Zinzendorf and the Moravians Issue 1 | 1982

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History does not record for certain who took the message of the crucified and risen Savior to that region north of the Danube. But it does say that in 836 the brothers, Cyril and Methodius of Constantinople and the Eastern Christian tradition went to Moravia as missionaries. The Latin church had preceded them there, but these industrious Greeks did something that the Latin missionaries had not done. Cyril invented an alphabet for the Moravian language and he and Methodius began translating the Bible for the people.

And they preached in the native tongue. “Their work sowed the seeds of that deep love for the truth, that passionate insistence upon having the Word in one’s tongue and that willingness to suffer and die for the faith which found expression, a few centuries later, among the followers of Master John Hus” (from Through Five Hundred Years, “A Popular History of the Moravian Church,” by Allen W. Schattschneider).

Year

Event

(1369–1415)

John Hus [John Hus John Hus (1369–1415)“Hus did not live to see the Protestant Church or any of its branches started, but he sowed the seed. His followers discovered that the Catholic Church would not change or reform so they felt they had only one choice: to make a new beginning,” notes Edwin A. Sawyer. Ordained a Roman Catholic Driest in 1400. John Hus became the preacher in Prague’s Bethlehem Chapel at the time the writings of the English reformer John Wycliffe were widely circulating throughout Bohemia. In Hus they found their champion. His call for “ethical transformation of clergy and church life” as well as a “genuine feeling of Bohemian nationalism” brought on a direct confrontation with his archbishop and ultimately, the pope. At Constance a church council condemned him as a heretic ...