The Oldest Protestants—Those Moravians

Seal of the Moravian Church.

Readers of this blog are an educated and sophisticated bunch, which is why you flock to this page in unprecedented numbers.  In particular, many of you are very savvy about religion and religious history.  Which is why you probably know for a fact the Protestant Reformation began on that day in 1517 when the German monk Martin Luther allegedly nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral.

But, of course, you would be wrong.  Sixty years earlier on March 1, 1457 The Unitas Fratrum was established in the village of Kunvald, on the Bohemian-Moravian borderland, both part of the loose Holy Roman Empire.  Most scholars point to this event as the establishment of the first modern Protestant denomination who would come to be known to the world as the Bohemian Brethren and latter simply as the Moravians.

Some credit the Waldensians, who arose in 12th Century Italy, with being first.  But they had been all but wiped out as heretics and driven deep underground and were barely functioning by the mid 1450’s.  Yet Moravian tradition asserts that these underground Waldensians passed ecclesiastical authority to the new group.

The true roots of these Brethren were with Jan Hus, a celebrated martyr burned at the stake in Konstanz for heresy on July 6, 1415 by order of the great Church Council meeting in that southern German city.  Hus had let a popular movement in Bohemia and Moravia calling for reform in the Catholic Church.  Many of his proposed reforms were really just an appeal to return to the norms of the Orthodox Church which had been usurped in the region—liturgy in Czech, the language of the people; the laity receiving communion of both bread and wine; married priests; and eliminating indulgences and the idea of Purgatory.

Surviving followers of Jan Hus kept the Hidden Seed in secret.

Hus had received support from the Bohemian King Wenceslaus—the very king made famous in an English carol—and local nobles and was elevated to Rectorship of the University of Prague.  Both the King and Hus were caught up in the complicated politics in the church which was then riven by opposing Popes.  Eventually Hus was declared a heretic.  Several papal armies attempted to suppress his movement but were defeated, as was a rebellion by local Catholics.

But Wenceslaus eventually had to withdraw support in hopes of being crowned Holy Roman Emperor.  The Council at Kunvald settled the question of Papal legitimacy then exercised its new unified power by condemning Hus and smashing his movement.

The suppression of the Husites was so complete that many people to this day believe that Hus left no church, that he was a premature dead end.

But the beliefs of Hus were kept alive underground for generations.  This ability to lie low and rise up again would be a recurring theme and even become an article of faith—the Hidden Seed which could survive long periods of suppression and then spring to life once more.

From their humble beginnings in Kunvald, the Brethren spread rapidly over most of the Czech lands.  They quickly won over most of the landed aristocracy and the thriving burgers of the cities.  They won wide support by establishing schools in every village giving instruction in Czech as well a teaching Latin and German at the higher levels.  This spread literacy to an unprecedented degree across the region.  By the mid-15th Century—about the time Luther was getting started—it is estimated that 90% of Czech speaking Bohemians and Moravians were Protestant.

And their movement spread north to Poland where the Polish Brethren, who developed even more revolutionary beliefs that included unitarian theology, also flourished.

Alarmed, authorities in Rome decided finally to fight back by sending in the Marines—I mean Jesuits.  They first established their own schools to counter the ones operated by the Brethren.  But their schools only instructed in Latin.  A crusade against instruction in the vulgate followed. 

By 1618 the very Catholic Holy Roman Emperor, Matthias, sought to reassert his authority by imposing a Catholic as King of Bohemia and March of Moravia.  Fearing the loss of their rights, local nobles rebelled in the Bohemian Revolt, which was finally crushed in 1621.  The nobles were deposed or executed and Germans placed in their spots by the Hapsburg rulers of the Empire. 

The war, subsequent repression, and the Black Plague depopulated Bohemia which was reduced from more than three million residents to less than 800,000.  The weakened population could not resist.  The Jesuits seized the Brethren schools and forbad the teaching of Czech or its use as an official or court language.  The Brethren were forced underground and into exile by brutal suppression.  A similar fate befell their Polish cousins.

Small bands of exiles spread across Northern Europe.  Holland, a refuge for dissidents, became home to many.  Other scattered across the German principalities, out of reach of the Emperor. For a hundred years they survived underground and in exile, once again the Hidden Seed.

Early Moravian artist John Valentine Haidt celebrated the souls from many cultures around the world brought to Christ by Moravian missionaries.

In 1722 a small band of the Hidden Seed who had survived in deep hiding in Moravia, escaped the rotting Empire and accepted the protection of a local nobleman in Berthelsdorf, in present day Saxony in eastern Germany.  Under his protection they founded a village, Herrnhut which grew into a city as the exiles were joined by hundreds, then thousands of others.

On August 13, 1727 the exiles gathered at the parish church of Berthelsdorf with the encouragement of the nobleman, Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, they united to renew the ancient Unitas Fratrum.  The modern Moravian church was reborn.

The Moravians thrived in their new home, not only collecting more members of their diaspora, but attracting the adherence of many German locals, particularly among the higher peasantry.  At least 30 more villages were founded and settled on the Herrnhut model which emphasized prayer and worship, and a form of communal living to assist the members in their spiritual growth. Christians from different confessional backgrounds were welcomed to participate in the discussions.  Christian education for children was emphasized the communities became centers of support, for the Moravian Mission work throughout the world.

In Europe small “renewal groups” were encouraged to function within existing churches.  These diaspora societies spread pietic Christianity as firm tendency in many national churches.

In fact the Moravians were really the first missionary Protestants.  They dispatched not only clergy, but pious and learned laymen with their families.  Within a mere 30 years Moravian missionaries were at work across the globe—the Caribbean, North and South America, the Arctic (Greenland and Iceland), Africa, and the Far East. They ministered not just to Europeans on those distant shores, but particularly to the native peoples and even to slaves.

In North America, the Moravians took a particular interest in the native nations.  As early as 1740 they were working among the Mohicans of New York.  The British colonial government, fearful that the Mohicans would ally with the French, expelled the Moravians from the colony, but some Mohican bands continued their congregations on their own.

About the same time Moravian settlers arrived in Pennsylvania.  Count Zinzendorf himself along with David Nitschmann established the settlement of Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, 1741.  Many Moravians settled in the area. They also ministered to the Algonquian speaking Lenape, also known as the Delaware.  This was some of their most successful work until peaceful villages of Moravian Lenape were forced into exile in Canada after the American Revolution settling around Morviatown, Ontario.

Historic Bethabara Moravian Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina's Old Town.

Other Moravians helped settle North Carolina, including establishing Salem, now part of Winston-Salem.  In 1801 they began an ambitious mission to the Cherokee which continued until that tribe was forcibly removed in the Trail of Tears.

The Moravians, often the only organized Christians on the frontier, played a key part in early American history.  But their pacifism and unconventional religious beliefs often made them targets for repression and prejudice with the arrival of Methodist and Baptist saddlebag preachers.  Their pacifism made them suspect in time of war as did their support of the Indians.

After the early 19th Century, the American Moravians became less missionary.  The Moravian denomination persists in this country with congregations in 18 states. The highest concentrations are in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Bethlehem is the seat of the Northern Province and Winston-Salem of the Southern. There are probably less than 50,000 members.

Worldwide the modern Unitas Fratrum has about 850,000 members organized into 18 semi-autonomous Unity Provinces, seven Missionary Provinces, and dozens of missions.  By far the highest concentration of Moravians in the world is now in Tanzania, a tribute to its missionary roots.

Today Moravian theology, though pious, is charmingly simple and surpassingly liberal.  It is best summed up by their motto, “In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; and in all things, love.”

No wonder isolated Moravian congregations in the South sometimes drifted to Universalism.  And the motto could be a distillation of William Ellery Channing’s fundamental Unitarian sermon, The Permanent and Transient in Christianity.

Sophia Lyon Fahs—Not Torturing Children on Sunday Morning

Note:  I missed her birthday yesterday, but Sophia Lyon Fahs rates an entry, even if it is a day late. Adapted from the biographical notes for my worship service/readers’ theater piece 400 Years of Unitarian and Universalist Poets from John Milton to Sylvia Plath.

Sophia Lyon Fahs is now revered among Unitarian Universalists as the dynamic innovator who revolutionized religious education by making it child centered and incorporating modern educational precepts.  She started her life on another journey entirely.  

She was born in China on August 2, 1876 to Presbyterian missionaries David and Mandana Doolittle Lyon.  All through childhood she dreamed of nothing else but becoming a missionary herself and bringing the Christian gospel to the unsaved slaves of false religions.  While a student at Wooster College in Wooster, Ohio, she enthusiastically signed the pledge of the Student Volunteer Movement which read, “It is my purpose in Life, if God permit, to become a foreign missionary.” 

 

After graduating from college and spending two years teaching high school Latin, she enlisted in the Student Volunteer organization, visiting college campuses and promoting the Pledge.  In 1901 she took a part-time job as a YWCA secretary to pay for her further religious education at the University of Chicago.  Warned that William Rainey Harper’s new university was a hot bed of unsound doctrine and radical intellectualism, Lyon wrote to friends that she felt secure in her Christian faith against any temptations. 

 

She was wrong.  The heady temptations of Biblical Higher Criticism and modernism would slowly batter her old time religion.   At Chicago she was exposed to giants like Harper and especially John Dewey, father of the progressive education movement.  

Still, there were things to tie her to tradition.  In 1902 Lyon married fellow Student Volunteer Movement activist Charles Harvey Fahs, whose fragile health prevented his being posted on for overseas service.  Instead the young couple moved to New York City.  Her husband took a job with the national Board of Missions of the Methodist Church and Sophia enrolled in another progressive institution to complete her graduate education, Columbia University Teacher’s College.  Two years later John Dewey would follow Fahs to her new school. 

She had to crowd her studies in-between raising a family.  Five children were born between 1905 and 1914, some of them sickly.  The realization that her children possessed independent minds and were capable of rational exploration of the world around her did more to revolutionize her thinking about religious education than all of her college courses.  While her husband frequently traveled for the Methodists, Fahs observed the techniques of the teachers at Horace Mann School, the college’s practice school.  

She was impressed by the experimentation she found there and yearned for a way to bring the techniques she learned there to tradition bound, Bible based Sunday School.  Fahs was convinced small children could get little out Bible study until they were old enough to really grasp the concepts of history in their early teen years.  Instead she was convinced that children would respond to vivid and detailed stories about people who mattered.  Recalling her own obsession with missionaries, she decided that the lives of contemporary foreign missionaries would make excellent study material.  Her first book for children, Uganda’s White Man of Work, about a real life missionary was published in 1907. 

 

It was just the first in a long line of books, articles, curriculum guides and worship materials, including finely crafted poetry that would pour from her in the coming decades.  It was not easy.  Two of her children died, and her ailing husband was often out of the country.  Her personal theology became ever more liberal and she looked for new sources for instruction materials for children drawn on the natural sciences, the religions of primitive peoples, and world religions.  She wanted to find ways for children to connect with the experiences of life—birth and death, the sun and stars and evolving life on earth and out of that experience begin to develop and articulate their own faith lives.   

She tried to put these theories into practice in a series of jobs as a Sunday School superintendent, but she was frequently at odds with both ministers and parents who demanded a traditional Bible study curriculum, even if they were modernists.  In 1933, however, Fahs was invited by the great modernist preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick to head up the Sunday School at his brand new Riverside Church.  It was there that she was able, finally, to develop the kind of progressive curriculum for which she became famous.  

Unitarian religious education leaders had been following Fahs’s work since in 1928 article How Childish Should a Child’s Religion Be.  They were impressed by what they saw.  In 1930 she was invited to lead a Unitarian religious education conference at the Isle of Shores.  Thus began her blossoming relationship with the denomination that would finally lead her to leave conventional Christianity behind.  

In 1937 Fahs was appointed Editor of Children’s Materials for the American Unitarian Association (AUA).  She was given a free reign, within the limited budget of the Depression ravaged Association, to completely remake the Beacon religious education curricula.  Fahs edited all the resulting New Beacon series and she was frequently the principle co-author.  

From the first hand experiences of her Martin and Judy books for primary children to explorations of nature in How Miracles Abound, to broadening understanding of other cultures and past experience in From Long Ago and Many Lands and Child of the Sun, to the practical comparative religion of The Church Across the Street Fahs was innovating and even daring.  

Of course, not everyone was ready for change.  Many congregations clung to the same Bible based Sunday School materials that were being used in mainline Protestant churches.  To provide a Bible based course in which children could grasp that scripture was written by fallible human being over hundreds of years, Fahs wrote her popular The Old Story of Salvation.  

In 1952 Fahs presented the underlying philosophy for the New Beacon Series in her book for religious educators, Today’s Children and Yesterday’s Heritage: A Philosophy of Creative Religious Development.  Other materials to teach the teachers followed.  The post war years really proved the popularity and durability of what Fahs was doing.  

When she had been hired, Unitarianism was a dwindling denomination.  Largely on the strength of its dynamic new religious education program, young families flocked to the congregations.  New congregations and fellowships sprang up far from the traditional strong holds of New England, the upper mid-west and California.  The Beacon curriculum books were also being used increasingly by other denominations and even by private schools.  

Despite advancing age and a crushing workload, nothing seemed to slow Fahs down.  In 1959 at the age of 82 she was able to fulfill a life-long dream when one of the new congregations built largely on her sound basis of Religious Education, the Montgomery County Unitarian Church of Bethesda, Maryland, ordained her into the ministry.  

Fahs finally took retirement at age 88 in 1964 and died honored and beloved in New York City in 1978 at the age of 101.  

Fahs legacy lives on in every Unitarian Universalist church school.  The curricula that she introduced may no longer be taught, but the spirit that created it lives on.  Much of that spirit comes from the remarkable poems and reading Fahs left behind and which are included in the UUA’s Singing the Living Tradition.  Not a Sunday goes by but that somewhere a congregation does not share the loving words of Sophia Lyon Fahs.

By far her most popular poem is often used in child dedications services and Christmas worship:

And So the Children Come

    And so the children come

    and so they have been coming.

    No angels herald their beginnings.

    No prophets predict their future courses.

    No wise men or women see a star to show where to find

    the babe that will save humankind.

    yet each night a child arrives is a holy night.

    Fathers and mothers—

    Sitting beside their sleeping children’s beds

    feel glory in the sight of new life beginning. They ask,

    Where and how will this new life end?

    Or will it ever end?

    Each day a child arrives is a holy day.

    A time for singing,

    a time for wondering,

    a time for worshipping.

    —Sophia Lyon Fahs