Image - Moravian Doors

The following words seemed to capture for me the foundation of the Christian religion and my hope for the Moravian tradition. 

“On him we’ll venture all we have, our lives, our all, to him we owe.

None else is able us to save, naught but the Savior will we know;

This we subscribe with heart and hand, resolved through grace whereby to stand.” 

The early American Moravians were uncommonly aware of their need to manage and conserve their environment. To their newly purchased 100,000 acres, in the 1750's, in North Carolina, they employed innovative land use policies and conservation practices. For example, to manage and steward wood a forester was appointed in 1759.

Moravian stewardship theory was combined with German ingenuity in the Moravian villages. The doors of older buildings are a case in point.

The construction of Salem Church, later known as Home Church, was begun in 1798 and its doors were and continue to be bivalve. That is to say, one panel was and is wider than the other. 

Excursus: The name "bivalve" is derived from the Latin bis, meaning "two", and valvae, meaning "leaves of a door". The larger definition of “bivalve” applies to a class of  mollusks with bodies enclosed by a hinged shell. Thus, a bivalve door is a door with two leaves.

Doors in early Moravian buildings were made as small as possible. They needed to be large enough to admit a person, but also let in the least cold in winter and heat in the summer.

Church doors were more complicated in former times, from the point of view of stewardship, because they were multifunctional. They had to be wide enough for a casket to enter. If the doors had two equally wide panels it would have necessitated opening both doors to admit the casket. The practical solution was to have two panels with one wider than the other. One being for people and the other for a coffin as the photographs illustrate.

Stewardship continues to the present to be a Moravian value. It is well to recall that humankind was given the mandate for stewardship of the environment. We read Genesis 1:26-30; and Genesis 2:15, in that regard.

As I close I cannot help but see a metaphor in the pictured church doors. It was Jesus that said the door and pathway to life are narrow and the door to death, alas, is wide Matthew 7:13-14. It is not curious that at Home Moravian Church the living entered by the narrow door and the dead, the wide. Though this symbol was not intended, I do not think I will ever see the church doors the same again. Food for thought.