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From 1750 to the time of the American Revolution we had two Lutheran churches in New York, the German Christ church, popularly known as "The Old Swamp Church," on Frankfort Street, and the Dutch Trinity church on Broadway and Rector Street. In the Swamp church the first preacher, Ries, remained for a year. He was followed in quick succession by Rapp, Wiessner, Schaeffer, Kurz, Bager and Gerock.
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.
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