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THE EXOTIC PLANT
A History of the Moravian Church in Great Britain 1742-2000

By Geoffrey and Margaret Stead Epworth Press, 2003.

With the recent publication of this book, much information about the identity and history of our church is made available to the wider Christian and academic community for the first time. The first three sections of the book tell the story of British Moravianism from the date of its formal inauguration up to the present day. The fourth and final part explores in considerable detail some of the aspects of worship, belief and traditional practice which can be seen as distinctively Moravian and which are likely to be unfamiliar to most general readers.

            The authors have clearly made very considerable use of the primary historical sources available to them. Their bibliography brings together, perhaps for the first time, a substantive list of manuscripts and printed sources of specifically Moravian provenance as well as listing many secondary sources relevant to wider religious and historical contexts. Future scholars will no doubt be very grateful to them for making this information available.

            The chosen title would appear to do the book a considerable disservice.  For many people, “exotic plant” will suggest something strange and foreign which is unlikely to thrive, requires very special treatment and may be unable to adjust to its surroundings. For a church which has roots dating back for the best part of six hundred years, which managed, through times of great difficulty, to conserve the seed which generated such vigorous new growth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the label seems to be insensitive and inappropriate. The church has shown real skill in setting seed across the world, in adapting to changes of many kinds and even in producing vigorous hybrids!

            For many Moravians, not only in this country, the life and vision of John Hus and the sense of being part of this long heritage remain important. It is worth remembering that as early as 1717 Archbishop William Wake, in correspondence with Bishop Daniel Jablonski, acknowledged the church’s lengthy episcopal continuity.

Although it has been well said that “continuity lies not in looking for tenuous historical links but in the richness of the heritage of ideas and beliefs”, it was still an important landmark.

            A sense of the ardent evangelism and piety of the early years when new congregations were being established in many parts of the country, and the Settlements were created comes across very clearly. But what may surprise some people is the long persistence of the German influence and the relative exclusiveness and isolation of some of their members and communities during these early years. Questions of ultimate authority and differing views about the status and direction appropriate for the development of the new province created considerable tensions between the British province and the headquarters of the Church in Germany. However, the timing of the arrival of the Moravians in this country would seem to have been uniquely favorable. It was already a period of change and innovation in which much intense religious activity was taking place. Some of this was a direct consequence of the religious upheavals of the 17^th century, some of it in association with Enlightenment thinking and some within the wider context of pre-industrial economic and

social change. The establishment of schools and workshops to make education more widely available, the exciting experiment of building largely self-sufficient religious communities and the opening of many new places of worship were the major eighteenth century achievements. These sure foundations formed the basis for much of the subsequent development of the church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and continue to influence and sustain the pattern of church activities.
 

          The authors consider thoughtfully some of the unique or unusual practices characteristic at one time or another within the church; These include the long-lasting practice of using the lot as a mechanism for decision making, the regular holding of the Love-Feast, the early-Morning Easter services held in the Congregation burial grounds and the unbroken line of Episcopal succession.  However, many readers are likely to find the proliferation of examples of symbolic and graphic language unnecessarily detailed and laborious. Some of the strange and strained translations of hymns from German to English are surely best forgotten! They will identify more easily with the recognition that the book gives to the role of music-making and congregational singing, to the survival and adaptation of some splendid German chorales and the musical compositions of, for example, LaTrobe.

            Inevitably the use of formal administrative sources means that it is often hard to sense the presence of ordinary congregation members or to capture some real sense of what you might call the ”Moravian Spirit”. To correct this imbalance readers, especially those unfamiliar with the church, would do well to consider the qualities of Simplicity, Happiness, Unintrusiveness, Fellowship and The Ideal of Service, which were used by Bishop Shawe to define that spirit in his book The Sprit of the Moravian Church.