Fig. I.1a–b Copies of Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, “Die Heiden Collegia,” 1742. Personal papers of Zinzendorf, PPZdf 48, and MissInd 217.12b, MAB.

      This detailed vision for Christianizing Native Americans living in eastern North America may have been conceived by Zinzendorf, but its success rested in the hands of Moravian missionaries from Europe—men and women who traveled by ship across the Atlantic to live in Native American communities. It was ultimately the day-to-day relationships formed by people working, eating, singing, and speaking together that would create the Moravians’ transatlantic network of people and places.³⁷ The Moravian missions were successful because they employed a two-pronged strategy that operated well on both a micro and macro level. In the larger sense, the Moravian Church had created links with the Danish and British Empires that allowed them to quickly build new communities or to establish a presence in existing communities already under the umbrella of larger colonial governing structures. But, on a smaller level, the Moravians’ missionary strategy skillfully deployed a network of hundreds of young men and women who ardently believed in the cause of spreading the Christian message to people living in every country and region. They were the cornerstone of the Moravian mission plan, and the success of the church’s agenda rested on them.

      The first Moravian missionary to live in a Native American community in North America was Christian Heinrich Rauch. Despite having never left the small geographic area in Germany where he was born, Rauch was inspired at the age of nineteen to immigrate to America by a letter sent from a German (non-Moravian) settler already living in Pennsylvania. In late 1737, Rauch had sat on a long wooden bench in the Saal (worship hall) of the Moravian community of Marienborn, Germany, eagerly awaiting the reading of a letter from Moravian leader August Spangenberg to Christian David. It was dated November 19, 1737, and contained an account by Conrad Weiser, a German from the Palatinate who now lived in the Tulpehocken Valley of Pennsylvania. Thanks to his ability to speak several Native languages, Weiser now served as the principle messenger to the Haudenosaunee on behalf of the Pennsylvania and Virginia governments. Earlier that year, Weiser had experienced a remarkable encounter in the forest as he journeyed north to Onondaga. This is Weiser’s story, as told in his own words and heard by Rauch:

      In the year 1737, I was sent the first time to Onondaga, at the desire of the governor of Virginia. I departed in the latter end of February very unexpectedly for a journey of 500 English miles, through a wilderness where there was neither road nor path, and at such a time of the year when animals could not meet with food. There were with me a Dutchman and three Indians. On the 9^th of April I found myself extremely weak, through the fatigues of so long a journey with cold and hunger which I had suffered. There having fallen a fresh snow about twenty inches deep, and we being yet three days’ journey from Onondaga in a frightful wilderness, my spirit failed, my body trembled and shook, and I thought I should fall down and die. I stepped aside, and sat down under a tree, expecting there to die. My companions soon missed me. The Indians came back and found me sitting there. They remained awhile silent; at last the old Indian [Shikellamy, Haudenosaunee leader at Shamokin] said, “My dear companion, thou hast hitherto encouraged us; wilt thou now give up? Remember that evil days are better than good days, for when we suffer much we do not sin; sin will be driven out of us by suffering, and God cannot extend his mercy to the former; but contrary-wise, when it goeth evil with us, God has compassion on us.” These words made me ashamed. I rose up and traveled as well as I could.³⁸

      Weiser’s fortitude earned him the name Tarachiawagon (Holder of the Heavens) among the Haudenosaunee. In Marienborn, his account also stirred admiration, but not for Weiser. It was the words of Shikellamy that moved several of the young brethren to tears. Surely, here was a person upon whom the Holy Spirit was already acting. Christian Heinrich Rauch was inspired. By 1740, he had sailed to the New York Colony, and requested permission from community elders to live in the Mohican village of Shekomeko. He did not preach, but instead offered basic medical care to the community, and set about living his usual daily life, including speaking prayers and singing hymns in their midst. Eventually, Rauch was able to report to the church in Europe that three people had requested Christian baptism. More followed and Shekomeko became the first Moravian mission in America.³⁹

      Early Moravian missionaries such as Rauch adapted to lifeways in Native American communities. They learned to boil maple sugar, interpret wampum, build and use bark canoes, and hunt using Native methods. They lived in bark homes and studied the languages of the communities they lived among. Rauch himself would learn to speak Mohican, Munsee, Unami, and Mohawk. According to an early Moravian Church history: “They [missionaries] earned their own bread, chiefly by working for the Indians, though the latter were not able to pay much for the produce of their labor. They lived and dressed in the Indian manner, so that in travelling to and fro they were taken for Indians. But whenever they could not subsist by the work of their own hands, they were provided with the necessaries of life by the Brethren [Moravians] at Bethlehem.”⁴⁰ When Rauch eventually built a Christian worship space in Shekomeko, it was a bark structure like the other buildings in the village. As Richard Pointer and Rachel Wheeler have both stressed, Rauch was seemingly a willing observer and practitioner of Mohican culture.⁴¹ He may originally have been interested in Mohican culture because he wanted to make sense of Native religious customs in order to present his Christian teachings in a more effective way, but by participating in local cultural practices he also participated in Native religious life. Missionaries such as Rauch listened to, recorded, and interpreted dreams, blessed hunters and hunting lodges, dispensed medicines, performed rituals for the dead and dying, and offered personal spiritual power through the blood of Christ.

      When Christian hymns were sung, or sermons preached, they were usually done in Native languages. Because song, especially as a means of communicating with the divine, was an important part of religious life in Native and European Moravian communities alike, missionaries stressed this connection. In his foreword to his hymnal in the Delaware language, missionary David Zeisberger stated: “As the singing of psalms and spiritual songs has always formed a principal part of the divine service of our Church, even in congregations gathered from among the heathen . . . all our converts find much pleasure in learning verses with their tunes by heart, and frequently sing and meditate on them at home and abroad.”⁴² Hymns were a part of daily life for Native Christians, just as songs had always been a part of daily life in Native communities: they were sung to and by the sick and the dying. They were sung at gravesides. They were sung by men while hunting. They were sung by women in the travails of childbirth. They were sung to bring comfort, to call spiritual power, and to create and fortify community. They cemented treaties and sounded bravery in battle. And hymns became gifts that could be received from spirit helpers or manitou, continuing aspects of sacred song practices in Native communities. Hymns fulfilled similar functions in European Moravian communities, too, forging commonalities in the way that both groups understood the social, cultural, and spiritual purposes of song.⁴³

      Rauch’s missionizing efforts were based on the Christian customs, theologies, and cultural ways that he had carried with him across the Atlantic. What theologies of song had he shared with residents of Shekomeko, and how had these theologies influenced their responses to Moravian Christianity? Rachel Wheeler has argued that there was a distinct difference between the missionizing efforts of the Moravians and the version of Christianity promulgated by English Congregationalist missionaries at the Christian Indian town in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. While Native Christian practice at Stockbridge was shaped around literacy—learning to read from the Bible and the hymnal and interpret Scripture—Moravians emphasized an embodied sense of theology that was principally conveyed through