Originally a Jesuit priest, he became a member of the Reformed Church in 1650, before founding the community which became known as the Labadists in 1669.

The son of an officer, he entered the Jesuit Order in 1625, was ordained in 1635,[2] but left in 1639 due to poor health and tensions with the other brothers.

[3] He turned to Jansenism and intensive study of the Bible, and began to be drawn to Calvinism.

[2] Cardinal Mazarin had him transferred to southern France in 1646 as a disturber of the peace,[2] where he changed his allegiance to the Reformed Church in 1650 at Montauban.

He moved on, in 1670, with his pupil Anna Maria van Schurman and his congregation into a house in Herford, Germany, provided as a refuge for persecuted spiritualists by Elisabeth of the Palatinate, the Calvinist abbess of the Lutheran convent in that city.