The Chief Eldership of Christ

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.

The practical shape of Moravian government follows from the vacancy. Authority rests with synods and with the boards those synods elect, not with a primate, and the church is organized into provinces that govern themselves and meet in a worldwide Unity Synod. The episcopate survives, in a succession the church traces through the old Bohemian Brethren, but a Moravian bishop is a pastor and an ordainer without administrative jurisdiction, which is a rarer arrangement than it sounds and one that has helped the church in ecumenical conversations with both episcopal and non-episcopal bodies. The eighteenth century congregations pressed the underlying conviction further than their descendants do, deciding contested questions, including at times marriages, by drawing the lot, on the reasoning that if Christ governs the church directly then the church should ask him rather than vote.

The lot was gradually restricted and then abandoned as binding during the nineteenth century, but the conviction it expressed remained in a milder institutional form. The same instinct shows in the Moravian reluctance to make a confession of its own the test of membership: the church's doctrinal statement, the Ground of the Unity, describes the essentials it holds and deliberately declines to legislate beyond them, on the ground that Christ, not the Unity, decides what the church must believe. A church with a vacant highest office is unusually careful about how much authority it gives the offices below.