to single Christians.”5
The German Reformed Church
The German Reformed Church in Pennsylvania, later called the Reformed Church in the United States, may have wrestled with the Church Question more extensively than any other denomination.6 German Reformed immigrants scattered throughout the colonies during the eighteenth century, with thousands settling in Pennsylvania. Once settled, they gathered for “religious meetings” and then sought to establish congregations that conformed to the patterns they had left behind in Europe. Having no pastors at first, they invited lay leaders to “maintain the ministry of the Word.”7
The first lay leader on record was the schoolteacher John Philip Boehm (1683–1749). In 1720 Boehm settled on a tract of land in Whitpain Township, then in Philadelphia, now in Montgomery County. In a short time his German Reformed neighbors recognized his gifts and begged Boehm to take upon himself the office of the ministry, placing him “in a strait betwixt three considerations: the pleading of the people, the law of the Reformed Church, and the promptings of his conscience.”8 In time, his conscience prevailed and he accepted the invitation. Boehm proceeded to draw up a church order and organized the German Reformed immigrants into three congregations so that each would have the authority to call a pastor. The newly organized congregations then each elected Boehm as their pastor. He celebrated the Lord’s Supper for the first time on October 15, 1725. Soon thereafter George Michael Weiss, a recent immigrant, arrived on the scene and challenged the validity of Boehm’s ministry. That challenge prompted an appeal for guidance by the congregations to the Reformed Church in the Netherlands.9 A favorable decision resulted in the ordination of Boehm by the Dutch Reformed ministers in New York on November 23, 1729.
The ordination of John Philip Boehm established a sixty-five year relationship between the German Reformed Church and the Dutch Reformed Church. The German Reformed congregations functioned first as a Coetus under the ecclesiastical supervision of the Dutch Reformed Church.10 In 1793 the formal ties between the two groups were broken when the Coetus became Der Synod Der Reformirten Hoch Deutschen Kirche In Den Vereinigten Staaten Von America.11 The Statistical report for 1793 numbered 78 congregations and 40,000 members of which 15,000 were communicant members.12 As historian George Warren Richards noted, the new synod immediately faced four challenges: the provision of ministers (45 of the 78 congregations were without pastors), the training of new pastors, the influence of American-born voluntary societies, and the influence of the revival system.13 Regarding the third and fourth challenges, Richards writes,
The method of propagating and nurturing faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ, by the educational or by the revival system was not a new issue, but a new form of an old issue in a new world. Its counterpart was the conflict between the way of the established State Churches in Europe and the way of Pietism in Germany, Holland, and Switzerland, known as Methodism in England. In fact it was the continuation in the modern era of the conflict between Church and Sect in the ancient and the Middle Ages. In Europe the Sect was restrained, partly by the age-old traditions of the Church and partly by the law of the State. Yet separation and independency could not be wholly prevented. The frontiers of colonial times and the toleration or freedom granted to all religions, as long as they did not transgress the civil law, gave large room for individualism, the right of private interpretation of Scripture, and the freedom of public assembly. Every denomination was more or less affected by the revival system; some became committed to it, others adopted certain features of it, few stood aloof from it.14
Although German Reformed churches had broken formal ties to the Dutch Reformed Church, a denominational structure for a national church did not become a reality for another seventy years. In 1863, the celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of the Heidelberg Catechism become the occasion for the formation of the General Synod of the German Reformed Church—uniting the older Eastern Synod with the Ohio Synod (separate since 1824) for national cooperation. We now had one General Synod, two district Synods, 27 Classes, 500 ministers, 1200 congregations, 100,000 baptized, 130,000 confirmed members, two theological seminaries, and four colleges.15 These statistics reveal that the German Reformed Church represented but a sliver of the Protestants in a nation of over twenty-seven million people.16 The 1860 census revealed that American Christians owned 38,183 buildings, with seating for 10,128,761 people, valued at $172,397,922.17 According to this report, German Reformed congregations had accommodations or seating for 273,697 people, about 1.4% of the total. Dutch Reformed congregations, by comparison, had seating for 211,068. Both denominations lagged well behind the Methodists (6,259,799), Baptists (4,044,220) and Presbyterians (2,565,949).
Recurring Themes
The Church Question was discussed within a specific and unprecedented social context. The reader of the articles in this volume will discover that John Nevin, both directly and indirectly, responded to several realities in antebellum America.18 For the purposes of this volume, I identify five: revivalism, republicanism, rationalism, pluralism, and immigration. Granted, these realities worked in concert, each influencing the others in ways beyond the grasp of even the best historians, making it difficult, then, to assert which one preceded the others or had greater influence than the others. Granted as well that isolating each ingredient from others only takes place in the abstract, we do so now with the hopes of identifying the primary contribution of each ingredient to the American context within which the Church Question was asked and answered.
Revivalism
In the closing years of the eighteenth century, many people in the new United States believed that Christianity was facing a serious crisis. In May of 1798, with only 5–10% of the population holding church membership,19 the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church issued a pastoral letter that warned of “a general dereliction of religious principle and practice among our fellow-citizens, . . . a visible and prevailing impiety and contempt for the laws and institutions of religion, and an abounding infidelity which in many instances tends to Atheism itself.”20 Several factors may have contributed to religious malaise in the country, including distrust of the Episcopalian church and the growing number of pioneers on the frontier, far removed from established churches.21 While many other reasons may be offered to explain the problem, the solution in the eyes of most American Protestants was simple. In times of trouble, seek revival. It worked once before in the so-called First Great Awakening.22 So why not again?
In final years of the eighteenth century and early years of the nineteenth, countless ministers began preaching for revival and an equal number of congregations began praying for it. Just where this new wave of revivals began or which one came first will probably never be settled.23 Historians typically identify three different flash points. First, in 1799 revival hit towns from Connecticut to New Hampshire.24
