Rasmus Jensen was the first missionary from any Evangelical Lutheran Church to come to MNorth America. He gave his life. He died along with 61 others in the winter of 1619-1620. He had become the first Lutheran pastor in the New World, arriving with the ships Unicorn and Lamprey, sent by King Christian IV of Norway and Denmark, in 1619. Captained by Jens Munk, the ships were searching for the Northwest Passage. The crew of 64 landed in what is now Churchill, Manitoba, where they were locked in for the winter by ice. By July of 1620 only Munk and two sailors survived to return to Norway and Denmark, and thereafter the Danes concentrated their missionary efforts in India and the Virgin Islands.
John Campanius is referred to as the "saintly apostle of the Indians." Called in 1643 as pastor for the congregation at Fort Christina along the Delaware River (the first Swedish settlement in North America), Campanius believed his call extended to the Delaware people. In 1696 Campanius translated Luther's Small Catechism into the Delaware Lenni Lanape language. He also built the first Lutheran church building in America on Tinicum Island, south of Philadelphia, in 1646.
Justus Falckner, born in Germany and educated at Halle, came to the new world in 1700 as an attorney and surveyor, having left Germany to avoid the ministry. When he arrived in Pennsylvania Falckner made the acquaintance of Swedish missionaries, who three years later recommended him to the Dutch congregation in New York. Ordained by the Swedes on November 24, 1703, Falckner was the first Lutheran to be ordained in America. Falckner's parish grew in area and in numbers as he continued to serve faithfully. His flock ultimately was composed not only of Dutch and Germans but also of Black and American Indian people. Falckner was also known for authoring treatises on doctrine and the hymn "Rise, O children of salvation" (LBW #182), as well as founding New Hanover Lutheran Church in New Hanover, Pennsylvania.
Henry Melchoir Muhlenberg ( founder, first North American Lutheran synod) German born (1711) and educated, Muhlenberg entered the university theological seminary at Gottingen in 1737. There he came under the influence of Baron Von Munchausen, was ordained in 1739, and in 1741 asked to become a missionary "to the scattered Lutherans in Pennsylvania." He entered the colonies at Charleston, S.C. , in 1742 and before going to Pennsylvania visited Lutheran ministries there and in Georgia. Once in Pennsylvania, he was elected pastor of the three congregations: Philadelphia, New Providence and New Hanover. A new building dedication for St. Michael's, Philadelphia, in 1748 brought together pastors and representatives of congregations from as far as New York and York County, Pennsylvania. Here the first general conference or synod was launched to the theme of Muhlenberg's opening address: "A twisted cord of many threads will not easily break. There must be unity among us...." The Ministerium of Pennsylvania was to meet annually as a time for discussion of theological issues amid the practical problems facing the young church. Muhlenberg published a collection of hymns and prayers and his model constitution for congregations provided for unity and cohesion as they carried out his motto "Ecclesia Plantanda" (The Church must be planted). By 1783 the expanding synod had five districts, and in 1786 New York formed a separate synod. By 1801 with districts expanded to include congregations in Maryland, Virginia and western Pennsylvania the seeds were sown for still more churches and synods. The "patriarch of the Lutheran church in America" died in 1787.
The first American Lutheran Seminary, Hartwick, was founded in New York City in 1797. Later it moved to Oneonta, New York and in 1926 added a college. Theological education at the institution ended in 1941. John C. Hartwick willed his large land holdings to start a seminary to train missionaries and any American Indian who wanted to become a student there.
John Bachman (1790-1874) was ordained in 1813. Born in New York, Bachman started out studying law, but changed to theology, which he studied privately. Ordained by the New York Ministerium, he was recommended to St. John Lutheran Church, Charleston, S.C., and served as pastor there for 56 years. Bachman displayed sympathy, wisdom and power as a pastor and was a leader in the organization of the Southern church.
Bachman joined the South Carolina Synod at its second convention and was its president for many years, leading in the establishment of the theological seminary at Lexington (later at Newberry) and Newberry College. He helped to establish the General Synod, the General Synod South and was instrumental in the adoption of the Book of Worship of 1866. Bachman was the first leader after Muhlenberg to urge the preparation of a common order of service.
At St. John's, Charleston, South Carolina, where he served from 1815-1874, he provided pioneer ministry among African Americans. In one year alone he baptized 90 persons of African American heritage and brought the congregation's membership to 40 percent African American before the Civil War. Enigmatically, while both a slave holder and advocate for the system in the South, his congregation was a provider of education for African Americans which was illegal. He was mentor and sponsor to three noteworthy African American churchmen: Jehu Jones, the first African American ordained by American Lutherans, Daniel Alexander Payne, founder and president of Wilberforce University, and Drayton Boston, the first U.S. missionary to Africa..
During the Civil War he sympathized strongly with his people and said the prayer at the convention in which the ordinance of secession of South Carolina was passed. His congregation was scattered, his library of valuable scientific collections was destroyed by one of Sherman's columns, and he was severely beaten by soldiers. After peace returned he gathered his congregation, which he had served in its dispersion in every part of the state. Bachman was also a world renown naturalist, having published many essays on scientific subjects. He died in Charleston in 1874. John S. Bachman (pastor, mentor)
Samuel Simon Schmucker (Americanizer of the Lutheran Church) From 1828-1845, perhaps no single person had more influence on the Lutheran Church in the U.S. than Dr. Schmucker. He was the son of a Lutheran minister, educated in the classics at York Academy, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton. When in 1820 he was licensed to preach by the Ministerium of Pennsylvania, he was considered "undoubtedly the best educated young man of American birth in the Lutheran ministry." As the guiding spirit in the organization of the General Synod, he wrote its constitution, formula of government, hymnal and discipline, and, in 1825 when it established its seminary at Gettysburg, he was elected its first professor. He filled its chair of Didactic Theology for 40 years. During those years Schmucker shaped the theology of over 400 young men, and he was the most prolific Lutheran theological writer of his generation. His Popular Theology passed through eight editions and was read in many Lutheran homes. It was a controversial "unionist" theology that many saw as compromising confessional Lutheran theology. According to one biographer, his later numerous writings "labored to depreciate the old confessional system of the church, and even to disparage those...confessions...which teach the Lutheran doctrine of the sacraments." His positions scandalized European theologians and made later immigrant Lutherans suspicious of a U.S. "protestantized" Lutheranism. From 1864 until his death in 1873 at age 74 , he devoted himself to writing
Jehu Jones In 1832 the New York Ministerium ordained the first African-American Lutheran pastor, Jehu Jones (c. 1808-1852?), formerly of St. John Lutheran Church, Charleston, South Carolina.
The son of a wealthy free hotel proprietor and member of St. John's Lutheran Church, Charleston, S.C., Jones was recruited by John S. Bachman for Philadelphia seminary training to serve as a missionary to Liberia. He never went to Africa but, following ordination he founded three African American congregations including St. Paul's, Philadelphia. Without adequate synodical financial support, the new St. Paul's building was lost to creditors. That, together with his civil rights activism, apparently discredited him in the church. Interestingly, his brother Edward Jones, a graduate of Amhurst College was probably one of the first African Americans to receive a baccalaureate degree. In 1827 Edward became an Episcopal Priest and missionary to Sierre Leone and died in England.
St. Paul Lutheran Church was located at 131 South Quince Street, Philadelphia, founded by Jehu Jones, comprised of free Black members, the first African-American Lutheran church in the U.S. A professor and a student from the Lutheran School of Theology at Philadelphia uncovered the site in 1997 and found the cornerstone still planted in the wall. The Pennsylvania State Historical Society has approved a marker for the site.
William Alfred Passavant (1821-1894) began his ministry in Baltimore in 1842. This son of Huguenot parents, born in Butler County, Penna., became a publisher (the first Lutheran Almanac and in 1845 The Missionary, which in 1861 was merged into The Lutheran of Philadelphia, where he remained for many years as co-editor) but his life was devoted principally to the founding and administration of benevolent institutions. Passavant established the first Protestant hospital in America in Pittsburgh. He established additional hospitals in Milwaukee (1863) and Chicago (1865), along with orphanages and other "inner missions." Passavant is perhaps best known for cooperating with Theodor Fliedner to establish the order of Protestant deaconesses, bringing the first deaconesses to America. See some of what made deaconesses stand out in the Deaconess Community display case. Passavant founded hospitals in Milwaukee, Chicago and Jacksonville, Ill., and orphanages at Mount Vernon, N.Y., Germantown, Pa., and Boston. He founded Conoquenesing Academy at Zelienople, Pa., and Thiel Hall at Water Cure, later to become Thiel College at Greenville, Pa. The ground for the seminary at Chicago was presented by him in 1868, though the seminary did not open until 1891. Passavant started the Pittsburgh Synod, helped found the General Council and organized the home missionary work of both bodies. He was also known as a good preacher.
So great was Passavant's influence on American Lutheranism that some church historians refer to 1849-1893 as "The Passavant Era". He touched much of the church's life from East to mid-west, and his name is synonymous with Lutheran health care
Sister Louisa Marthens (first American deaconess) Dr. William Passavant is credited with bringing the first deaconesses to the U.S. During a trip to Germany he came in contact with Pastor Theodore Fliedner who, as founder of the modern diaconate, had opened a hospital and training school for deaconesses in Kaiserswerth. At Passavant's request, in 1849, Fliedner brought four German deaconesses to Pittsburgh to work in the Pittsburgh Infirmary (now Passavant Hospital). Louisa Marthens, a member of Passavant's congregation, offered her services to the deaconesses. On May 28, 1850, Sister Marthens was consecrated as the first American deaconess. Over the next 50 years, her service centered around establishing and managing hospitals and orphans' homes from Philadelphia to west of Chicago. In 1859, she took four orphans from Zelienople, Pennsylvania, to Germantown to establish the Silver Springs-Martin Luther School that operates today in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania. Sister Louisa died in 1899 at the age of 71.
Elling Eielsen (pietist, synod founder) Eielsen came to the U.S. from Norway in 1839 as an itinerant lay preacher in the Haugean pietistic tradition. He was ordained in Chicago and is credited with organizing the first Norwegian Lutheran congregation in America at Fox River, Illinois. In 1846, he organized a synod at Jefferson Prairie, Wisconsin. Known as The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (or Eielsen Synod), it insisted on positive and courageous evangelism and vigorous lay leadership. He remained with it over the next 30 years as groups -- which would later to move into one of our own ELCA predecessor churches -- split off. He, himself, led a minority group that retained the Eielsen Synod name. Though he died in 1883, his piety and reliance on lay leadership remained a dominating influence for much of upper-Midwest Lutheranism.
John Christian Frederick Heyer was born in Germany and came to the U.S. at 17. He studied theology and labored as a home missionary in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. In 1841, commissioned at the age of 48, Heyer was sent to Guntur, India, by the Ministerium of Pennsylvania as the first foreign missionary of the American Lutheran churches. He served in India for 14 years and founded a Baltimore, Maryland, congregation on his furlough. Heyer later returned to the U.S. as a traveling missionary among Germans in Minnesota, organizing the Minnesota Synod. He established new home mission congregations throughout the Mississippi Valley before returning to India at the age of 77 to reorganize the Rajahmundry, India, mission. Heyer was said to have been "able to administer with rare economy, the scanty revenues of a mission in a time of scarcity." He served his last years as "House Father" at the Philadelphia Seminary until his death in 1873.
to find more on Lutherans in North America, go to the site from which these biographies were taken hishttp://www.elca.org/co/timeline/index.html
http://www.elca.org/co/timeline/index.html
