Dober's Resignation and a Vacant Office

The renewed Unitas Fratrum that formed at Herrnhut in the 1720s took the offices of the old Bohemian Brethren seriously, and one of them was the Chief Eldership, the highest office of the Unity. It was filled not by a nobleman or a theologian but by Leonhard Dober, a potter, who had gone as one of the first two Moravian missionaries to the enslaved people of Saint Thomas in the Caribbean in 1732 and had since been recalled. Dober found the office unbearable and asked more than once to be released from it.

A synod meeting in London in 1741 accepted his resignation and then faced the question of a successor, and concluded that there should not be one, because the office belonged to Christ himself and no member of the Unity should occupy it. The church has kept the decision as a founding fact of its polity rather than as an administrative curiosity, and marks 13 November as the festival of the Chief Eldership of Christ, one of the memorial days that structure the Moravian year alongside 13 August, when the renewed church dates its spiritual beginning. What was settled in London was not a doctrine of Christ's divinity, which the Unity had never doubted, but a doctrine about church government: that the highest office in the church is occupied, and not by anyone available for election.