The Moravians Open Their First Mission On Saint Thomas

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 1732, Johann Leonhard Dober and David Nitschmann sailed from the newly renewed community at Herrnhut to the Danish Caribbean island of Saint Thomas, founding the Moravian Church's first overseas mission barely five years after the 1727 renewal that had given the Brethren an organized base to send missionaries from at all. Dober and Nitschmann went to Saint Thomas to reach enslaved Africans on the island's plantations, a population no Protestant mission before theirs had made its dedicated purpose.

The Saint Thomas mission did not stand alone for long. Herrnhut's missionary effort reached Greenland the following year, in 1733, and within a decade had crossed to North America, establishing a Mohican mission at Shekomeko, New York, in 1740. Three missions on three continents inside eight years turned a settlement that had barely existed a decade earlier into a sending church operating on a scale far beyond its own small population at Herrnhut.

What the Saint Thomas mission changed for the Moravians' spread was direction itself: a church that had spent the previous century surviving underground in Moravia and exile in Poland became, within five years of its own re-founding, a movement that measured its purpose by how far its missionaries could reach rather than by how well it could preserve itself at home, a pattern that would carry it to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania within another decade.