German Reformed Church
The origins of the German Reformed Church in North America lie in the overseas movement of people from Calvinist territories of central Europe in the eighteenth century. Although radical pietists and anabaptists had dominated the earliest migrations to the American colonies, the majority of German speakers crossing the Atlantic from 1717 to 1775 were Lutherans and German Reformed.
Withstanding the lure of the numerous sectarian groups in the tolerant religious climate of Pennsylvania, which became their major destination, Lutheran and Reformed settlers organized congregations on their own initiative. German Reformed pastors began to arrive in larger numbers in the 1740s, and ecclesiastical authorities in Holland exerted considerable influence over the colonial church until the end of the eighteenth century.The first ordained German Reformed minister to arrive in Pennsylvania was the Swiss Samuel Guldin in 1710, but Guldin had become a separatist and did not accept a pastorate. A Reformed pastor also accompanied a group of miners from Nassau- Siegen to Virginia in 1714. In 1725 three congregations in present-day Philadelphia and Montgomery counties called the schoolmaster and farmer John Philip Bohm (Boehm) (1683—1749) as their pastor. Bohm subsequently extended his activities to the Tulpehocken and Conestoga settlements. Georg Michael Weiss (1700—1761), who had been ordained in Heidelberg prior to his arrival in Pennsylvania in 1727, organized congregations in Philadelphia and Germantown and preached in the backcountry, where he challenged Bohm’s ministry. In 1729, the Classis of Amsterdam as the governing body of the Reformed Church in Holland declared the call that Bohm had received from his congregations valid and asked the Dutch Reformed ministers in New York to ordain him. Weiss returned to Europe in 1730 and later settled in New York, but Bohm remained the mainstay of the German Reformed Church in Pennsylvania until the mid-1740s.
A staunch defender of Calvinist orthodoxy, he accepted the Classis of Amsterdam as the colonial church’s ecclesiastical superior, supplied it with detailed information about Pennsylvania, and refuted the ecumenical initiatives of the Moravians. His organizational efforts were hampered, however, by his conflicts with younger colleagues. Disregarding the Reformed tradition of a trained, ordained ministry, several congregations accepted “irregular,” unordained preachers out of expediency.After Bohm had repeatedly asked for more pastors, the synods of North and South Holland sent Michael Schlatter (1716—1790) from St. Gall to Pennsylvania in 1746 in order to organize the church there. Initially Schlatter proved extremely successful: within a year he had visited the major congregations, settled a lengthy property dispute, and organized the resident Reformed pastors into a coetus. The coetus accepted the Heidelberg catechism as its confessional basis and adopted a “church order” (Kirchenordnung) in 1748. In 1751 Schlatter traveled to Europe, where his report on conditions in America was printed in Dutch and German and elicited financial help from public and private sources. When he returned to Pennsylvania in 1752, Schlatter was accompanied by six young pastors he had recruited in Herborn. Despite increased support from Holland, the coetus was weakened by internal conflicts, and several pastors left the body or were expelled. The most prominent of these was Michael Schlatter himself, whose early successes had been followed by a series of setbacks. As early as 1749 the Philadelphia congregation, incensed by his authoritarian style of leadership, had dismissed him, and although a committee of arbitrators vindicated Schlatter, the majority of his parishioners would not accept him back. Moreover, his colleagues in the coetus resented his ambition and influence. During a second trip to Europe, he was dismissed from pastoral service in Pennsylvania at his own request, and after brief periods as supervisor of the “charity schools” established to assimilate the children of German immigrants and as British army chaplain in the French and Indian War, Schlatter spent the rest of his life as an independent minister.
Continuing central European immigration fueled the expansion of the German Reformed Church. In 1748 there were 46 congregations in Pennsylvania, 4 in New Jersey, 3 in Maryland, and 2 in Virginia. By 1776 the number of congregations had increased to 123 in Pennsylvania, 9 in New Jersey, 19 in Maryland, and 16 in Virginia. Most congregations also established parochial schools. Although the Holland church authorities sent 29 university-trained pastors to America between 1748 and 1776, the supply did not match the demand for ministerial services, and “irregular” preachers only partly filled the void. In numerous places Lutherans and Reformed used the same church building (union churches). Several Reformed pastors also found their way to the southern colonies. John Joachim Zubly (1724—1781), a native of St. Gall who pursued an independent ministry in Savannah, emerged as Georgia’s leading political pamphleteer during the imperial crisis of the 1760s but rejected the idea of American independence and ended his life as a loyalist.
After the American Revolution the Reformed coetus initially sought to strengthen its ties to the Holland church authorities. Because the number of ministers arriving from Europe after 1783 was insufficient and proposals for the establishment of a theological seminary in America were rejected in Holland, the coetus formally severed its European connection in 1793 and constituted itself as the Synod of the German Reformed Church in the United States of America. By the latter year, 43 Reformed pastors were serving 236 congregations in Pennsylvania and neighboring states.
At the time of the Second Great Awakening, Philip William Otterbein (1726— 1813) synthesized continental European pietism and English methodism into a distinct strand of evangelical revivalism. Trained at Herborn and recruited for the American ministry by Michael Schlatter, Otterbein had served several congregations in Pennsylvania and Maryland before becoming pastor in Baltimore in 1774.
Influenced by the Methodist Francis Asbury, Otterbein and his Reformed colleague Benedict Swope established Methodiststyle classes in several Maryland congregations. Although he retained his allegiance to the German Reformed Church, Otterbein and the Mennonite bishop Martin Boehm began organizing meetings with like-minded preachers in 1789 and eventually ordained men for the ministry. These activities resulted in the formation of a new denomination, the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. Around 1830 John Winebrenner, a former Reformed pastor at Harrisburg, organized a primitivist evangelical denomination called the Church of God.Even as the Reformed Church continued to grow in the nineteenth century, its history was marked by conflicts over language, ministerial training, revivalism, and liturgy. The adoption of English in worship services was opposed by many German laypeople, and the language question split several congregations. After the synod had voted to establish a theological seminary and hire an English-speaking professor in 1821, numerous congregations in eastern Pennsylvania seceded and formed the “Free Synod.” Proponents of both sides subsequently waged a pamphlet and newspaper battle over their respective understandings of ecclesiastical authority, local liberty, and ethnic identity. In 1836, the year before the two synods reunited, the Free Synod counted twenty-three ministers and eighty congregations. Meanwhile, the Ohio Classis had formed its own synod in 1824.
The first theological seminary of the German Reformed Church was eventually opened in Carlisle in 1825. It was later transferred to York in 1829, Mercersburg in 1837, and eventually to Lancaster in 1871. In the 1840s Mercersburg became the center of an extended controversy when two recently appointed professors, John Williamson Nevin (1803—1886) and the Swiss-born Phillip Schaff (1819— 1893), began to criticize evangelical revivalism and stress the importance of institutional church life, formal liturgy, and the sacraments.
They denounced sectarianism and promoted a return to the ancient ecumenical creeds, which they hoped would eventually lead to the restoration of a unified church. Opponents of the Mercersburg theologians, who became known as the Old Reformed, regarded these views as heretical and emphasized traditional Calvinist doctrine. In reaction to a proposed new liturgy influenced by the Mercersburg theologians, the Old Reformed organized a convention in Myerstown, Pennsylvania, in 1867. To promote their cause, the Old Reformed began to publish their own journal and founded Ursinus College. After its General Synod of 1878 the Reformed Church took steps to restore harmony between the two parties, and thirty years later a new church constitution was approved that allowed both sides a large measure of freedom in matters of liturgy and doctrine.Under the leadership of George W Richards, the Reformed Church of the United States pursued an ecumenical course after World War I. In 1934 it merged with the Evangelical Synod of North America into the Evangelical and Reformed Church. The new denomination counted some 800,000 members in 1957, when the Evangelical and Reformed Church and the General Council of Congregational Christian Churches formed the United Church of Christ.
Mark Haberlein
See also Georgia; Germantown, Pennsylvania;
Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod; Pietism; Schaff, Phillip
References and Further Reading
Glatfelter, Charles H. Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717—1793. 2 vols. Breinigsville: Pennsylvania German Society, 1979-1981.
Good, James I. History of the Reformed Church in the U.S. in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Board of Publication of the Reformed Church in America, 1911.
Hinke, William J. Ministers of the German Reformed Congregations in Pennsylvania and other Colonies in the Eighteenth Century. Lancaster, PA: Historical Commission of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, 1951.
Nolt, Steven M. Foreigners in Their Own Land: Pennsylvania Germans in the Early Republic. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.
Wentz, Richard E. John Williamson Nevin: American Theologian. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.