The 100-year-long prayer meeting

Nicholas Ludwig, aka Count Zinzendorf, was born in Dresden in 1700. He was a part of the Pietist movement in Germany, which emphasized personal piety and an emotional component to religious life. This was in contrast to the state Lutheran Church of the day, which had grown to symbolize a largely intellectual faith centered on belief in specific doctrines. He believed in "heart religion," a personal salvation built on the individual's spiritual relationship with Christ.

As a teenager at Halle Academy, Zinzendorf and several other young nobles formed a secret society called "The Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed." The stated purpose of this order was that the members would use their position and influence to spread the Gospel. As an adult, Zinzendorf later reactivated this adolescent society, and many influential leaders of Europe ended up joining the group. A few included the King of Denmark, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Archbishop of Paris.

In 1722, he was approached by a group of Moravians to request permission to live on his lands. He granted their request, and a small band crossed the border from Moravia to settle in a town they called Herrnhut, or "the Lord's Watch." By the beginning of 1727 the community of about three hundred people was wracked by dissension and bickering. His tenants went through a period of serious division, and it was then in 1727 that Zinzendorf left public life to spend all his time at his Berthelsdorf estate working with the troubled Moravians. Largely due to his leadership in daily Bible studies, the group came to formulate a unique document, known as the "Brotherly Agreement," which set forth basic tenets of Christian behavior. Residents of Herrnhut were required to sign a pledge to abide by these Biblical principals. In addition, Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf and others covenanted to prayer and labor for revival. On May 12 revival came. Christians were aglow with new life and power, dissension vanished and unbelievers were converted. This experience began the Moravian renewal, and led to the beginning of the Protestant World Mission movement.

The Moravian Community of Herrnhut in Saxony, in 1727, commenced a round-the-clock “prayer watch” that continued non-stop for over a hundred years. By 1791, 65 years after commencement of that prayer vigil, the small Moravian community had sent 300 missionaries to the ends of the earth.

In 1731, while attending the coronation of Christian VI in Copenhagen, the young Count met a converted slave from the West Indies, Anthony Ulrich. Anthony's tale of his people's plight moved Zinzendorf, who brought him back to Herrnhut. As a result, two young men, Leonard Dober and David Nitchmann, were sent to St. Thomas to live among the slaves and preach the Gospel. This was the first organized Protestant mission work, and grew rapidly to Africa, America, Russia, and other parts of the world. By the end of Zinzendorf's life there were active missions from Greenland to South Africa, literally from one end of the earth to the other. Though the Baptist missionary William Carey is often refered to as the "Father of Modern Missions," he himself would credit Zinzendorf with that role, for he often refered to the model of the earlier Moravians in his journal.

His overwhelming interest in the colonies involved evangelising the native Americans, and he travelled into the wilderness with Indian agent Conrad Weiser to meet with the chieftains of several tribes and clans. As far as we have been able to identify, he is the only European noble to have gone out to meet the native American leaders in this manner.

There are numerous churches in Pennsylvania where Moravians would start a church and school for the settlers and native Americans, and then turn it over to the Lutheran Church, the Reformed Church, or whatever denomination they perceived to be the strongest in that area.

Both John and Charles Wesley had been converted through their contact with the Moravians.



I call this "The Cross Signal," or, "A call for help." I took a photo from "The Dark Knight," and, in Photoshop, changed the bat to a cross, and replaced Aaron Eckhart/Harvey Dent/Two-Face/Gotham's white knight with a photo of myself, adding lighting and a photo filter effect.




OK, since a question was asked about my photo, here is my driver's license photo from a little over 3 years ago, untouched. All I did was scan it in at 300 dpi, crop it, rotate it, and increased the size proportionally to 2 inches width (which decreased the resolution). The white areas are from the plastic covering, which I intentionally did not remove. My color profile photo (which you can see on the right side of my blog page) is the same photo, except I added a mustache with Photoshop. But this photo here is how it originally looked.


GREAT QUOTES

"If you wish to know God, you must know his Word.
If you wish to perceive His power,
you must see how He works by his Word.
If you wish to know His purpose before it comes to pass,
you can only discover it by His Word."
(C.H. Spurgeon)

"I used to ask God to help me. Then I asked if I might help Him.
I ended up by asking Him to do His work through me."
(Hudson Taylor)

"The most important thing in your Christian life
is fellowship with God."
(Peter S. Ruckman)

"To educate a man in mind and not in morals
is to educate a menace to society."
(Theodore Roosevelt)

"Nothing but Christianity will give you the victory.
Until a man believes in his heart
that Jesus Christ is his Lord and Master...
his course through life will be neither safe nor pleasant.
My only regret is that I was so long blinded by my pleasures,
my vices and pursuits, and the examples of others
that I was kept from seeing, admiring,
and adoring the marvelous light of the gospel."
(Francis Scott Key, author of the words of our national anthem)

The above edited information was gathered from the following websites:
http://www.1timothy4-13.com/files/chr_vik/greatquotes.html
http://ctlibrary.com/ch/1982/issue1/118.html
http://www.zinzendorf.com/countz.htm