Chattel slaves bought, sold and evangelized

At the same time the Moravians were converting thousands of blacks and enslaved Africans -  white brethren in the West Indies began buying slaves themselves, as if to confirm their willing acceptance of the prevailing social hierarchies.

In 1737, they bought a plantation with thirty to forty slaves on St. Thomas to support their

livelihood. In the following years, Moravian missionaries in Jamaica, Antigua, and other Caribbean colonies followed a similar course, finding it easier to join the plantation economy than to live on its fringes dependent on handouts from Europe. They might also have reason that ownership of plantations and slaves would earn them favor with authorities.
-- Moravian Missionaries and Slaves, Hamilton and Hamilton - Caribbean Studies, V, no 2 (July 1965), 4-5.

The Brethren were hardly the first to use Christianity to humanize and legitimize slavery simultaneously. But later generations of white Brethren would regret their forerunners ownership of slaves.  "We grieve over it, and believe the Lord winked at those times of ignorance," lamented a missionary in Jamaica in 1854. -- J.H. Buchner, The Moravians in Jamaica. The reference in to Acts 17:30.