One heart and soul

A scattering of religious refugees came looking for shelter, and Count Zinzendorf gave it to them on his estate, the place they named Herrnhut. They arrived a quarrelsome, mismatched lot, and for a while they lived like it. Then in 1727 something broke over the community, and the bickering gave way to a unity the world had not seen in such a form since the book of Acts. They became, as Luke says of the first believers, of one heart and soul. Out of that knitting came two astonishing things. The first was a prayer watch, lit and never allowed to go out, hour after hour, that is said to have burned on without a break for a hundred years. The second was a flood of missionaries sent to the ends of the earth, some of them reportedly willing to sell themselves into slavery if that was the only way to reach the enslaved. Their break was not a leaving but an entering: out of ordinary, comfortable, every-soul-for-itself Christianity and into a shared life so total it frightened the watching church.

You can hold the faith privately for a long time and call it devotion. A walk that is yours alone, a budget that is yours alone, a future that is yours alone, with God somewhere in the arrangement. Herrnhut is a break with exactly that. What happened there was not better organization; it was a holy discontent with mild, manageable Christianity that finally broke through into something shared and costly. They pooled their prayers until the watch never went dark. They pooled their lives until missionaries went out willing to lose their own freedom. None of it was safe, and none of it was private. The question their story leaves is not whether you admire the Moravians. It is whether your own faith has ever cost you the thing they paid: the comfort of keeping it to yourself. The break into one heart and soul is not a relic of 1727. It is still on offer, and it still asks for everything you would rather hold back.