William Alfred Passavant

William Alfred Passavant

William Alfred Passavant (born October 9, 1821 in Zelienople , Butler County , Pennsylvania , † June 3, 1894 ibid) was an American Lutheran minister who was known for bringing the diaconal movement to the United States. The calendar of saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America commemorates him on November 24th alongside Justus Falckner and Jehu Jones . The Episcopal Church of the United States has established a feast day for him on January 3rd .

Life

Early years

William Alfred Passavant was born in Zelienople (Pennsylvania) in 1821 as the youngest son of Philipp Ludwig Passavant and Fredericka Wilhelmina Basse (nicknamed "Zelie", from which the place name is derived). His grandfather, Baron Detmar Basse , born in Iserlohn in the Ruhr Valley , spent a decade as a diplomat and trader in Paris, then fled the Napoleonic Wars and emigrated with his family and friends in 1801 to Pittsburgh via Philadelphia , driven by the prospect of religious freedom and economic opportunities. The widowed baron bought 40 km² along Connoquenessing Creek in Butler County, Pennsylvania , began building a wooden castle, and founded (with Christian Buhl) a whole new town with a sawmill, brickworks and blast furnace. He traveled and sent enthusiastic letters back to Germany, with which he encouraged his daughter and her newly wed husband (a French Huguenot ) to emigrate from Frankfurt am Main in 1807 . Philippe Passavant built a shop and became the city's first trader. The baron suffered financial setbacks at the end of the war, eventually sold Bassenheim to Michael Beltzhoover, traveled back to Germany in 1818 and died in Mannheim in 1836 . Bassenheim was sold to Mr Saunders, who ran a Presbyterian school on site (attended by both young William Passavant and his lifelong friend, future Pastor George Wenzel), until it burned down in 1842 due to a lightning strike. The baron had sold half of his land to the Harmoniten , a pietistic religious community founded by Johann Georg Rapp and Frederick Rapp, who then founded Harmony (Pennsylvania) , but then finally sold the colony to Abraham Zeigler, who relocated it further west. to New Harmony, Indiana .

The young Passavant and Wenzel crossed the Allegheny Mountains to attend Jefferson College in Canonsburg . In addition to these studies, Passavant taught in Sunday School and sent articles to the German-language Lutheran Church newspaper (published in Philadelphia since 1838), as well as to the English-language reform magazine Observer . Realizing that he needed Wenceslas support in German and that other American-born Lutherans were having similar problems, Passavant tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Philadelphia publisher to publish a Lutheran almanac in English. During his time in college, attending the Presbyterian services held there, he learned that his sister Emma had married a Presbyterian clergyman, Sidney Jennings, who he liked.

After interrupting his studies for a year due to the unexpected death of his eldest brother Detmar in Pittsburgh, Passavant entered the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg under Samuel Schmucker to prepare for a spiritual career. Among his fellow students was Charles Porterfield Krauth , son of the President of Gettisburg College , who later led the New Lutheran movement that Passavant eventually joined. In Gettysburg, Passavant continued Sunday school, joined the Pennsylvania Bible Society , raised funds for the evangelical mission in Cincinnati , and attended revival meetings his father found too Methodist.

Career

William Passavant received his license and began his ministry in Baltimore, Maryland, as well as his publishing career in 1842. Ordained in 1843, he edited the Lutheran Almanac for the first two years before passing the project on to others. Another project was a Sunday school hymn book. Passavant also met his future friend, Eliza Walter, although he felt that his financial position was insufficient to allow him to raise a family. In 1844, Passavant responded to repeated calls from a distressed community in Pittsburgh, and after moving to that city, he organized the Pittsburgh Synod. At their second meeting he had already set up six Sunday schools, some with the help of other evangelical clergy.

Pastor Passavant married Eliza Walter on May 1, 1845, shortly after his friend Krauth married, despite a fire in Pittsburgh's business district three weeks earlier that had also struck many parishioners. The newlyweds spent their honeymoon with the General Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in Philadelphia; they also visited friends and relatives in Baltimore.

The following year, Passavant traveled as a regional delegate to the Christian Alliance in London in August 1846. He toured historical sites in England, France and Germany, and secured pledges of support from Lutheran missionaries in Basel . In Germany, William Passavant met Pastor Theodor Fliedner , who, as the founder of modern diakonia, had founded a hospital and a deaconess school in Kaiserswerth , near Düsseldorf and the traditional estates of the Basse family. At Passavant's request, Fliedner brought four German deaconesses to Pittsburgh in 1849 , who were supposed to work in the local hospital (today the Passavant Hospital, connected to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center ).

William Passavant was particularly known for addressing current social issues, from pre-Civil War slavery to the needs of immigrants. He founded and managed a wide variety of charities, particularly in the industrial cities of his home country.

William Passavant began publishing The Missionary , which was incorporated into Charles P. Krauth's The Lutheran of Philadelphia in 1861 , with Passavant remaining co-editor of the Lutheran and Missionary . In 1867 he helped organize the General Assembly; from 1881 to 1894 he directed The Workman .

After his father's death in 1858, Passavant accepted a position as pastor of the Christ Lutheran Church in Baden, Pennsylvania on the Ohio River , where he stayed for 21 years until 1879, also traveling and active in the United States and abroad maintained contact by letter. In 1863, Passavant established an orphanage for girls in Rochester, Pennsylvania , in addition to that in Zelienople. William Passavant and A. Louis Thiel founded Thiel College in 1866, an independent institution associated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. At the meeting of the Pittsburgh Synod in Greensburg, Pennsylvania in 1869 it was decided that the Thiel Hall should be converted into a college for western Pennsylvania. Thiel College was officially founded on September 1, 1870.

Passavant founded many other missions, as well as hospitals in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Chicago and Jacksonville, Illinois. For his hospital in Pittsburgh he tried to win the deaconess Elisabeth Fedde . One of the last institutions Passavant founded was the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Chicago. Many of the institutions Passavant founded were later merged, along with others, into Lutheran Services in America , the largest ecclesiastical social program in the United States.

Death and legacy

William Passavant died in Pittsburgh after falling ill in Milwaukee . He was buried in the cemetery of the Lutheran Church of St. Paul in Zelienople. The house in which William Passavant was born is now listed on the national monument register as the Passavant House.

List of institutions organized by Passavant (selection)

• Orphanage and Agricultural School in Zelienople, Pennsylvania (now Glade Run Lutheran Services )
• Passavant Epilepsy Home in Rochester, Pennsylvania (now Passavant Memorial Homes )
• Passavant Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (now UPMC Passavant Hospital )
• Passavant Hospital in Chicago, Illinois (now Passavant Memorial Hospital )
• Passavant Hospital in Jacksonville, Illinois (now Passavant Area Hospital )
• Passavant Hospital in Milwaukee (Wisconsin) (now Aurora Sinai Medical Center , the former hospital building is now on the national monument register) *
• Wartburg Orphans' Farm School in Mount Vernon, New York (now The Wartburg Adult Care Community )

Works

• Address delivered before the Franklin literary society, of Jefferson college: at its semi-centennial anniversary, November 14th, 1847 , John Bausman, Washington, Pa. 1848
• The Missionary , Pittsburgh, Pa., 1848-1861
• Funeral sermon, occasioned by the death of the Rev. Michael J. Steck: Pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran churches in Greensburg and vicinity, Westmoreland County, Pa. : delivered in his church in Greensburg, on Sunday, October 8th, 1848: to which is added an appendix , Johnston & Stockton, Pittsburgh, Pa., 1850
• Hymns: selected and original, for Sunday schools, of the Evangelical Lutheran Church: with a supplement containing hymns for the use of infant schools. , T. Newton Kurtz, Baltimore 1851 (1843)
• Braun, Hattie Engeling (1899-1984); Dentzer, Catherine (1870-1947); Passavant, WA; Reck, Louise (1911-1982); Lutheran Deaconess Motherhouse at Milwaukee. Correspondence 1887-1947; 1887-1901.
• Passavant, Zelie; Passavant, WA; Zelienople Historical Society. Once upon a lifetime recipes , Zelienople Historical Society, Zelienople, Pennsylvania; Cookbook Publishers, Inc., Copyright 1978

literature

• Roth, HW. Sketch memorial, William Alfred Passavant, Jr. , Institution of Protestant Deaconesses, 1902
• Gelberding, CH. Life and letters of WA Passavant, DD , Illinois Historical Society, 1909
• Weng, Marjorie R .. Passavant's vision: a history of the Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary, 1891-1951; sixty years of service to the church from The Chicago Lutheran Seminary Record , Volume LVI, No. 4. Maywood, Ill, 1951
• Jennings, Zelie. Some account of Dettmar Basse, the Passavant family and their arrival in America (Zelienople Historical Society 1988)
• Fischer, Robert H. .. A servant of all people: the legacy of William Alfred Passavant (1821-1894), pioneer in the church's ministry of mercy , Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, Chicago 1997
• Wentz, Frederick K .. Witness at the crossroads: Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary servants in the public life , Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, Gettysburg 2001
• Solberg, Carl. Passavant Revisited (Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly. 2002 75 # 4 pages 194–202. Short scientific biography)

Web links

• Thiel College website
• Christ Lutheran Church of Baden ( Memento from October 7, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
• Passavant Memorial Homes ( Memento from March 6, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
• Passavant Area Hospital
• The Wartburg Foundation
• Glade Run Lutheran Services ( Memento from September 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ^ William Alfred Passavant on ancestry.com
2. ↑ http://ojs.libraries.psu.edu/index.php/wph/article/viewFile/1371/1219
3. ↑ http://www.bchistory.org/beavercounty/BeaverCountyTopical/SteelandIron/BassenheimFurnace/BassenheimFurnace.html ( Memento from July 30, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
4. ↑ http://www.zelienoplehistoricalsociety.com/
5. ↑ https://ojs.libraries.psu.edu/index.php/wph/article/viewFile/1371/1219 at p. 22nd
6. ↑ https://ojs.libraries.psu.edu/index.php/wph/article/viewFile/1371/1219 p.23
7. ^ Shelby Miller Ruch, Harmony (Arcadia Publishing, 2009) at p. 8th
8. ↑ Gerberding, CH. Life and Letters of WA Passavant, DD, Illinois Historical Society. 1909 pp. 36 and 40-41
9. ↑ Gerberding on p. 38
10. ↑ Gerberding, p. 42ff
11. ↑ Historical roots run deep in Zelienople (Trudy M. Gray, The Tribune-Review Publishing Co., August 1, 2004)  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )
12. ↑ Gerberding, pp. 53-61
13. ↑ Gerberding, p. 103
14. ↑ Gerberding, pp. 109–111
15. ↑ Gerberding, pp. 130-132
16. ↑ Gerberding, pp. 139–151
17. ↑ Baden's First 100 Years (Christ Lutheran Church of Baden, PA.) ( Memento from October 7, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
18. ↑ Gerberding, pp. 183-193
19. ^ Margit Herfarth: Life in two worlds. The American deaconess movement and its German roots , publications by Diakoniewiss. Institute of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Evang. Verlagsanstalt Leipzig 2014, pp. 71–96, M. Herfarth: Life in two worlds . ISBN 978-3-374-03788-9 .
20. ^ Passavant Memorial Homes Foundation (archived copy) ( Memento of January 4, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
21. ^ The History of Thiel College 1866–1974 (Dr. Roy H. Johnson. Thiel College, Greenville, Pennsylvania) ( Memento of February 23, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
22. ↑ http://cyclopedia.lcms.org/display.asp?t1=c&word=CHICAGOLUTHERANTHEOLOGICALSEMINARY
23. ↑ Lutherans in North America (Holy Trinity Church, New Rochelle, Ny) ( Memento April 14, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
24. ^ William Alfred Passavant in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved January 8, 2015.
25. ^ The Passavant House (Zelienople Historical Society) http://www.zelienoplehistoricalsociety.com/index.html