Missionary Sending and the Moravian Brethren

Abstract

There is an increasing number of larger churches today taking back their New Testament responsibility of missionary sending from the agencies to which many had outsourced this task in the previous century. While this task seems more possible in churches with a larger staff and more plentiful resources, how can the more common small- to medium-sized churches take part? By even the most conservative estimates, the Moravian Brethren of the eighteenth century sent a remarkable quantity and quality of missionaries given their size. In this dissertation, I argue that cultural liturgies among eighteenth-century Moravians resulted in their remarkably high per capita sending rate, and that these cultural liturgies can be translated and exercised by twenty-first-century churches, creating a more conducive culture for missionary sending. The research I have compiled determines how the Moravians built a culture of sending within their communities and what processes they used to raise up and send out so many missionaries. I begin by building a model of Christian formation based on James Smith’s concept of cultural liturgies. Then, to distinguish the effects of the inherited culture of the Moravian Brethen from their eighteenth-century contemporary practice, I offer a history of the Brethren from their origins to the time of their underground period, specifically noting the effects of outside influences that led to missionary-culture-inducing values. After that, I provide a snapshot of eighteenth-century Moravian sending culture, giving particular attention to missionary sending cultural liturgies. Lastly, I give a distillation of contemporary missionary sending applications that can be contemporized and contextualized for local churches in the twenty-first century.