History & overview · every faith gets one
In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things love — and a hundred-year prayer meeting.
The oldest organised Protestant body, formed at Kunvald in Bohemia in 1457 out of the Hussite movement, nearly extinguished by the Counter-Reformation, and restarted in 1722 on Count Zinzendorf's Saxon estate at Herrnhut. From there it launched the first sustained Protestant foreign mission in 1732, sixty years before William Carey, and sent members as artisan missionaries to the Caribbean, Greenland, Suriname, the Cape and Labrador. Its largest province today is Tanzanian.
Why it is filed this way
The Moravians predate the Reformation by sixty years and are usually filed under Protestantism for convenience. They kept an episcopal succession from the pre-Reformation Unity, which is why Anglicans recognised their orders in 1749 — a Protestant body with bishops, no bishop-run government, and a founding date before Luther was born.
Continuous as a body since 1457 in the sense the church itself claims, though the Bohemian Unity was effectively destroyed after 1620 and survived as scattered families until the Herrnhut renewal of 1722.
The founding
The Unitas Fratrum was formed at Kunvald in eastern Bohemia in 1457 by followers of Jan Hus, burned at Constance in 1415, who wanted a church of practice rather than of argument. Two and a half centuries of persecution reduced it to a Hidden Seed of scattered families. In 1722 a group of Moravian refugees led by the carpenter Christian David was given land on the Saxon estate of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf and built the village of Herrnhut. The community was quarrelsome and near collapse until a communion service on 13 August 1727 which Moravians describe as the church's rebirth; five years later the first two missionaries left for St Thomas in the Danish West Indies.
Its founding is bound to Jan Hus, then Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf — 1457 CE.
What it holds
Reality. The heart addressed before the head; doctrine kept deliberately short so that fellowship can be long.
The divine. The Trinity, with an intense and idiosyncratic devotion to the wounds and blood of Christ that peaked in the 1740s and which the church later reined in and now discusses openly..
Death and after. Resurrection; the dead are spoken of as having gone home, and the graveyard is called God's Acre.