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Put my name in the “other” section of the “How’d you hear about the scholarship?” If you win, I’ll win too. Share the wealth!

apply for the Logos Seminary Scholarship (www.SeminaryScholarship.com).

Scholar George Forell put it more succinctly: Zinzendorf was “the noble Jesus freak.”¹

Imagine my surprise to find this terminology used and applied to someone from so long ago. I have not been able to find the actual citation even though the quote is often repeated. Since Forell wrote throughout the era of modern day Jesus Freaks, the phrase is not so surprising after all. But why apply it to Zinzendorf? Probably because of his commitment to community and rejection of church as institution. Zinzendorf was more interested in people living together well than people agreeing on how to think.

Zinzendorf was first a nobleman and politician and for a time took up government service. After about a year of this, he decided to abandon the life of the elite and rather build a community where people were free to worship God without the trappings of institutional structure. He hoped that people could live together well without hierarchy and without focusing on doctrinal division. His emphasis on relationships and genuine concern for the well being of others provoked a response to a converted slave’s request that someone go and preach the gospel to slaves in the West Indies. A movement of missionaries was born.

The idea of living well together, as a community, and caring enough about others to go and tell of the good news, were characteristics of many of the Jesus Freaks of the era I grew up in. Of course Zinzendorf was not the first “Jesus Freak” but he does stand in that tradition and leaves us an important testimony about “religion of the heart.”