Herrnhut in 1727 held Bohemian Brethren, Lutherans, Reformed, Schwenkfelders and separatists who had arrived from different persecutions and disliked each other. The Brotherly Agreement adopted on 12 May 1727 was a set of statutes for how the village would live, and congregations have adopted their own versions since. The communion service on 13 August 1727 is dated by the church as the renewal of the Unity, and out of that summer came the prayer watch — members taking hourly shifts so that intercession never stopped — which Moravian accounts say continued unbroken for over a hundred years. Both the agreement and the watch are the mechanism behind the mission programme: a small community with a shared rule and a habit of round-the-clock prayer proved capable of sending a disproportionate number of its own people abroad permanently.