David Nitschmann

David Nitschmann was born in Moravia in the 1690s, in a region where families connected with the old Unity of the Brethren continued to preserve their faith through generations of restriction and persecution. He learned the trade of carpentry. That detail is more important than it first appears because several men named David Nitschmann appear in the early history of the Moravian Church. One was a wagon maker, another was a weaver who later served as secretary and archivist, and another belonged to an earlier generation of the family. The David remembered for sailing with Johann Leonhard Dober to St. Thomas was the carpenter who later became the first bishop of the renewed Moravian Church. Confusing them changes the history of the people involved.

The older Brethren tradition had endured after the upheavals of the seventeenth century, often through households and small gatherings rather than recognised public institutions. In the 1720s refugees from Moravia began to settle on the Saxon estate of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf. The community that grew there became known as Herrnhut. Nitschmann was among the people who left Moravia for that settlement, bringing both the convictions of his religious upbringing and a practical trade by which he could earn a living. He entered a community still finding its form, with people from different Protestant backgrounds attempting to live and worship together.

Herrnhut became known for sustained communal prayer and a strong interest in sending the Christian message beyond Europe. Its members were not all ministers by training. Craftsmen, labourers and people with few possessions took part in the decisions. The renewed Brethren believed that the church should carry the gospel among people to whom European Protestants had paid little attention. Their language about other cultures reflected the prejudices of their age, and the places they entered were often colonies built upon unequal power. Their commitment to mission must be understood beside those conditions, not separated from them.

In 1732 Nitschmann and Johann Leonhard Dober were sent to the Danish island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean. They travelled overland to Copenhagen and then by ship to the island. A later history of the Moravians in Georgia says that Nitschmann used his skill as a ship's carpenter to help pay their passage. On St. Thomas the men sought to speak about Christianity among people held in slavery on plantations. Such work placed them inside a violent colonial system; their presence should not be made into a story in which the enslaved had no voice or understanding of their own circumstances. Nor should later romantic claims that the missionaries themselves had to sell themselves into slavery be repeated without sound evidence.

The work was difficult and their resources were limited. Nitschmann supported himself and his companion by carpentry, while Dober continued the effort to establish contact with those who would hear them. After roughly four months Nitschmann returned to Europe, as the original arrangement had provided, leaving Dober to continue the mission. The short duration of Nitschmann's own time on the island is sometimes lost in retellings that turn the journey into a lifelong appointment. His role was real, but so was the division of responsibility between the two men. The Moravian mission to the Caribbean endured beyond this first journey through the labour of later workers and the Christian communities that developed there.

Nitschmann went on to hold a central place in the ordering of the renewed church. In 1735 leaders determined that it would be wise to renew the historic episcopal succession of the Unity of the Brethren. Bishop Daniel Ernst Jablonski, who represented the older church tradition, consecrated Nitschmann as a bishop on March 13, with the agreement of another bishop. The decision was intended partly to strengthen the church's capacity to ordain ministers whose standing could be recognised beyond Herrnhut. Nitschmann's appointment did not give him the character of a distant ecclesiastical dignitary. He remained a travelling worker and organiser whose office was tied closely to the demands of a small and expanding community.

Later that year he led a company of Moravian settlers and missionaries bound for Georgia, then a British colony in North America. The party travelled through German and English ports and made practical arrangements for provisions and passage. The surviving history records Nitschmann's conversations with General James Oglethorpe over land grants, support and the conditions under which the Moravians would live. He could not speak English readily, and interpreters were needed for some of these exchanges. He was also troubled by demands for military service, since the Brethren did not believe they should be compelled to bear arms. These difficulties remind us that founding a mission settlement required negotiations about ordinary matters as well as preaching.

The ship carried John and Charles Wesley, who were themselves setting out for Georgia. Journals from the voyage survive from the Moravian and English participants. They record prayer meetings, language study, disagreement and shared daily experience during the long Atlantic passage. Nitschmann's entries describe the fellowship of the travelling company and his concern that they should remain faithful to the reason they had left home. His relationship with the Wesleys belongs to a larger history of Moravian influence upon early Methodism. It should not be simplified into the claim that one voyage or one man alone caused the later English revival.

The Moravian company reached Georgia in February 1736. Nitschmann helped establish order among the settlers and took part in the appointment and ordination of church workers. The colony's early years were troubled by material insecurity, colonial demands and disagreements about military service. The Moravian settlement in Georgia did not become a lasting centre for the church. Its members eventually withdrew, and the Brethren directed more attention toward Pennsylvania. This was an early disappointment in mission organisation, not proof that the original purpose had been insincere. The history includes practical misjudgments as well as faith and endurance.

In later years Nitschmann continued to travel in the service of the church and became associated with Moravian work in Pennsylvania. He helped establish and strengthen the settlement at Bethlehem, which became an important centre of worship, education, organisation and mission. Moravian communities depended upon networks of craftspeople, teachers, married families and single men and women, with labour arranged in forms particular to their church life. Nitschmann moved among these communities as a bishop whose duties included pastoral oversight and connection between congregations. Reference works remember his extensive journeys, including many crossings by sea.

The record of his life is not as full as the later literature sometimes suggests. It is rich in community chronicles, ships' journals and the actions of church leaders, but it contains less about his private household or the feelings he carried on particular days. Historians must therefore resist inventing a childhood conversation, a solitary prayer or a dramatic closing scene. Even the date of his death appears differently in modern summaries, generally placed in early October 1772 at Bethlehem. The near-contemporary historical account of the Georgia mission gives October 9, while another reference lists October 8. Until the archival register is checked, the safer statement is that he died in Bethlehem in October 1772.

Nitschmann helped carry a small religious community across several kinds of frontier: from restricted worship in Moravia to Herrnhut, from Europe to the enslaved communities of St. Thomas, and from the German-speaking church into the unsettled beginnings of British North America. He was not the only David Nitschmann who served that movement, and his accomplishments should not absorb the work of the others. His own place is substantial enough. He was a carpenter, an early missionary, a bishop and an organiser who worked with people from different nations while the renewed Moravian Church was learning how to sustain a mission beyond its first home.