Funeral and burial rites are as old as mankind. Every religion has its own ideas about dying, death and the afterlife. Exploring these can help us better understand our own culture and beliefs. 

Our five-part series “Death and Eternal Life“ provides fascinating insights into funeral customs of the worldwide EMS fellowship. Many of these rituals straddle the line between Christianity and traditional religious beliefs. Churches often play a mediating role. In the first part, we invite you to discover the cemeteries of the Moravian Church in Germany and Greenland: they reflect the unique characteristics of Moravian theology.

All the articles in the series appear for the first time in the current issue of the magazine “EMS Insights”. Written by an editorial team from Africa, Asia and Europe, it offers an international perspective on the work of EMS member churches and mission societies.

Equal and yet not equal – Graveyards of the Moravian Church

The first time you visit a Moravian Church graveyard, which they refer to as God's Acre, you will probably be quite surprised. Instead of a wide variety of gravestones and tombs that you usually find elsewhere, you only see flat stones of the same size arranged in rows and fields. The term God’s Acre comes from the belief that the bodies of the dead are sown as seeds in God’s field so that they may rise again on the Day of the Resurrection. 

When you take a closer look at the gravestones, you see they only show the name, place and date of birth, place and date of death and usually a Bible verse. Titles such as ‘Doctor’, ‘Mayor’ or ‘Senior Government Councillor’ are completely omitted. No achievements are listed either. Some may also notice that men are buried on one side and women on the other. There are no family tombs. What's more, you can't choose your own grave site – the next person to die gets the next grave in line. So, as you walk along the graves, you are in fact walking through time.

This particular Moravian burial culture is far from arbitrary as it is based on theological principles. A life with God mainly plays out in this world. After death, the soul returns to the “bosom of the Father”. Instead of speaking of death, they often talk of “going home to God”. The body itself is irrelevant and therefore the place where the body is buried does not need very much attention at all. That’s why it is not necessary for married couples or families to be buried in the same place or next to each other. 

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Photo: Moravian Church

Even the simple inscriptions on the gravestones have a theological meaning. As they were in this life, all people stand before God as sinners and need his forgiveness. The man is neither above the woman nor the doctor above the potter. This is why there is no need to adorn oneself with earthly titles and why the members of the Moravian Church address each other by their first names (without a title). This equality or equivalent value of people is also expressed by the fact that these titles are deliberately omitted on the gravestones and they are all the same size. 

GOD'S ACRES INTERNATIONAL 

The Moravian Church was one of the first Protestant missionary churches. Since 1732, Europeans have travelled to little-known regions of the world to bring the gospel to enslaved and indigenous populations. Their own culture often went along with it, such as the simple white church hall or the division of the community into equal social groups (widows, young single men, etc.). Even their burial culture was part of the European culture that they brought with them. But soon the missionaries realised that there were important cultural distinctions, especially in the matter of burial rites. So how can the equality of all people be respected here? Do they all have to be buried according to the same brotherly ritual?  

Over the course of time, this problem was solved in different ways in the various mission fields. It is interesting to take a look at Greenland, the second oldest mission region of the Moravians. In 1733, the station of New Herrnhut was founded near the settlement of Godthåb (now Nuuk), which was founded by Hans Egede. In the following decades, further mission stations were established towards the south: Lichtenfels, Lichtenau and Friedrichsthal. God’s Acres were established at all the stations. All deceased members of the congregations were buried there, whether they were European or Inuit. And yet the graves are very different. While the European graves are marked with a classic Moravian gravestone, the Inuit graves are built according to their own tradition. They did not bury their dead in the ground but covered them with stones. Each stack of stones represents one person. So, in these graveyards, Europeans and Inuit are buried side by side (as equals) and yet they remain true to their own cultures. Equal and yet not equal. 

Niels Gärtner 
Pastor of the Moravian Church in Germany. 

Read also part 2 of the series ‘Death and eternal life’.