The Hidden Seed's descendants re-emerged in 1722, when a small group of refugees from Moravia sought asylum on the Saxon estate of Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700-1760), a Pietist nobleman sympathetic to persecuted Protestants. Zinzendorf granted them land, and the settlement they built, Herrnhut, meaning the Lord's Watch, became the center of a renewed Moravian Church under his leadership, blending the old Unitas Fratrum's episcopal succession with the warm, experiential piety of German Pietism.
From Herrnhut, the renewed church launched one of the most ambitious missionary movements of the eighteenth century relative to its small size, sending missionaries to enslaved communities in the Caribbean beginning in 1732, to Greenland, to Native American communities, and to British North America, where Moravian settlers founded Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1741 and, later, Winston-Salem's founding settlement of Salem, North Carolina. The Moravian Church ordained women in Herrnhut as early as 1758, though that early egalitarianism receded after Zinzendorf's death and was not restored in North America until Mary Matz's ordination in 1975. Today organized into around two dozen self-governing provinces worldwide under a General Synod of the Unity, the church counts roughly a million members globally, with its strongest historic American presence still centered on Bethlehem and Winston-Salem.