Friedrich von Schlümbach

Friedrich von Schlümbach (born June 27, 1842 in Öhringen , Württemberg , † May 21, 1901 in Cleveland , Ohio ) was a German-American revival preacher and founder of the first YMCA in Germany.

Life

Coat of arms of the von Schlümbach family, 1761

Born as the youngest son of the retired officer Georg Christoph von Schlümbach (1801–1879) from a Württemberg-Franconian family ennobled in 1761, Schlümbach joined the Württemberg army in 1859 as an officer candidate. He had to flee and emigrated to the USA because of high debts that he had already incurred in the first few months. There he fought in the civil war from May 1861 on the side of the northern states. After his dismissal with the rank of captain in 1865, he tried his hand at various professions until he - previously a supporter of the atheistic free-thinker movement - experienced a conversion in 1868. He trained at a seminary of the Episcopal Methodist Church and worked from 1872 as a preacher for German immigrants in Baltimore . There he made efforts above all to the youth and founded German-speaking Christian youth clubs, which he initially collected in a national league from 1874, but then transferred to the YMCA. From 1878 he was himself the secretary of the German language work of the YMCA based in New York City . He traveled extensively in the United States and in 1880 he and Dwight Lyman Moody carried out a highly acclaimed evangelism in Chicago.

At a YMCA conference in London in 1881, Schlümbach met German supporters of the community movement who invited him to the federal festival of the Rhenish-Westphalian Youth Association in Elberfeld . There he met, among others, the practical theologian Theodor Christlieb from Bonn , who won him over to an evangelistic trip to Germany. In doing so, Schlümbach was not supposed to advertise methodism, but rather work closely with representatives of the regional churches. In September 1882 an event at the Hermannsdenkmal gave the impetus for the unification of the German Protestant youth clubs; by the YMCA Association in Germany this is considered to be its origin. Schlümbach then worked for several months in Berlin through Adolf Stoecker's mediation , where he initiated the establishment of the first YMCA on German soil in January 1883. Further campaigns led him to Magdeburg, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein, most recently to his home town of Württemberg. Here he announced his resignation from the Methodist Church in July 1883, because he now saw his concerns realized in the regional churches.

After returning to the USA, Schlümbach was pastor of a Lutheran congregation in Cleveland. But he kept in touch with friends in Germany and came back several times. He was involved in the founding of the German Evangelization Association in 1884 and the Johanneum Evangelist School in 1886.

literature

• Karl Heinz Voigt :  Schlümbach, Friedrich von. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 9, Bautz, Herzberg 1995, ISBN 3-88309-058-1 , Sp. 306-314.
• Michael Domsgen :  Schlümbach, Friedrich v. . In: Religion Past and Present (RGG). 4th edition. Volume 7, Mohr-Siebeck, Tübingen 2004, Sp. 924.
• Karl Heinz Voigt: Friedrich von Schlümbach, Theodor Christlieb and evangelism in Germany. From the ecumenical association with "undenominational character" to the "German Evangelization Association" . In: Monthly Issues for Evangelical Church History of the Rhineland 53 (2004), pp. 337–359.
• Thomas Hahn-Bruckart: Friedrich von Schlümbach - revival preacher between Germany and America. Interculturality and transdenominationalism in the 19th century (= work on the history of Pietism 56). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2011. ISBN 978-3-525-55804-1 .
• Thomas Hahn-Bruckart: Friedrich von Schlümbach: Evangelism and youth work between the continents . In: Frank Lüdke, Norbert Schmidt (ed.): The new world and the new Pietism. Anglo-American influences on German neo-pietism (= writings of the Protestant university TABOR, volume 3). LIT-Verlag, Berlin 2012, pp. 35–47.