Evangelical Synod of North America
The Evangelical Synod of North America (until 1927 German Evangelical Synod of North America ) was originally a German-speaking Christian Church of united tradition in the United States. It is one of the predecessor churches of the United Church of Christ .
history
The church arose in the Midwest of the United States from congregations of German origin in the tradition of the Evangelical United Churches in Prussia , which, like the German United Churches of the time, were strongly influenced by Pietism .
Bethlehem Church in Ann Arbor , Michigan, founded in 1833, is the oldest congregation .
In 1840 the German Evangelical Church Association of the West was founded in St. Louis as a branch church of the United Evangelical Church in Prussia (Prussian Union) . The founders were six German pastors who had been ordained in Prussia and who did pioneering work in Missouri and Illinois. The congregations were supported by the Basel Mission and German mission societies, who also evangelized the immigrants as far as they were deists or people who were far removed from the church.
In 1850, the Church in Missouri founded its own seminary, the Eden Theological Seminary , because the training at German universities did not meet the needs of the American frontier. Eden Theological Seminary is now a United Church of Christ seminary .
The church united in 1858 with the German Evangelical Church Association of Ohio founded in 1850 , in 1860 with the German Uniate Evangelical Synod of the East , and in 1872 with the German Evangelical Synod of the Northwest .
The Church formulated a creed in short: Christ alone, faith alone, the Bible alone.
In 1866 the name was changed to German Evangelical Synod of the West , in 1877 to German Evangelical Synod of North America . In 1884 the Church established an India Mission. In 1908 the church was a founding member of the Federal Council of Churches , a predecessor organization of the National Council of Churches of Christ .
After most congregations had switched from German to English as the language of worship by the beginning of the 20th century, German was deleted from the name; the church was now called the Evangelical Synod of North America . In 1934 the church merged with the larger, liberal part of the Reformed Church in the United States to form the Evangelical and Reformed Church , which was absorbed into the United Church of Christ in 1957.
Size and distribution
The Church was mainly widespread among German emigrants in the Midwest, where most of the German emigrants then settled ( Missouri , Illinois , Indiana , Michigan , Iowa, and Wisconsin ). At the beginning of the twentieth century, most of the literature was in German.
The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica gives 985 pastors and 238,000 members for 1909. In 1934, when it merged with the Reformed Church in America, the Evangelical Synod had 281,000 members and 1,227 pastors.
Known members
The most famous members of the Evangelical Synod of North America were the brothers Reinhold Niebuhr and H. Richard Niebuhr .
See also
Evangelical Association , German-speaking Church of Methodist Tradition.
literature
- Johannes Ehmann (Ed.): The Church of the Union. History - Theology - Perspectives. Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2019, pp. 156–160.