1675–1793

Pietism, Moravian Missions, and the Birth of the Modern Protestant Missionary Movement

Pietism arose as a reaction against a stagnant Lutheran orthodoxy. The Frankfurt pastor Philipp Jakob Spener gathered home Bible-study groups (collegia pietatis). In 1675 he published the movement's manifesto, Pia Desideria. It was a call for living faith, the universal priesthood of laypeople, and renewed pastoral training.

Orthodox theologians at Leipzig and Wittenberg accused his disciple August Hermann Francke of 283 heresies. Despite this, Francke founded a university at Halle in 1694 with a school for the poor and an orphanage. He made it a center for training Pietist – and, new for Protestantism, missionary – leaders.

When the Danish king Frederick IV decided to send missionaries to his Indian colonies, he turned to Halle. In 1706–1707 Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau founded the Tranquebar mission. This was the beginning of Protestant missions as such.

In 1722 Spener's godson, Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, a graduate of Halle, gave refuge to persecuted Bohemian "Moravian Brethren" on his Saxon estate. There the community of Herrnhut arose. After an encounter in 1731 with Inuit converted by Hans Egede, the Moravians caught missionary fervor. From 1732 they sent missionaries to the West Indies, Africa, India and America, including Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1741. Their influence on John Wesley and later on Schleiermacher far outweighed their numbers.

Finally, in 1792 William Carey secured the founding of the Baptist Missionary Society, and in 1793 he sailed for India. This is traditionally regarded as the start of the modern Protestant missionary movement. In its wake, many new missionary societies were founded across Europe from 1795 through the 1830s.