. It did. But I found the site of Chief Shikellamy’s village, on the north side of town where the great rivers come together, at once.

I stood, and “remembered” even though I had never stood there before.

On the far side of the Susquehanna, half a mile wide at Sunbury, golden lights moved along the water’s edge below the rock face of a mountain. Trains stood in rail yards on my side. Above them, in a quiet residential area, built out to a flood-wall, I found the state historical marker: “Shikellamy, Oneida chief and overseer or vice-regent of the Six Nations, asserting Iroquois dominion over conquered Delaware and other tribes. He lived at Shamokin Indian town, Sunbury, from about 1728 until his death, 1748. Said to be buried near here.”

Shikellamy, baptised member of the Unity of Brothers, resting in the wounds of the Lamb. At this place Peter Böhler and Ludwig von Zinzendorf preached in his home. In this soil Martin and Johanna Mack, just married (Martin, who became a bishop in the Gemeine and died the year after the hurricane, at Friedensthal on St. Croix), planted turnips. Here Joseph Powell the farm director that left Bethlehem “right before harvest” built a blacksmith shop.

From where I stood on the flood-wall I watched the Susquehanna move under reflected lights toward Shamokin Dam. Plumes of vapour from the Cellotex plant billowed into the night sky. Beneath them, on what might have been a restaurant, I saw a sign “Christian Assembly” and stepped in. A woman with frizzy hair and green tights, evidently a good cook, met me among preparations for a Christmas banquet. “Moravians, nope never heard of ’em! Sheila,” she called over her shoulder from where she stood squeezing out the mayonnaise, “Ever heard tell of a Christian community here in the 1700s? Plain people that preached to Indians?”

Looking thoughtful, but no less friendly, another woman emerged from the kitchen. She had heard of Moravian College in Bethlehem but did not know that a church started it.

In Bethlehem itself I found things more encouraging. Not only did I discover a number of people well aware of Moravian Pilgerwerk (mission activity) in the past. I found a group, including a Moravian pastor, actively involved in church planting and mission communities today.

On a sunny winter morning we met under rough-hewn ceiling beams in the Saal of Bethlehem’s 1742 Gemeinhaus. January sunlight streamed through many-paned windows onto the hardwood floor upstairs. We sat on bare benches, Anabaptist men with beards, a sister in a long dress and white head covering, one brother from England, one from Hungary, discussing with modern-day Moravians (not for a pageant but for real) the situation of Hindu refugees in Venezuela. We spoke of travel through the Orinoco delta to the Demerara. We discussed how best to get from Berbice to Suriname, and sang Brother Ludwig’s song, Jesu geh voran (Jesus still lead on) together.

How I wished this meeting could have taken place two hundred years earlier! But it didn’t, and some time later I sat with other Moravians, Anabaptists, and Lutherans in a restored meetinghouse on the campus of a Brethren college. A Moravian bishop spoke on Ludwig von Zinzendorf’s “ecumenical theology.” A panel, including a student from Herrnhut (after the breakup of communism, no longer in East Germany), a Lutheran theologian, a Moravian history professor, and a women who carefully spoke of Christian “siblinghood” discussed what he had to say.

Conversation turned to the Moravian focus on the blood of Christ. The bishop smiled. “We no longer speak about that,” he explained, “Because we have learned that not everyone comes to God through Jesus Christ. Some, like our Muslim brothers and sisters, come to God through God. . . .”

Sitting in the Brethren meetinghouse I could not help but think of Joseph Müller. Born in a Swiss Anabaptist home he emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1735 where he found the Lord among the Brethren (Dunkards) at Germantown. They baptised him by trine immersion. But through contact with the Skippack brothers and meetings of the “Church of God in the Spirit” he joined the Moravians.

Andreas and Wilhelm Frey, like Joseph Müller of Mennonite background, and their sister Veronika who became his wife, also humbled themselves before the Lamb and moved to Bethlehem. When Brother Ludwig returned to Europe in 1743, Joseph travelled with him. As part of the Pilgergemeine he made his way through Saxony and Silesia, back to Mühlheim on the Rhein where he visited Gerhard Tersteegen. He became leader of boys’ choirs, first at Herrnhaag then in England. Andreas and Wilhelm, his brothers-in-law left the Moravians again, but Joseph felt sure he had found the Saviour’s Gemeine. In a letter to his Dunkard and Mennonite family he wrote:

If the Saviour [through the use of the lot] had allowed it, we would baptise by immersion. But neither in Pennsylvania or in Germany has he wanted it this way, no doubt because we Dunkers make too much out of it. . . . God does not like when we emphasise anything but Christ, his death and wounds, and his bloody atonement. All other things—baptism, the Lord’s supper, footwashing, going to meeting, vigils, prayers, fasts, and the alms we give—easily become idols to us. . . .

I do not think the Moravians are the only true church, but they are certainly the best I know of at this point. I do not say this because of their beautiful order and outward appearance. Many take that for the thing itself. Rather, I say this because the Moravian church rests exclusively on the foundation of the prophets and apostles, that is, on Jesus Christ and on his blood. This word of the cross separates their doctrine from all other doctrines in the world.1

“Christ, his death and wounds, and his bloody atonement . . . beautiful order and outward appearance . . . the word of the cross.” Browsing the Moravian exhibit on the day of the bishop’s visit, I could not help but compare what Joseph Müller saw with what one sees today. Under the lids of glass cases I saw old Moravian books and pictures of their “beautifully ordered” communities. I looked at Moravian tools and handcrafted articles, and on stands around me hung evidence of their “outward appearance”: broad-brimmed hats like the Amish, long dresses with capes and aprons, head coverings in three pieces that covered all the hair and then some, and black bonnets like those still worn among the Old Order River Brethren.

With these peculiarities they went—trusting the Saviour alone for their protection, and following his instructions explicitly—to St. Thomas, to Greenland, Suriname, and South Africa. With this they enjoyed his favour and brought thousands upon thousands of black slaves, natives of the rain forest, Khoi tribesmen, and Eskimos to him. Yet now it might be indiscreet to mention his saving blood.

Is this what happens to movements that go “all out” for Christ? Two Mennonite ministers, Jaan Stinstra and Jeme Teknatel (the man in whose home Moravian brothers stayed in Amsterdam) discussed that question centuries ago. Jaan Stinstra, minister of the Harlingen congregation and for many years moderator of the Frisian Mennonite Society, said “yes!” He predicted the apostasy and decline of the Moravian church.

In fact, no one in the eighteenth century, predicted it with greater force and accuracy.

Jaan Stinstra and his Mennonite friends had little time for the Herzensglauben (heart religion) of the Moravians. “Who cares whether our hearts turn warm or cold when we pray?” they asked. “No amount of inner feelings, of evangelistic zeal, or great ideas about following Christ will last through time. Such emotionalism, if let go, destroys common sense, but an honest Gehorsamsglauben (religion of obedience) goes on forever.”

In 1753 Jaan Stinstra wrote a book against the Moravians and their influence, Waarschuwinge tegen de Geestdrijverij, that others soon published in England under the title A Pastoral Letter Against Fanaticism addressed to the Mennonites of Friesland. . . which may serve as an Excellent Antidote against the Principles of Fanatics in General and the Herrnhuters or Moravians in Particular. The book also appeared in French (with an introduction giving the story of the rise of Herrnhut) and soon after in German. Leaders of the Dutch Reformed church read Jaan’s book and became greatly alarmed. They sent a letter to all Dutch colonies in the East and West Indies, to New York, South Africa and Suriname, urgently calling on Reformed pastors everywhere to stand against the “heretical and dangerous influence” from Herrnhut.

Both the book and the letter brought great hardship on Moravians around the world. In Ceylon it resulted in their expulsion altogether. But Jeme Deknatel, minister of the Mennonite congregation bij ‘t Lam (by the Lamb) in Amsterdam, did not support it. “Why fear the Moravians or be hard on them?” Jeme and his friends (like Peter Weber, another Mennonite minister from Germany) wondered. “If we know and walk with Christ, how shall Moravian influence harm us?”

Jeme Deknatel saw nothing dangerous about a “heart religion” or an emphasis on personal experience. “What religion might we have,” he wondered, “if it is not bevindelijk (something to experience and feel)?” When the Moravians organised a congregation in Amsterdam in 1738 he became an affiliate and often preached at the Heerendyk community even though he kept his membership in the Mennonite church. He sent his sons, Jan and Jakob, to the Moravians’ school in Marienborn, and entertained brother Josef, Brother Ludwig (who celebrated communion with him) and others in his home.

In a letter to Leonhard Dober, Jeme Deknatel told of the wonderful fellowship with Christ he and his family had discovered through influence from Herrnhut. “We have rid ourselves of much self-love and self-made piety,” he said, and through prayer meetings in his home, correspondence far and wide, and his writings distributed from Russia to Pennsylvania he shared with his Anabaptist brothers and sisters what he had found.

Hutterite believers wrote to Jeme Deknatel from eastern Europe. Through this and direct contact with Herrnhut (Brother Ludwig issued passports for them) many escaped from Roman Catholic lands to begin a new life in Russia. In southern Germany and Switzerland Peter Weber and groups of seekers under Moravian influence “woke up” to Christ. So did Mennonites and Dunkards in Pennsylvania (among whom this influence resulted in the formation of the “River Brethren”) and the Mennonite Brüdergemeine (named after the Unity of Brothers) in Russia.

In Harlingen itself, right in Jaan Stinstra’s congregation, hungry seekers discovered fellowship with Christ through Moravian influence, and when Jaan forbade Jeme Deknatel to come and preach for them, they began to meet for prayer and communion services in their homes.

“We dare not stand in the way of the Saviour’s work in believers’ hearts,” Jeme Deknatel, and his friends insisted. “If Christians lose a Herzensglauben they will surely lose their Gehorsam (obedience) as well. . . .”

But Jaan Stinstra was the first to be proven right.

When Brother Ludwig returned to Germany from America in 1743 he found the Moravian church growing by leaps and bounds. More than twenty thousand people—four thousand of them in Silesia alone—had joined, and new Ortsgemeinen, Niesky, Gnadenfrei (Free Grace), and Gnadenberg, had grown up almost overnight. Another one, Neudietendorf was underway in the German province of Thüringen. Brother Ludwig, who had asked for release from leadership two years earlier, felt bewildered at first, then upset.

All this happening without him involved? What about not making proselytes and just helping people find Christ where they are? Brother Ludwig felt his vision betrayed. He also felt certain this rapid growth, particularly with its “sectarian distinctions” brought from Moravia (refusal to swear oaths or bear arms, plain dress, life in community), would bring German rulers in ever greater wrath upon them. So he lost no time in going to government officials, requesting them to cancel permits they had given for more building projects, and at the Hirschberg, near Ebersdorf, he called the leaders of all Moravian congregations together.

In a difficult conference that lasted a week, it became clear that even though Christ might serve as “chief elder” of the church, no one but Ludwig von Zinzendorf, with his noble rank and assets, would have the last word. What could David Nitschmann, Wenzel Neisser, Martin and Leonhard Dober, and other leaders, most of them refugees from Moravia, say? They owed their livelihood (and quite likely their lives) to the Count on whose property they lived. Four months later they signed a document of submission giving him “unlimited control and oversight” of the Moravian Church.

Things happened fast. Under Ludwig’s unrestrained leadership waves of ever greater evangelistic zeal swept through the communities, while the first sentiments of disdain for Herrnhut’s “prudish ways” made themselves felt at Marienborn and Herrnhaag. Thankfulness for Christ’s blood progressed rapidly from emphasis to obsession. “In our congregation it becomes bloodier all the time,” Christian Renatus von Zinzendorf (Ludwig’s son) wrote. “To speak of the cross and the blood becomes continually more pleasant and goes deeper into the heart. Every hour of the day we taste nothing but wounds and wounds and wounds and wounds.”

A stream of songs written after Brother Ludwig’s return, exhausted the ideas of the “blood conscious ones” how to put their fascination with Christ to words—but they kept on writing and singing nevertheless. For those who had not felt the Saviour’s presence “warming the heart” their songs became unintelligible. Even some who lived in fellowship with him began to wonder where this matter of his Wunden (wounds) would take them:

Des Wundten Kreutz-Gotts Bundesblut

Die Wunden-wunden-wunden-fluth,

Ihr Wunden! Ja, ihr wunden!

(The Cross-God’s covenant blood of the wounds, the wounds-wounds-wounds flow from its wounds! Yes its wounds!)

Euer Wunden-wunden-wunden-gut

Macht Wunden-wunden-wunden-muth

Und Wunden, Herzens-wunden.

(Your wounds-wounds-wounds possession, gives you wounds-wounds-wounds courage, and wounds wound your heart.)

Wunden! Wunden! Wunden! Wunden!

Wunden! Wunden! Wunden! Wunden!

Wunden! Wunden! O! Ihr Wunden.2

At Herrnhaag the brothers built a niche, lined with red velvet, into the side of the Saal. Children placed into it pictured the believers’ rest in the side wound of Christ. At a “bloody festival of grace” the whole congregation marched through a red arch to celebrate the same. Thinking of themselves as little Kreuzluft-vögelein (birds of the air around the cross) fluttering about the “magnetic body of the Lamb,” they pictured themselves with their beaks pushed deep into his wounds, drawing on his blood until “stiff and full with ecstasy” they would close their eyes in unconsciousness. Nothing but a fresh spurt of blood, pouring over them from head to foot, would awaken and loosen them to flutter around the cross again. They sung of licking round and round in Christ’s wounds like in a block of salt (Ich hab es um und um belekt, Das Stein-salz! O wie hats geschmeckt!), of crawling deeply into them like little bees, or swimming like fish in the sea of his blood. But this focus on the wounds—even though most Moravians believed it rested on Christ—did not keep their eyes on him. Neither did it save them from disaster.

Financial mismanagement, most of it happening during the “years of blood” and indiscriminate use of the lot, finally brought the whole Gemeine to the brink of bankruptcy. The beautiful communities of the Wetterau, Herrnhaag (built with the labour of thousands of willing hands) and Marienborn had to be abandoned. In the east, a Russian army destroyed the Neusalz community. The Sharon community at Chelsea, in London, and Heerendyk in the Netherlands had to be sold. Pilgerhut in South America was abandoned like the work in the East Indies and many preaching places through England, Ireland, and Germany. Even so, by the time Brother Ludwig died in 1760 and the believers bought Herrnhut from his heirs, the church faced outstanding debts of nearly eight hundred thousand Reichsthaler (besides the five hundred thousand they had already paid).

Jaan Stinstra felt completely justified. His prophecy had come true—even faster than he expected. In his old age even Jeme Deknatel, John and Charles Wesley, Peter Weber and others who had warmly defended the Moravians and opposed him had to admit, somewhat hesitantly, that he had been right. But the story did not end. . . .

Jeme Deknatel’s prophecy also came true.

Not only did the Mennonites clinging tightly to a strict Gehorsamsglauben (Jaan Stinstra’s congregation at Harlingen included) turn further and further away from personal faith in Christ—eventually losing interest in “conversion” and personal piety altogether. Their focus on correct teaching and good works, as opposed to a focus on Christ, led them to spiritual death. First a few, then dozens of Mennonite congregations died out in the Netherlands and Germany. Ever shrinking groups failed to keep their young people, and marks of nonconformity to the world fell away, one after another. Their peace witness disappeared. Even though their interest in foreign missions survived for a while, a generation after Jaan Stinstra’s death the few remaining Mennonites in Western Europe lived little differently than their Lutheran, Catholic, and unbelieving neighbours.

And the Moravians, after the “blood enthusiasm” died down, followed suit.

During the years they spoke of little else but the Saviour’s blood and wounds many had failed to read his words or follow his instructions carefully. They also forgot to teach them to their children. Hymnbooks took the place of Scriptures, and ever more exciting celebrations—in “halls decorated with pine branches and thousands of candles, with fancy lettering and displays, much Christmas baking, drama, and other sorts of childishness” as described by Andreas Frey—took the place of sound teaching. Jacob John Sessler, describing what happened at Bethlehem in America, wrote:

The emphasis on their hymns, while it apparently unified them externally, left them without an intellectual grasp of their belief. They largely replaced religious instruction and the study of the Bible itself. These hymns were supposed to be the expressions of hearts already “set on fire” for the Lord, but the fact was that many who sang them were not “set on fire.” Later generations did not share the sentiment which those hymns presupposed. With the breakdown of the General Economy the individual pursuit of business afforded the Brethren less time for participation in [worship] services. In short, the Brethren were no longer imbued with the piety to which a previous generation had given expression. They now dared to question the traditions and beliefs of their church without being stricken with the sinfulness of such an attitude.

On his return from America, Brother Ludwig had already attempted to modify what he saw as “sectarian influences” from Moravia. He wanted the communities to fit into the main-line churches of Europe (Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed) and even though he left room for those with peculiar convictions to practice them, he no longer felt they should be required of everyone. Pilgrims who had suffered harassment for years because they would not swear oaths suddenly received directions from Marienborn to “make nothing more out of it.” Some obeyed and swore oaths of allegiance. Others, standing for what they had always believed, returned to Europe or Pennsylvania.

In meetings after Brother Ludwig’s death the church elected an “Elders’ Conference” (a board of governors) to oversee all Moravian communities. Trained theologians defined what they believed, experienced businessmen took charge of their money, and historians recorded what they had done. As long as those whose “hearts had been truly warmed” lived, the Ortsgemeinen continued to function (even though their children and grandchildren grew restless within them) but drastic changes followed.

By the late 1700s most communities had allowed hourly intercessions to cease. They no longer washed feet before communion (something old Friedrich von Watteville mentioned in a letter of admonition from his deathbed), and the bands, choirs, and weekly or monthly interviews fell into disarray. The Elders’ Conference tried to improve and enlarge Moravian schools that had acquired fame as among the best in Europe. In 1775 they made the leaders of all congregations directly responsible to Herrnhut, “agents and representatives of the Elders’ Conference,” rather than to the groups they served. For a time they also set up a dual membership system: Those who wished to belong to the Moravian church but not follow all its customs could take part as associate members, and receive communion twice a year. Those fully integrated, an “inner circle” of dedicated members, could meet for communion once a month. But after 1800 the speed of the Unity of Brothers’ deterioration only increased.

In meetings at Herrnhut early in the nineteenth century the use of the lot came up for question. Many members did not feel like using it anymore, particularly not in marriage. At first the Elders’ Conference allowed them to stop putting in a blank slip. Then they made marriage by lot necessary for ministers and missionaries only. After a few more years, they dropped it altogether. Along with it, they dropped all dress standards, both for men and women. The sisters stopped wearing their white Shnäbelhauben (head coverings), and in 1836 the Elders’ Conference decided to exchange the “kiss of peace” with an ordinary handshake.

Up to this time, only members of the Moravian church could live in the Ortsgemeinen. The church still owned the mills, tanneries, stores, and guest houses within them and employed many of its working members. But families managed their own affairs. Young men and women living in their choir houses, found work elsewhere and no longer shared their possessions. They simply paid for their keep, like at boarding houses, and after repeated incidents of drunkenness and immorality (or theft, as in one case in Germany where a brother in charge made off with a large sum of money), the church decided to close the choir houses down.

At Bethlehem in Pennsylvania the church began to allow its members to sell land to non-Moravians in 1844. Other communities “opened up” soon afterward, but no change affected the brothers and sisters more than their gradual acceptance of military service.

For a hundred years since their flight to Herrnhut, and century upon century before then, Moravian believers, as “pilgrims on earth and friends of the whole world,” had refused to take part in war. War and worldly government, like taking up arms for self-defence, looked to them like the exact opposite of Christ’s way. As late as in the 1770’s (during the Revolutionary War) the brothers at Gnadenheim, near York, Pennsylvania, wrote: “To take part in military service is sin. It calls for church discipline.” In a message to the young brothers at Bethlehem, Bishop Johann Ettwein said: “To take up arms is the same as murder, and to hire a substitute for the militia, the same as hiring a murderer instead of being one. . . . Your work is to serve Christ. Therefore you may not allow anything to break your close connection or your allegiance to him. For this reason, do not get involved in political excitement.”

A generation later, Moravians in Europe fought on both sides of the Napoleonic Wars. The same took place in America where the church band from Salem, North Carolina, played for Confederate troops at Gettysburg. And during both World Wars young Moravians marched to opposite tunes—mere Americans, Britons, or Nazis. Herrnhut itself passed from the Heiland’s hands into those of the Führer, then into East German communism. But the story did not end. . . .

A chorus of frogs sang in the rain the night we met with the leaders of the Moravian Church in Guyana, at Georgetown. Sitting around a table under a bare light in the basement of the manse on New Garden Street, we heard water dripping outside its open windows. Water ran from coconut palms. Mosquitos circled about, and the happy noise of children playing across the yard in the John Amos Comenius school drifted to us. A brother read the Watchword. We prayed together and an East Indian Christian (a welcome sight among the rest of the brothers, all Afro-Guyanese, in this racially divided land) spoke to us. We discussed plans together. Then we stood, holding hands, to pray again and sing a Moravian hymn.

After the meeting I met leaders from West Demerara, Graham’s Hall, Beterverwagting, Berbice. . . . As if walking straight out of the story those names evoked they almost startled me with their reality. Anabaptists from England, America, and Canada, here we stood among Moravians again—Afro-Moravians in South America on the eve of the twenty-first century—just as colourfully diverse, yet as directly a result of central Europeans seeking for Christ as we. And in that strange diversity but common unity it occurred to me that we may not have missed our last chance yet.

All those that predicted, like Jaan Stinstra, the ruin of the Moravian church saw some of their prophecies come true. But all of them, to greater or lesser degrees, suffered the same ruin themselves. Apostasy comes in many ways. No matter on what we focus—on strict obedience to the letter, on heady emotionalism, on missions, on revival, on community, on nonconformity, on peace—if it is not Christ, it leads to ruin. But awakening only and always comes through humble repentance.

The first Mennonite meetinghouse in America, at Germantown, like the Moravian Gemeinhaus at Bethlehem, has become a museum. To a certain extent both of us have become “museum churches.” All Christians like to know something about us, and mention us in their footnotes. But what would happen, I began to ask myself that wet tropical night on New Garden Street, if we woke up together? What would happen if in full recognition of our Sünderhaftigkeit (wretched sinnerness) we would fall on our faces before the “Bridegroom of our Souls” then rose to follow him in radical obedience? What would happen if we caught a new vision of the Gemeinde Gottes im Geist, a “Jesus Church” for the 21’st Century, then lived it out in simplicity and peace?

Could many good traditions, the Pilger and the Ortsgemeinen, “choir houses” for single brothers and sisters, “pilgrim wheels” and the “hinge,” not come back to life and serve the Saviour again?

Could what the Moravians had and what the Anabaptists (always bickering and dividing over details) needed, not come together? On the other hand, could the “If you love me keep my commandments” teaching of the Anabaptists not protect those who exult in the wonder of Christ’s mercy today?

It will not take a fresh understanding of Scripture, it suddenly occurred to me, for us to rediscover the great joy of the early Moravian, the Anabaptist, the Waldensian, the early Czech, Albigensian, Bogomil, and first Christian movements. It will not take years in college or celebrations of history—artefact displays, Moravian stars, beeswax candles, or music by Bethlehem’s Bach choir. It will not even take this book. . . .

All it will take for heaven to move and earth to shake again is a “night on the Hutberg.” All it will take is what David had and Saul did not—a vision of ourselves as ganz klein und sünderisch, utterly wretched in our sins before God (both as individuals and congregations). Then, on our faces in repentance before him, we might see what the believers at Herrnhut saw, and our Saviour might finish in us what he began in them.

Just before Easter, in 1999, I visited Bethlehem for the last time before moving to South America. Patches of frozen snow still crunched under my feet on the burial ground in the middle of the city. The rising sun, dazzling in mist above the Lehigh, shone through giant trees not yet in bud. Squirrels scampered from tree to tree, and I heard the roar of morning rush hour traffic. . . .

Johann Michael Zahm, Sinsheim Pfaltz, 1737, Michael of the Mennising Nation, John Peter of the Wampanosh Nation, Thomas Fischer, Neustadt an der Asch, Simeon a Delaware, Johannes (Tschoop) a Mohican—the gravestones, some still under snow, lay flat among dry grass and seeds. Row upon row of stones, they lay like I knew the brothers and sisters buried there had sat in meeting. Every one alike. All on the same level. First I walked where the married brothers lay: Johann Friedrich Cammerhof, David Nitschman Zauchenthal 1696-1772 episcopus, Christian Werner, Copenhagen, William, son of Johannes an East Indian and of Magdalena an African, Georg Heinrich Loskiel, Angermunde, Courland, 1745-1814, Joseph a Mohican. Jens Wittenberg, Christiania [Norway], Joachim Busse, Reval, Livonia, 1758. . . .

Then I found myself among the young brothers’ and little boys’s choirs: Johann Ignatius Nitschmann, Joseph “Indian boy” 1759, Samuel (a Delaware) 1757, Timothy Horsefield, Johann Gattermeyer, William Shippen, Christian David Heckewelder, Friedrich Christian Beutel [son of Heinrich and Elisabeth, pioneers at Pilgerhut], Ludwig Daniel Lukenbach. . . .

On the other side of the central path through the burial ground I read: Agnes Fischer, Mühlhausen im Schweiz, 1788, Anna Helena Haberland, Berthelsdorf, Elisabeth Weber, Modekrick [Muddy Creek], Susanne Elisabeth Funk Kaske [Pilgerhut, Berbice], Anna Caritas of the Shawnee Nation, Eve of the Mohican Nation, wife of Nicodemus, Elizabeth Langgard, s’Gravenhaag, Barbara Schlegel, Franconia, Helene Birnbaum, Kärnten, 1784, Rosina Neubert, Kunwald in Mähren, Marianne Garrison [the converted sea-captain’s wife], Dorothea Schmidt, Württemberg, Maria Elisabeth Pitschman, Oberschlesien . . . . And among the girls choirs, Susanna Carolina Eggert, Lydia Carolina Hübner, Lisette Lewering, Johanna Elisabeth Unger, Mary Pyrlaeus, Juliane Fischer, geboren in Surinam, Rachel and Anna Maria of the Delaware Nation, Clementine Sophie Borheck, Carolina Henkel, St. Croix. . . .

Baby girls that died before they had names lay under simple inscriptions, Beata (Blessed) Schropp, Beata Schultz, and baby boys under the name Beatus.

From London and Donegal and Wittgenstein they came. From Schaffhausen, Hungary, Yorkshire, Antigua, St. Thomas, Heidelberg, Stockholm, the Aarau, Liverpool, Jutland, Holstein, Lübeck, Hinterpommern—their names (many of them old Waldensian and Unity names from Moravia) standing in silent witness this spring morning above the Lehigh to what happened in southern France, in Czech lands, and at Herrnhut in the eighteenth century.

In this burial ground I could not feel sad. The vollendete Gemeine (triumphant congregation) that left its names at this place is no longer here. Their trials passed. They had their turn. They saw the Lamb and changed the world. Now it is our turn.

At the time of the awakening in Herrnhut, Brother Ludwig wrote:

A Church remains immovable, as long as she is faithful and the Saviour prospers her. But the moment her spirit is gone, and the body is without life, it must, according to general and eternal justice, be dissolved, and lose its form also. Those church bodies which are not dissolved when life is wanting, either never had it, but were statues, or if they had, then they are carcasses in the sight of God, till their figure likewise drops. But God who raises the dead and has promised eternal duration to his own schemes, foresees an hour when he will call such a vanished church out of her grave. Then she is fairer than before.3

An hour foreseen by God to rise from the grave? Should we “behold the Lamb” like the young slave singing with all his heart among the St. Thomas underbrush, that hour might come today.




1 From a letter from Joseph Müller to the Brethren in Germantown, November 1749.

2 Gesangbuch, 1945

3 Berliner Reden, 1738

Peter Hoover
*************************************************


 2008/7/24 17:29Profile
MikeAtnip
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Joined: 2007/10/21
Posts: 13
Quaker City, Ohio

 Re:

[url=http://www.elcristianismoprimitivo.com/Behold%20the%20Lamb.pdf]Behold the Lamb[/url] available for download in PDF format.


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Mike Atnip

 2008/12/23 21:06Profile





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