Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf

Count Zinzendorf was a Saxon nobleman raised in Pietism who let a band of persecuted Moravian refugees settle on his estate in 1722. The village they built, Herrnhut — 'the Lord's watch' — was quarrelsome until a communion service in August 1727 that the community ever after described as its Pentecost. Out of it came a prayer watch, men and women covering every hour, that by the Moravians' own records continued for around a hundred years.

Out of the praying came the sending: within five years Herrnhut was dispatching missionaries to enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and to Greenland, decades before Carey. A Moravian meeting in London is where John Wesley's heart was 'strangely warmed.' Zinzendorf's motto held it all together: 'I have one passion — it is He, it is He alone.'