The Moravians Who Sold Themselves Into Slavery

In 1732, two young Moravian men named Johann Leonard Dober and David Nitschmann stood on the docks of Copenhagen with a radical plan. They had learned that enslaved Africans on the island of St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies had no access to the Gospel — plantation owners forbade outside preachers from speaking to their workers. So Dober and Nitschmann resolved to sell themselves into slavery to reach them.

They never had to follow through on that extreme measure, but they did arrive on the island with almost nothing, laboring alongside enslaved men and women in brutal Caribbean heat, sharing the love of Christ in the fields and cramped quarters where no respectable European minister would go. Within decades, the Moravian movement sent over three hundred missionaries to the margins of the known world — more than all Protestant churches combined had sent in two centuries.

Jesus told His followers that salt hidden in a cabinet preserves nothing, and a lamp stuffed under a basket lights no room. The law and the prophets pointed toward a righteousness that moved outward, not inward. Dober and Nitschmann understood this. They did not wait for the world to come to them. They carried the flavor of the Kingdom into the most bitter places on earth, and the light they bore there — among people the world had discarded — shone with a brilliance no darkness could overcome.

That is what the Almighty calls His people to be: salt that touches the wound, light that enters the room.