The Christian Munsee are a group of Lenape (also known as Delaware), an Indigenous people in the United States, that primarily speak Munsee and have converted to Christianity, following the teachings of Moravian missionaries. The Christian Munsee are also known as the Moravian Munsee or the Moravian Indians, the Moravian Christian Indians or, in context, simply the Christian Indians. As the Moravian Church transferred some of their missions to other Christian denominations, such as the Methodists, Christian Munsee today belong to the Moravian Church, Methodist Church, United Church of Canada, among other Christian denominations. The Christian Munsee tribe has produced several people who have become notable figures in Christianity and the Delaware Nation as a whole, such as Gelelemend (a Lenape chief), John Henry Kilbuck (a Moravian Christian missionary to the Native peoples in Alaska), Papunhank (a Moravian Lenape diplomat and preacher), Glikhikan (Munsee chief, Moravian elder, and Christian martyr), and Washington Jacobs (a chief of the Moravian of the Thames reservation). Present-day Christian Munsee communities include Moravian of the Thames, the Christian Munsee tribe in Kansas, and the Stockbridge–Munsee Community. History Starting in the 1740s, the Moravian Church sent out Christian missionaries to American Indian tribes and started settlements, with full tribal support. The ranks of the Christian Munsee thus include influential Lenape chiefs from the start. The Moravian Christian approach was to preserve Lenape cultural practices while passing on to the Lenape the Gospel message with the entirety of the Christian faith. As such, Moravian Christian missionaries developed the orthography for Lenape dialects and David Zeisberger "compiled dictionaries of various Native tongues, translating them into English and German". Mid-Atlantic states and Ohio The Munsee were the Wolf Clan of the Lenape, occupying the area where present-day New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey meet. The first recorded European contact occurred in 1524, when Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed into what is now New York Harbor. Like most native peoples of the Atlantic coast, the Munsee were quickly devastated by European diseases such as smallpox and influenza, and those who survived were forced inland. By the mid-18th century, one group of Lenape people began to follow the teachings of the Moravian missionaries. The Moravians were descended from the exiled Protestants from Morava, now Czech Republic, who founded a Protestant denomination from Herrnhut in the Germann state of Saxony. They sought to protect their converts by creating separate mission villages in the