History
The foundation traces its roots to 1754 when two tailors were sent to Suriname as unsupported missionaries. To earn a living they practiced their craft, using their free time for their missionary work.
The business activities of C. Kersten & Co prospered and became one of Surinam's largest commercial enterprises, generating employment and profits.
The profits were used to establish other Moravian Church businesses in the Caribbean and Europe. All the businesses were eventually transferred to the Moravian Church Foundation and are now used to finance church work and social and community projects on several continents.
Read more about this topic: Moravian Church Foundation
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)