John Martin Mack

Who was John Martin Mack?

John Martin Mack was a Moravian bishop. He came to the United States in 1735, and joined the Moravian colony in the province of Georgia. Thence he went to Pennsylvania, and assisted at the founding of Bethlehem. Soon afterward he was appointed missionary among the Indians, and labored with great success for twenty years in New York, Pennsylvania, and New England. Both in New York and New England the Moravians were accused of being spies of the French, and in consequence their missionaries were made to suffer. Mack was arrested and imprisoned at Milford, Connecticut, and banished from the province of New York. But such persecutions speedily came to an end when, in 1749, the parliament of Great Britain acknowledged the Moravians to be an ancient episcopal church, and invited them to settle in this country. Meanwhile Mack had founded Gnadenhütten, a nourishing Christian Indian settlement in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. At a later time he founded Nain, another Christian Indian town, near Bethlehem. He was in the full tide of successful work when he was unexpectedly called to the West Indies as superintendent of the missions in the Danish islands.