The Moravians pray nonstop
The Herrnhut prayer meeting — 100 years continuous
The community at Herrnhut is on the verge of destroying itself.
Count Zinzendorf has allowed refugees from Moravia — descendants of the ancient Bohemian church that Hus died for — to settle on his estate in Saxony. By 1727 there are about three hundred of them, and they are fighting. Lutherans and Reformed and Anabaptists and Bohemian Brethren, all crammed into one community, all convinced that their own tradition is correct and the others need correction.
Zinzendorf spends months working through the community — reconciling individuals, drafting shared agreements, praying over the fractures. On August 13, 1727, during a communion service, something happens. The community records it as a day of divine visitation — an outpouring of the Spirit that produces weeping, reconciliation, and a unity that the previous months of conflict had made impossible.
The aftershock is a prayer meeting. Twenty-four men and twenty-four women covenant to pray in rotation, one hour each, around the clock, so that there is always someone in the community lifting prayers to God.
The prayer meeting lasts for one hundred years without stopping.
Out of that prayer meeting comes the Moravian missionary movement — the first sustained Protestant missionary enterprise, which will send over three hundred missionaries to the Caribbean, West Africa, Greenland, Labrador, and the American colonies in the next twenty years. The Moravians reach Georgia, where John Wesley encounters them on a ship in a storm and is undone by their fearlessness.
“Our community became a congregation of Jesus Christ when we were melted together by the love of God.”
— Count Zinzendorf, on August 13, 1727 AD
“All these with one accord continued steadfastly in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.”
The Moravians prayed for one hundred years without stopping, in one-hour shifts, around the clock. Three hundred people sustaining a century of continuous intercession.
Out of it came a missionary movement that reached every continent before any other Protestant church had seriously tried.
The connection between the prayer and the mission is not coincidental. A community that has been interceding together for decades has a different quality of love, a different clarity of purpose, a different willingness to sacrifice than a community that meets occasionally for worship.
The prayer precedes the sending. It always has. The Moravians are the most vivid demonstration of what happens when a community decides to take that seriously.
What would it mean for your community to pray with that kind of sustained, corporate, intercessory seriousness?