The Plea That Launched a Thousand Missionaries

In 1731, a young German nobleman named Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf attended the coronation of King Christian VI in Copenhagen. There he met Anthony, an enslaved man from the Danish colony of St. Thomas in the Caribbean. Anthony described his sister and brother, still on the island, who longed to hear about Jesus but had no one to tell them.

That conversation haunted Zinzendorf. He carried Anthony's words back to his Moravian community at Herrnhut in Saxony. The response was swift. Two young men — Leonard Dober, a potter, and David Nitschmann, a carpenter — volunteered to go. They were willing to live and labor alongside the enslaved just to share the gospel with people no European church had bothered to reach.

They sailed in 1732. Within a single generation, the Moravians had sent more missionaries to more places than all of Protestantism had reached in two centuries.

Like Paul's midnight vision of a Macedonian man crying, "Come over and help us," Anthony's plea cut through every comfortable excuse. And just as the Lord opened Lydia's heart by a quiet riverbank in Philippi — turning one woman's faith into the seedbed of Europe's first church — a single conversation in Copenhagen ignited a missionary movement that circled the globe.

The Almighty rarely shouts His redirections. More often, He sends one unexpected voice we weren't planning to hear.