Most worship services are built around a sermon, with hymns arranged to support it. The Moravian Singstunde reverses that structure entirely. Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, the eighteenth century nobleman whose estate at Herrnhut became the refuge and organizing center for the persecuted Bohemian Brethren, is credited with originating the practice: a service assembled by carefully selecting individual stanzas from many different hymns and arranging them in sequence so that, sung one after another, they develop a single Christian theme on their own, with no sermon required to connect them.
Zinzendorf himself wrote more than two thousand hymns across his lifetime, and under his influence Herrnhut cultivated hymn singing as something closer to theology conducted in real time than to mere musical accompaniment. The Moravian Book of Worship carries that inheritance forward into the present, its own Easter Morning liturgy directly descended from the version printed in the 1778 German and 1789 English Moravian hymnals. A Singstunde built today from this 1995 volume is, in a real sense, still Zinzendorf's own method of teaching, unbroken across nearly three centuries.
The method also depends on a congregation that already knows its hymnal well, since a Singstunde only communicates a coherent theme if the listeners recognize where each borrowed stanza originally comes from and what larger hymn it is quietly drawing on. That familiarity was easier to assume in Zinzendorf's own tightly knit Herrnhut community than it is in a modern, more dispersed congregation, which is part of why the practice survives today as a distinctive, deliberately preserved feature of Moravian worship rather than as an ordinary, unremarked habit.