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Welcome to our 24-7 Week of Prayer 2025!

100 years of prayer

Inspiration behind the current 24/7 international prayer movement came from a movement of 100 years of Moravian prayer, which began on 27 August 1727 in Herrnhut, Germany.

In 1722 a band of refugees arrived on the country estate of Count Nicolaus von Zinzendorf at Bethelsdorf in Saxony, fleeing from religious persecution in their homelands of Bohemia and Moravia across the Austrian Alps to the south. Zinzendorf welcomed them to settle on his land and they built a village called Herrnhut, ‘the watch of the Lord’.

However, they couldn’t agree among themselves. On 13 August 1727, they gathered in the church and repented before the Lord. The repentance and reconciliation that followed led to an outpouring of the Spirit. The count said: ‘The Saviour permitted to come upon us as a spirit of whom we hitherto not had any experience or knowledge. Now the Holy Spirit Himself took full control of everything and everyone.’ This became known as the Moravian Pentecost.

Two weeks later the community launched their ‘watch of the Lord’ praying around the clock. 24 men and 24 women entered into a solemn commitment to cover every hour of the day and night in continuous prayer. They prayed for individual souls, for pilgrims and missionaries in the Lord’s service. They cried out to God for their nation, for its leaders and teachers. Finally, they lifted up the whole of Christendom and all mankind so that this institution of round-the-clock prayer would allow there to be no silence before the Lord, day and night. It continued for 100 years.

Five years after their beginning, in 1732, they began sending out missionaries around the world, and this unlikely place became the epicentre of a prayer and mission movement which propelled the gospel to many nations, translated the Scriptures into new languages, planted churches and new communities and prayed continually for more than a century.

In 1732, a Dutch ship left for the Danish West Indies with two missionaries – the first from Herrnhut: 26-year-old Johann Dober and 36-year-old David Nitschmann. They were among the first missionaries to come from a protestant church, the first to go as lay workers and not theologically trained, the first sent by a church and not a state body or society, and the first to work among enslaved people.

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