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Zinzendorf today

By Andy Griffiths.

When did Zinzendorf live, and what was his theological context?

His dates are 1700-1760. He lived most of his life in Saxony, in what is now the far south-east corner of Germany, but he also travelled widely – not least to England, where he lived from 1746-1753.  The most readable recent biography is Phil Anderson’s The Lord of the Ring (Kingsway, Eastbourne 2006), or go to www.zinzendorf.com.

Zinzendorf has to be understood against the backdrop of two other religious movements of his day: German Pietism and the English Holiness Tradition, including Wesleyan Methodism. Both of these movements presented a model of the Christian life in which there was an agonizing struggle for conversion, followed by a serious and observable growth in holiness, aiming at some form of perfection. In contrast, Zinzendorf saw ‘stillness’ as the way to receive salvation – “faith is not a please, but a thank you.” And, on biblical and psychological grounds, he argued that ‘sanctification’ should be seen as our setting apart for God, which is already achieved at our conversion. He declared that his theology was “the opposite of Pietism” – he didn’t want good works done out of pride, fear, guilt or duty, but only out of an overflowing gratitude for what we have already been given. “If a believer, by the power of Christ, do all things required by the law of the Spirit, he hardly is conscious of having done any thing, for he hath done no thing but he is led and moved to in his own heart.”

“Jesus,” says Zinzendorf, “the more I am sure of your mercy and love, the more I will be devoted to you, and cheerfully stand to comply with your every command.”

“We think that when anyone gets hold of the crucified Christ for the heart, all that is idle vanishes away and all necessary good comes, together with the living impression of the loving and faithful Lamb.”

I guess his opponents felt that relying on gratitude alone as a motivation to do the right thing would undermine the need for hard work.

That’s exactly what they said. Yet he established the first Protestant world mission movement; his followers travelled all over the world, willing (literally) to become slaves if necessary. They bought people out of debt-bondage, healed the sick, shared their possessions, preached the good news and established experimental missional communities on every continent. So many of them lost their lives that their missionary service became known as 'The Great Dying'. “You must be content to suffer, die and be forgotten,” Zinzendorf told them. It was said that the distinguishing mark of the Moravians was that “no one thinks: I am doing this for me.” Gratitude turned out to be a very powerful motivation indeed.

I read that Zinzendorf had a radically Christocentric theology

Yes, he did. Jesus is the active God, God-for-us, the lamb we follow, the saviour, Yahweh in the Old Testament, the bridegroom, the unseen head of a church without hierarchy, the perfect human being, the concentrated God, the centre of our faith. For Zinzendorf, spirituality is all about loving Jesus. By his death and resurrection, Jesus has already justified his family and made us holy. Without him, we can have no reliable knowledge of God. Through a simple, unstruggling, loving and cheerful relationship with Jesus we come to know the Trinity, which is the model for community. Missionaries and evangelists were to speak in depth of Jesus the Man – his perfect love, life and death and his resurrection – before, probably on a subsequent occasion, introducing any concept of ‘God’.

Zinzendorf’s stress on, and apparently pathological interest in, the wounds of Jesus is harder to live with. This is deliberate. Zinzendorf believed that words such as ‘cross’ and ‘crucified’ had lost their power to move and offend. The visual image is very striking: through the wound in Jesus’ side we can reach his heart and be (together) ‘in Christ’; the wounds, still visible on his glorified body, bring to mind our ransom, our sacrifice and our joy, and are the key for understanding the whole bible. Zinzendorf called this “the hermeneutic of the wounds”.

For more on Zinzendorf’s theology, and for a bibliography, see www.zinzendorf.webs.com.

Is there anything in what you discovered about Zinzendorf that might impact our ministry today?

Well, I think more stress on joyful, confident gratitude as the only motivation for goodness would help our preaching, but I also think his four-part mission strategy has something to teach us.

First, the story of Jesus was to be preached. Preaching that majored on fear was to be avoided – as Zinzendorf put it: “the Methodists’ way of converting people is to shake them over hell, but of the loving Jesus one hears little. They teach that one must first be holy. Our plan of action is to aim for the heart at once. We attempt to bring all people to a knowledge of the crucified Jesus, and see his wounds as the most important thing, so that the wounds may remain their motivation for the rest of their lives”.

Second, his workers were to discern individuals who were being touched by this message and assist with their progress towards Jesus. “One is not to proceed with the conversion of individuals, nor rush them in their process with God, until one has discerned what God is doing”. Zinzendorf frequently used the example of Cornelius in Acts 10 to explain this: God was simultaneously preparing Cornelius to receive salvation at Peter’s hands, and preparing Peter to receive Cornelius. Today, Zinzendorf is rightly honoured for founding a 100-year prayer meeting, but he was always speaking about the way Jesus interrupts prayer by asking us to join in with what God had already started doing before our prayers began. His early followers became highly skilled in this gentle, time-consuming discernment. Potential converts were to be discouraged from any acts that might appear to be attempting to ‘struggle’ for God’s favour – they were to be cheerfully still. For some, “God’s work is not done yet, he will complete it later with no assistance from us.”  Either way, it is not for us to force the pace – “one can wish for what is good for [someone] without compulsion”.

Third, healing is to be offered. Healing was (literally!) the other side of the coin from preaching. Members wore a medallion with ‘the wounds of Christ’ written on one side and ‘healing’ on the other. Sometimes this healing was miraculous, but usually it came through medical and relief services offered to those in the area. The sick were to be visited daily, cared for and read with; shoes were to be bought for those without them, beggars given money, coffins provided for those who could not afford them, and slaves bought out of debt bondage. The Caribs of the Amazon referred to the Moravians in their own language as ‘the brothers who love you.’

But it is the fourth aspect of Zinzendorf’s missionary strategy that made the most difference to the history of mission. All through his life, he kept founding ‘vowed communities’. In his teens, he formed ‘the Order of the Mustard Seed’. In early adulthood, he formed ‘The League of Gentlemen’. In 1722, some religious refugees – some of them from Moravia, hence the term ‘Moravian church’ - asked to settle on his estate, and he formed them into the Herrnhut Community. When the Pietists got him exiled from Saxony, he formed ‘the Pilgrim Congregation’, a sort of mobile headquarters team. All over the world, he formed Ortsgemeine, missional communities, in every region. Danish Lutherans and the Anglican SPCK had sent out missionaries before Zinzendorf’s day, but these were always clergy, sent out singly. Zinzendorf sent whole communities of ordinary Christians. “As in every quarter of the world where we establish our selves [sic],” he wrote “there are usually 80-100 Persons in our Oeconomy who eat our Bread, but who, after the manner of the Rechabites, are not inclined to fix their abodes or carry on their Affairs for their own Benefit, but at all times be at Liberty and serve their neighbours after their Capacity”. “This is our plan for the Kingdom of God: not first to bring arguments, but to let the people see what kind of men [we] are, and then they will be forced to ask, ‘Who makes such men as these?’” Zinzendorf’s mission was mission by community.

Zinzendorf believed churches should be easy to join, and he was very clear that those at Berthelsdorf who discerned that God was calling them simply to remain as members of the Lutheran Parish Church, without taking vows to join the Herrnhut community, were not lesser Christians – their whole lives were Gottesdienst, worshipful service to God. Joining one of the missional communities was a lot more difficult. “I am of the opinion that we ought to reject every man who shows a disposition to seek his own ease or advantage,” said Zinzendorf. Members were described as entering the missional community through the hole in Jesus’ side (and indeed this was dramatised by provision of a red archway!) – this was a way of forcing the existing team to see that, though having to incorporate new recruits was traumatic in a close-knit group, inclusion was Jesus’ will: “The body was forced to yield a new and unique orifice through which persons could enter.”

The vowed communities were unrepentantly lay. A key moment was 1725, when the community was reorganised to allow maximum lay ministry. Rothe (one of Zinzendorf’s closest collaborators) presented the new system to the Herrnhut community, which now numbered around 60, as the practical result of Romans 12. Christian David reports that “he proved how very unfair it would be if everything depended on one or two poor [clergypeople]. For 1) No one person would have all the gifts needed by a whole community and 2) Even if he had all gifts, time and strength would be lacking to do all that was needed for each member. But where members are committed to one another, and each one serves the other with that gift which each received from the Lord for the common good, then can the whole body be built up for its self-improvement.” Zinzendorf was also clear, at least after 1727, that missional communities were to include men and women. Women took a more active leadership role within these communities than anywhere else in the Christian world at the time, with Anna Nitschmann effectively being Zinzendorf’s deputy or even co-leader.

Worship in the missional communities was deconstructed, and each element offered separately, with a responsibility for worshippers to construct a balanced diet for themselves. There was the Bible Hour (without music); communion; prayer meetings for the missionaries; litany meetings with a mixture of extempore and written prayer. There were song meetings that were almost nothing but hymns, there were ‘Quarter Hours’ (extempore preaching/prophesying that was never to last more than 15 minutes); Quaker-style hours of almost complete silence; 'love feasts'; and ‘Moravian teas’ with games for all ages, birthday songs and buns. The community at Herrnhut once asked the baker for bigger buns for their teas!

Visually, the halls were daringly decorated, with an entire room in the London Hall being made to resemble a hewn rock with a riven side and a fountain. The floor was sometimes covered in cloth of one colour, with the benches being covered with material of another shade. There were pictures all over the walls and candles – all things which were distrusted as ‘papist’ by some visitors.  All this was simply a product of the idea that “the Bruedergemeine would be a place of experiment, a temporary making visible of the unity of the people of God”. Zinzendorf believed that “experimenting is the way that one tests truth and discerns what Christ wants us to do” and that playfulness is a virtue.

Today, I suppose these experimental mission communities might be called ‘new monastic communities’.

Yes, I think they might – and some Christians may feel more affinity with Zinzendorf than with the Celtic Saints or Francis of Assisi. And maybe the two poles of ‘church’ (easy to join) and ‘experimental missional community’ (entered by those who take a vow to live by a certain rule of life) are helpful – as long as we insist, with Zinzendorf, that those in the vowed community are not in any sense superior or more holy than those who don’t join. I’m certainly going to try to model some of my approach to mission on this.

Where else can we get in touch with Zinzendorf’s heritage?

There are two streams. The first is the Moravian Church. Zinzendorf never wanted to create a new denomination, but he effectively did, albeit one which looked back into Czech history for its forebears. There are three quarters of a million Moravians worldwide today, with significant numbers in Tanzania and the West Indies, and including over 25 congregations in the UK (www.moravians.co.uk). Herrnhut in Germany is still the worldwide headquarters and I loved visiting it – see www.wikitravel.org/en/Herrnhut for English-language tourist information. If you go, don’t miss the Sculpture Trail, which conveys Zinzendorf’s theology visually. Many people follow the Moravian ‘watchword’ scheme of daily Bible texts (see www.moravian.org/faith-a-congregations/moravian-daily-texts.html).

Some read a daily Bible passage from the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection (see www.zinzendorf.webs.com/the-afflictions), after Zinzendorf’s model. From the 1720s to the 1820s, and from the 1950s to the present day, the Moravian church has mounted a 24/7 ‘prayer watch’ (see www.mcsp.org/index). Anglicans may be interested to know that since the 1998 signing of the Fetter Lane Declaration, the Moravian Church and the Church of England have been formally committed to sharing as much of their life as possible.

The second stream is those who look to Zinzendorf without themselves being Moravians. This can feel uncomfortable. There are organizations claiming Zinzendorf as spiritual parent without supporting major aspects of his theology. However, I can wholeheartedly recommend www.mustardseedorder.com, which started me on my own journey, and www.24-7prayer.com, a prayer movement which draws much of its inspiration from Herrnhut.