The Count Who Offered Land and Received a Legacy

In 1722, a twenty-one-year-old German nobleman named Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf made what seemed like a modest gesture. A band of persecuted Moravian Christians needed somewhere to live, and Zinzendorf had land on his estate in Saxony. He gave them a corner of it, expecting nothing more than to be a good neighbor.

He had no idea what God was building.

The refugees established a village called Herrnhut — "the Lord's Watch." Within five years, a spiritual renewal swept through the community so powerful that they launched a continuous prayer meeting lasting over one hundred years. From that tiny settlement, Moravian missionaries fanned out across the globe — to the Caribbean, to Greenland, to South Africa, to Native American territories — sending more missionaries in twenty years than all of Protestantism had dispatched in the previous two centuries.

Zinzendorf thought he was giving God a piece of land. God was establishing a dynasty of faith that reshaped the entire Protestant missionary movement.