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Nikolaus von Zinzendorf

Lived
1700–1760
Era
Modern
Where
Herrnhut, Saxony
Tradition
Moravian

Sheltering the Moravians, and sending them everywhere

A Saxon count who let refugees from the Hussite remnant settle on his estate in 1722, and who ended up leading the community, being exiled from Saxony for it, and giving his fortune to it.

Why it matters

Herrnhut began a prayer meeting in 1727 kept in hourly shifts for a hundred years, and started sending missionaries in 1732 — to the Caribbean, Greenland, Suriname and southern Africa — sixty years before the societies usually credited with beginning the modern missionary movement. Moravians on an Atlantic crossing in a storm, calm while everyone else panicked, were what unsettled John Wesley into the search that ended at Aldersgate.

In the record

  1. 1792–1910 AD Migration

    The modern missionary movement

    Herrnhut was sending workers sixty years before the societies usually credited

All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.

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