Grace Canberra is about being part of a ‘seed movement’, not just a local congregation.

We are always living in a historical, cultural and spiritual continuum and are shaped by it far more than we are aware. If you were attending a ministry training class in the first few years of the early church you would have been taught that the gospel should be preached only to Jews. That teaching wouldn’t have come from Jesus, but from the accumulation of generations of ethnocentric theology. The presumption was that the nations would be saved by converting to Judaism and believing in Jesus Christ.

When Greeks were saved Antioch became the first “kingdom” church. Jews and Gentiles worshipped together. These men did something that was not being done, taught or thought about, but it was clearly on the heart of God.

The men from Cyprus and Cyrene have begotten many spiritual sons and daughters down through the Christian centuries. Someone has re-discovered what God actually said rather than what everyone assumed he said. There are individuals and groups who, in their own day faced discouragement, danger, derision and even death because they testified to something of the heart of God they had discovered in the Word. In this spirit many “mountain peaks" have been successfully scaled but there are some that are yet to be conquered.

There is one particular prophetic movement that represents an attempt to conquer these unclimbed peaks. I speak of Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf and the Moravians. The events referred to were forged in a small village in Saxony two hundred years after the Reformation.  Yet from this unlikely setting emerged a force of brotherly love and a fervency of heart for the gospel big enough to embrace the furthest nations of the world characterised by four passionate distinctives:

HOLINESS measured in terms of lost people feeling loved,

ONENESS measured by the relationship between Jesus and the Father,

FULNESS measured by the powerful ministry of Christ on the earth, and ...

COMPLETION of the task to disciple all nations

These distinctive were all part of the imprint left by the Zinzendorf and the Moravians following the visitation of the Spirit in August 1727. 

The Moravians were a seed movement. Seeds are an important image in the Bible. The image of seeds is among the most common in the parables of Jesus. The most important thing about a seed is not its size, its shape or its colour but its purpose and potential. The second most important thing for a seed is a bit of good soil.

What Zinzendorf captured was the heart of God. It was all that he represented. Because of this Moravian seed produced a harvest in the Wesleyan and subsequent evangelical revivals, the Keswick holiness movement and to the Pentecostal and charismatic movements of last century. Add to this the tribute that William Carey gave in acknowledging Zinzendorf as the preliminary articulator of his own missionary vision and you have an influence that not only touched the world in a single generation but has multiplied to many generations of Christian ministry.

The “seed” nature of the Moravian influence is no more profoundly declared than in the fact that they do not represent some huge multi-national ecclesiastical monolith today. Their greatest identity has been invisibly sown into the body of Christ around the world.

It is the unfinished business of this work that I think gives some shape and identity to what we at Grace Canberra are called to be and do. God desires a dwelling place on the earth. If seeds and mountain peaks can form pictures for us, then the issues represented by the Moravians provide the agenda of unfinished business for the church in this day. It will be a matter of calling people to pick up the track but with a determination to go to the summit. The shape of this fellowship of believers will not be in a particular name, or a formal structure. Its shape will be created by the fact that we are heading for the summit. We at Grace need to make this our collective aim and call others to make it their own collective aim. In the sense that pioneers like the first Moravians have gone before, we can take encouragement from their determination. In the sense that the summit has yet to be reached we have to keep going and chart the trail by our own experience.