History of the Brethren Church

The Brethren Church is one of the Christian churches that professes the fundamental ancient Christian creeds. Like the whole Christian church, it has its origin in God. God the Father calls it, God the Son dies for it, and God the Holy Spirit leads and sanctifies it.

The Brethren Church is a young twig on the historic trunk of Christianity, with roots in the apostolic tradition. The church stands on the Gospel, on the good news about God, who came to serve and to give his life for ours. In terms of church history and theological emphases, we belong to the Reformation and evangelical churches. This means that we appeal to the biblical gospel of Jesus Christ as the only and key starting point and criterion of living faith and godly life.

A hundred years before the worldwide Reformation in Germany (M. Luther) and Switzerland (U. Zwingli and J. Calvin), the Reformation arose in Bohemia (J. Hus, 1415). Behind the Reformation stood the effort to return the church to the biblical gospel. The ideas of the Reformation survived despite the strong Counter-Reformation. Proof of this is also the founding of the Unity of the Brethren in 1457. Its last bishop was Jan Amos Comenius (1627-1672). Persecution drove the Unity of the Brethren out of Austria-Hungary and it took root in Saxony. There the “Moravian Brethren” flourished. They were ahead of their time, above all in foreign missions. They were modern missionary pioneers. They carried the Gospel to places where people had not heard of God’s salvation before.

In their motherland, the Kingdom of Bohemia, however, the situation of the church was much worse. The Patent of Toleration of Emperor Joseph II of 1781 brought at least limited freedoms for Lutherans and Calvinists on the territory of the Austrian monarchy. The following period, however, was a period of gradual decline of faith. The Protestant churches, marked by centuries of strong Counter-Reformation, were losing their zeal and becoming more and more formal. A renewal of faith came only with the revival movement of the 19th century.

To understand the history of the Brethren Church, one has to get to know its predecessor, the Free Reformed Church (Svobodná církev reformovaná). It arose on Czech territory in 1880, and those who came into it were people whose lives had been clearly transformed by the Gospel, who wanted the Holy Scriptures to be the final and sufficient authority of their lives, and who wanted to spread the message about the saving God further. The church quickly spread to Slovakia as well.

During the First Czechoslovak Republic a new name came too, Jednota českobratská (the Czech Brethren Unity), which referred to the tradition of the Unity of the Brethren. In this period the church grew in size and congregations grew in Slovakia as well. A historical curiosity may be the fact that after the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1919, a preacher of the Brethren Church, František Urbánek, became the spiritual adviser and confessor of the first president, T. G. Masaryk.

Since the church grew on both sides of the river Morava, in 1967 it changed its name to the Brethren Church, under which our church has worked until now.