Bringing the New World Home: Moravian Gemeintag Meetings and Protestant Pastoral Authority, 1738–1746

Abstract

This essay offers the first comparative examination of the German Moravian Gemeintag and British evangelical “Letter Day” meetings in the mid-eighteenth century. Gemeintag meetings established a new, experimental approach to pastoral leadership at gatherings for religious devotion and prayer by endowing the lived spiritual experiences of believers with edificatory and didactic authority. The experiences and testimonies of believers read aloud at epistolary prayer meetings utilized this novel symbolic authority to the most significant effect by supplying material examples of, rather than biblical aphorisms or clerical pronouncements about, God’s favor. Comparative structural analyses and close readings of the epistolary content reveal how believers in distant mission fields temporarily operated as authorized mediators of the Gospel message. The Gemeintag and its British evangelical offspring, thus, made valuable contributions to the blurring of increasingly fluid ecclesiastical and pastoral boundaries wrought by the pluralization of Protestantism in the early modern period.