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Updated: June 21, 2025
That Muehlenberg was consulted and gave his consent is to be supposed, but that he gave way to the desires and plans of his associate is natural. At the Trappe, where Muehlenberg lived and had charge, he introduced an arrangement which was different from that at Philadelphia, and which may naturally be supposed to represent his views, as the other did those of Brunnholtz.
This whole arrangement bears a close resemblance to that of the Dutch Lutheran Churches, and is virtually that found in the German Churches in Pennsylvania when Muehlenberg came. The Church Council consisted of the minister, the councilmen and wardens.
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.
These charges were referred to the Swedish pastors Provost Wrangel and Borell, to whom the written evidence was to be submitted, all of which they sent to Muehlenberg so as to enable him to make his answer. That answer shows that under what he deemed unjust assault and provocation, he was capable of vigorous indignation.
But the wounded vanity of Raus had at least the good results that it caused to be written the statement in which Muehlenberg, with indignation repels the outrageous charge.
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.
But no written constitution is now known in Tulpehocken earlier than that introduced by Muehlenberg. In all the old congregations the case is the same, so far as any known evidence proves. In all the German congregations in Pennsylvania, however, an organization was found when Muehlenberg came, which had arisen out of the necessities of the case, and in all of them it had the same character.
Muehlenberg became acquainted with the Dutch Lutheran constitution, based on that of Amsterdam, in 1745, at the Raritan, and in 1750-1752 at New York and Hackensack, where for two summers he was pastor of congregations in which it prevailed.
To follow them in their efforts to obtain a satisfactory organization of the congregation, is what I propose now to do. There is grave reason to doubt whether, prior to the arrival in Pennsylvania of Henry Melchior Muehlenberg, any of the German Lutheran congregations in Pennsylvania had a well-developed, clearly defined, written constitution.
He is rightly called the Patriarch of the Lutheran Church in America. In response to an urgent appeal, Muehlenberg came over from Pennsylvania in 1751 and assumed the pastorate of Trinity church. Although he spent but a short time in 1751 and again in 1752 on the ground, he was for two years pastor of the mother church. His was a fruitful ministry.
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