Two Shoemakers on a Danish Dock

In August 1732, two young Moravian men — Johann Leonhard Dober, a potter, and David Nitschmann, a carpenter — stood on a dock in Copenhagen, preparing to sail for the Caribbean island of St. Thomas. Their mission: to bring the gospel to enslaved Africans whom no European church had thought worth reaching.

Their tiny community in Herrnhut, Germany, numbered barely six hundred. Yet when Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf shared the plight of enslaved people in the Danish West Indies, Dober could not sleep. He told his friends, "I will go." Nitschmann said, "I will go with him."

As the ship pulled away from the harbor, Dober shouted back to the small crowd on the dock words that would echo for centuries: "May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward of His suffering!"

Some of those watching wept. Some doubted the two young men would survive. Both responses — worship and doubt — mirror exactly what happened on that Galilean mountainside when Jesus spoke the Great Commission. Yet Jesus did not wait for the doubt to disappear before issuing the command. He simply said, "Go."

And they went. Within decades, those six hundred Moravians sent out more missionaries than the entire Protestant church had in two centuries — all because two ordinary men took "all nations" literally.

Christ's final promise was not "You will feel ready." It was "I am with you always."