The Organization of the Congregation in the Early Lutheran Churches in America | Page 9

and Knapp at Amsterdam is retained, and that concerning the
Ziekentrooster omitted. Chapter VI and VII are as at Amsterdam.
We here close the examination of the organization of Lutheran
congregations existing in this country when Muehlenberg came, of the
influences by which it had been produced, and of the European
Lutheran constitutions which then and afterwards formed the basis on
which it rested. We go on to describe the gradual formation, under
Muehlenberg and the Halle Missionaries, of the constitution, afterwards
accepted generally by the American congregations.

HENRY MELCHIOR MUEHLENBERG.
In 1742 H. M. Muehlenberg arrived in Pennsylvania, where he not only
ministered to several congregations, but soon became virtual
superintendent of all the congregations. He brought the troubled affairs
of his own pastorate into order. He gradually guided and was guided to
a complete organization of his congregations. He prepared and
introduced the well ordered constitutions by which their affairs have
been regulated ever since, and which now forms the Order of
Government throughout the body of older congregations. His labors
and counsels were sought for, in ever-widening districts, until his
oversight extended from the middle of New York to Georgia. He
gathered the pastors and representatives of the congregations together
and formed the United Evangelical Lutheran Ministry, of which union
he became Senior; and he prepared the Order of Worship used
throughout the churches. Whether authority from the Fathers at Halle
and London at the beginning formally charged him with the oversight
of the churches, I do not know; but the common consent of all
concerned, and their urgent demand of such labor from him, actually
made him Senior of the Ministry and Superintendent of the Churches,

as well as missionary in chief to the scattered Lutherans in this land. He
was called of God to this high office, and the call came through the
churches, formally perhaps, certainly really.
And he was admirably fitted for this great work by natural talents and
character, by liberal culture with severe formative trials in the
attainment of it, and also by the peculiar circumstances and influences
which surrounded him before coming to America.
His large mental powers, his force and energy of purpose, his
self-forgetfulness and power of endurance, his consuming zeal and
devotion of his whole faculties to his work, his tender sympathy and
ardent love of souls, together with his admirable judgment and
prudence, made him a born ruler of men.
There is one characteristic of the Patriarch of the Lutheran Church in
America which is of such importance to his own times and which, after
a century has passed, continues to have so great significance, that it
claims attention; it is his fidelity to the confessions of the Lutheran
Church. The foundations of the organization of that church here were
firmly placed upon those confessions in their entirety and in their true
meaning. The relation of Muehlenberg to the confessions was in his
own lifetime openly questioned by some of his co-laborers in
Pennsylvania, like Stoever and Wagner, who affirmed that the Halle
Pietists were not sound Lutherans; the same hue and cry was raised in
New York by Berkenmeyer and Sommer, who were representatives
here of the orthodoxy, which in Germany contended against Pietism;
other good men, like Gerock and Bager, who had not been sent from
Halle, sympathized with this feeling, and finally, with some
encouragement from Gerock, Lucas Raus, in whom personal enmity
toward Muehlenberg had been rankling for years, brought direct
charges of want of fidelity to the confessions against him before the
ministerium and offered to support them with evidence in writing.
There have been those in these later years, who having themselves
departed from the old confessions of our church, have affirmed that
Muehlenberg had allowed himself the same liberty, and that he and his
coadjutors had not themselves maintained, nor required of ministers

and congregations an absolute, unconditional and complete acceptance
of the confessions. The charges of his contemporaries were based on
their general impression concerning the Halle school of pietism, and
were entirely unsustained by any evidence furnished by Muehlenberg.
The falsity of the charges, by whomsoever made, will be shown by the
facts that in the ordination of ministers, in the reception of
congregations into the union, and in the constitutions which they
prepared for congregations, they required acknowledgement of the
confessions and adherence to them in the most absolute terms. If we
take Kurtz's ordination as a test, the evidence concerning which is full,
we find among the questions to which he must furnish a satisfactory
written answer, this one: "Ob unsere Evan. Luth. Lehre die allein
gerecht-und seligmachende, und wo sie in Gottes Wortgegruendet
sey?" Is our Evangelical Lutheran doctrine the only justifying and
saving doctrine, and on what proofs of Holy Scripture does it rest?