Our History

The Church of the Brethren (Cirkev bratská) carries on the work of Jan Amos Komenský (Comenius), one of the most significant European thinkers, who was a bishop of the Unity of the Brethren. Its roots, however, reach even deeper, back to the Bohemian Reformation.

A hundred years before Luther and Zwingli, Jan Hus strove for the renewal of the church in Bohemia. Even after his death and the difficult years that followed the Battle of Lipany (1434), reformation ideas in Bohemia did not die out. They were carried on by Petr Chelčický, at whose initiative the Unity of the Brethren was formed in 1457, known in the world as the “Moravian Brethren” (Unitas Fratrum). Comenius later became one of its bishops (1632).

The legacy of the Unity of the Brethren came back to life centuries later, when Nicolaus Zinzendorf used his estate to support a renewed brethren community in Herrnhut. From there, over the following century, missionaries went out into the whole world—to the Pacific islands, to Africa, and to America—and many of these congregations still exist today.

The Brethren were also behind the translation of the Bible into Czech, the so-called Bible of Kralice (1579–1593), which for a long time also became the Bible of Slovak Protestants. Likewise, the entire Evangelical Church in Slovakia adopted the hymnbook Cithara sanctorum (1636) by the exile Juraj Tranovský, who settled in Liptovský Mikuláš.

The present-day shape of the Church of the Brethren was also influenced by Scottish Presbyterian and American missionaries, who at the end of the 19th century brought evangelical emphases into the then Kingdom of Hungary. Interestingly, the spiritual advisor of the first Czechoslovak president, T. G. Masaryk, was Church of the Brethren pastor František Urbánek. Congregations of the Church of the Brethren were established in Slovakia mainly over the course of the 20th century.