Pioneer pastor and forger of American Lutheranism. Date of commemoration: October 7.
He was sure that God intended him for a life of missionary service in India. His theological studies at Göttingen and Halle, establishment of a school for poor children, oversight of a hospital—all of these were to prepare him for the trials of far-off Bengal and its people in need.
But when the call came, on his thirtieth birthday, it summoned him west, not east. German Lutherans had been migrating to the American colonies for decades, but they were like sheep without a shepherd. Would young Henry go and serve them?
He agreed—reluctantly. Three years, he said.
He stayed until his dying day.
It wasn’t as though Henry Melchior Muhlenberg was the most natural fit for the emerging nation. He came out of a state church with long-established centers of academic study and a structure rooted in German culture. America, by contrast, was wild and woolly and wholly unpredictable. Far from having a state church, it was a marketplace of competing churches, or even no churches at all. Far from having a stable and ancient culture, America was the reinvention of culture from the ground up. Everything was up for grabs.
He arrived on September 23, 1742, in Charleston, South Carolina. His first experience of the New World was its slavery, the abuse of black women by their white owners, and the refusal of the whites to evangelize the blacks for fear that they might rise up and overthrow their oppressors. Henry wrote disgustedly in his journal that “the so-called Christians lead a more evil life than the heathen.” He went on to baptize and marry black Christians throughout the course of his ministry.
After the landing on American shores, it was a rough ride north by boat through storms and stagnant tides—“My sickness increases and makes me vomit day and night. Our ship’s company curses to make one’s hair stand on end. As long as I was able to speak, I admonished them, but to no avail, for it has already become second nature. To be among such people is a foretaste of hell”—before Henry reached Philadelphia and his new congregations in Providence and New Hanover, assigned to him by the church’s governing body back home in Halle. So, naturally, he was surprised to find another pastor in his place.
Not exactly a pastor, actually; a “quack salver,” as Henry called him and his like. One of the most lucrative lines of work for charlatans in colonial North America was in churches. Often these were men who had been defrocked back in Europe for misconduct, but sometimes it was just opportunists who sniffed out a steady flow of fees from services and sacraments. To Henry’s dismay, the people at New Hanover excused their faker, saying that “even though he was not ordained and often drank to excess, he did preach edifying sermons.” Henry staked his claim on the grounds that he was a faithful adherent of the Augsburg Confession and in possession of an official letter of call from Halle. It worked, but it foreshadowed the difficulties that would come of trying to administer a church from another continent.
The congregation eventually came to accept Henry, but they were not prepared to accept oversight from so far away. They’d built their churches with their own hands instead of inheriting them from their ancestors. They’d organized themselves into congregations and weren’t prepared to cede authority to outsiders. In short, they were already Americans, and already a denomination, one among many competing religious groups with no state backing. “The government has nothing to do with it and will not concern itself with such matters,” a bewildered Henry observed. “Everything depends on the vote of the majority. A preacher must fight his way through with the sword of the Spirit alone.”
But Henry was a stubborn soul and rose to the challenge. He began to navigate the path between a market-driven Christianity and a state-run one by setting up new rules for the young churches. Their pastors had to subscribe to the Augsburg Confession, and in turn the congregations had to pay them a proper salary—no more of the fee-for-service approach to baptism, communion, and weddings that had reigned before. That wasn’t exactly a straightforward matter, though, since many of the German immigrants came over as indentured servants and spent years paying off their debts. “But if I seek first the kingdom of God,” observed Henry, “the rest will be added unto me, for one man brings me a sausage, another a piece of meat, a third a chicken, a fourth a loaf of bread, a fifth some pigeons, a sixth rabbits, a seventh eggs, an eighth some tea and sugar, a ninth some honey, a tenth some apples, and eleventh partridges, and so forth.”
Three years after his arrival, in 1745, Henry married into a well-established American family of German extraction, taking Anna Maria Weiser for his wife. Together they had eight children, six of whom survived to adulthood. Three of their sons became pastors and two of their daughters married pastors, earning Henry both the literal and figurative title of patriarch of the Lutheran church in America.
Being a pastor in the American colonies did not mean keeping still and putting in hours at the office every day. Henry had to move house three times in his first year and up to twenty times during his American career. He traveled constantly, visiting and gathering up the scattered immigrants, many of whom were pushing westwards, since already by the 1740s all the land of the mid-Atlantic region had been claimed.
Despite his long and heartfelt obedience to the mission back in Halle, Henry quickly recognized the limits of its usefulness. “There is a proverb here, and I know from my own experience that it is true, which declares that the Germans who come from Europe are blind the first seven years they are in this land,” he notes. “It is exceedingly difficult for the theologues who come from Europe to get a practical understanding of the distinction between the ecclesia plantata [church already planted] and the ecclesia plantanda [church being planted].” In 1748 Henry organized his fellow pastors—the real ones, that is—into a ministerium for Pennsylvania, which he accomplished with such success that he started getting asked for help from points farther off, from New York to Virginia.
In that same year Henry himself ordained a pastor, one John Nicholas Kurtz. Halle didn’t respond fast enough and didn’t grasp the situation: Henry needed authorized pastors, and fast. The shortage of clergy was reaching the crisis point, and it wasn’t an easy job anyway. He describes the typical four-point parish: “A preacher would have to preach and catechize the first Sunday morning in one congregation and that afternoon in another; then on the following Sunday he would have to conduct services morning and afternoon in the two remaining congregations. During the week he would have to seek out the sheep, develop a Westphalian stomach to digest hard fare, and be equipped with a great soul and with love toward Christ and his lost sheep, for this is an ecclesia colligenda here. It is exceedingly sad and heartrending to be in such places, see the conditions with one’s own eyes, and not know what to advise or how to help.”
Henry also realized that just because people were German, and officially Lutheran, didn’t mean they went to church; and just because people went to church didn’t meant that they understood their faith. Confirmation quickly became a central part of Henry’s ministry—catching the youth before they drifted away, no longer Germans but truly Americans now—yet he also confirmed a considerable number of adults whose religious training had slipped through the cracks of an erratic immigrant lifestyle.
Moreover, at this time Lutherans weren’t especially well known in the colonies: they were confused with Moravians, mistaken for “papists,” or dismissed as a sect. That ignorance could well extend to Lutheran parishes. Henry mentions one of the new-built Lutheran churches, “adorned with all kind of paintings, including one of the blessed Dr. Luther, which is life-size and fairly recognizable because his name is written underneath in large letters. Even if the picture does not resemble the sainted Luther, this should not be surprising, for a like disimilarity may have appeared some years ago between Luther and those who bear his name and claim his faith.” He describes a characteristic sermon in which he tried to correct misapprehensions: “By God’s grace I laid the emphasis on true repentance, living faith, and godliness. I said in conclusion that these three points, together with the two sacraments, were the chief content of Evangelical Lutheran doctrine.”
Henry took joy in much of his work, like the baptisms and the confirmations and the occasional deathbed conversion. In good Pietist fashion he reached out to all who would listen—Lutherans, other Christians, the unchurched—and he was an admiring friend of George Whitefield, the impassioned preacher of the First Great Awakening. He often spoke with pleasure of meeting with “awakened” souls, Christians with a conscious and profound commitment to their faith, although he rejected popular notions of instantaneous perfection.
He ministered not only to the German but also to the British, black, and native. He was keenly interested in the question of evangelism among the native peoples of North America and records rare conversations with them, such as this one, in which the Indians come out much wiser than the colonists: “Some of the old Indians, who do not have the benefit of a higher revelation and do not understand Machiavellian principles, are astonished when they hear that German mercenaries are brought here to wound and kill the usually peaceful inhabitants of this land who have never done them any harm, to scourge defenseless and helpless women and children, and to burn their houses, crops, etc. The Indians think that these troops would do more wisely to remain here, to beat their spears and swords into axes, mattocks, shovels, plowshares, scythes, and sickles, and to cultivate the land, for there are still many millions of acres which are uncultivated—as many as there are hairs on one’s head, to put it as the Indians count. Or if this did not please them, they would do better to return quietly to their homes and live there where the Great Spirit had raised them up out of the earth and where they would reap what they had planted.”
Colonial American ministry was not without its trials. “For the pastoral office in this country,” Henry once wrote in a fit of exasperation, “and to get along with these people without sacrificing either love or the truth, one needs not only a certain measure of grace and talent, but also an unusually sanctified temperament.” (This may have been self-criticism; Henry was known for his short temper and sharp tongue.) He had to resolve disputes over the ownership of church buildings and even cemeteries. Criminals roved freely through the land—“unruly and brazen sinners”—and on occasion Henry himself was forced to be a witness in criminal cases. He was often sick, treated himself to regular bleeding as a remedy, and tried all kinds of medications that—from a later perspective—were as horrifying as they were ineffective. He suffered earthquake, climate extremes, and “musquitoes” and “cackrotsches,” as his creative English spelling put it. He tried such exotic foods as raccoon and pumpkin, but nearly wept for joy when he got to taste sauerkraut again: “Today our good hostess treated us to a great rarity which had been sent to our host by a good friend from Philadelphia on Captain Wright’s ship, namely, sauerkraut, which to me and my family was like the gift of a costly medicine. Since such things are rare and not easily preserved in this warm climate, the whole family derived great sensual gratification from it, and I cannot deny that I shared in it. For I have not arrived at that état d’abandon which, in my younger years, the fanatical French and German moralists taught and insisted upon so stoutly, to wit, that if a man would be a perfect Christian, he must bring self-denial to the point where he becomes indifferent alike to heat and cold and sour and sweet taste.”
After thirty years of restless labor to build up the American church, Henry might well have anticipated a peaceful retirement. Instead he got a revolution. As early as the 1740s he and other pastors were under pressure to name their side, should it come to a conflict between crown and colony, but they resisted as long as they could. The ante was upped through the 1760s. In the next decade there was no more dodging the question: Henry noted in his journal on July 4, 1776, that “today the Continental Congress openly declared the united provinces of North America to be free and independent states.” And that meant war.
For a long time Henry’s loyalties were torn. King George of England was actually a German, a Hanoverian, and Henry had come to America in the first place as a guest of British. Yet three decades in the developing nation naturally inclined his support toward his fellow Americans. Two of his sons even became officers in the colonial army.
But Henry could hardly feel enthusiastic about war even in a righteous cause. The roving criminality only got worse; there were shortages, runaway inflation, and bad weather to boot. He was forced to play the role of doctor even after his store of medicines was depleted because all the real doctors were occupied with the army. And he was, essentially, at the mercy of anyone who found him. “I am sitting here, old and worn out,” he wrote in 1777, “with a sick wife who is afflicted with hysterical paroxysms, surrounded by two daughers, two daughters-in-law, two little children, and my son’s parents-in-law, etc., and I expect that any day or hour a British division will cross over the Schuylkill to our home and treat us, without distinction, as divine providence decrees or permits. One cannot well flee, for no place is safe. Where the two armies do not go, one finds thieves, robbers, and murderers who are taking advantage of the present times and conditions.”
The next year his thoughts were even more dire. “The flesh and the spirit are struggling within me. The flesh tells me that I should flee or seek protection from the commander-in-chief of the British. The spirit says: Seek protection from him who has all power in heaven and on earth; he can and will save all who come to him. Reason says: One must nevertheless also make use of all means that are permitted and not simply wait for supernatural protection. This is true, but in circumstances like these, if one accepts protection from one party, one exposes oneself to moral hatred, revenge, and ruin; and lofty human reason certainly cannot foresee how God’s secret counsel will decide the outcome, which side will be on top and which below. If this were a struggle for the honor of God and the welfare of religion, then each one would turn and hold to his own party; but this is not at all the issue which is being fought pro and contra now. At any rate, daily experience shows that this is an extraordinary war in ancient, heathen, barbaric mode, which manifests little or nothing that is humane, much less Christian, and which aims at the ruin of both the so-called mother and the children. Therefore it cannot be looked upon as anything else but a necessary, severe chastistement and grave punishment laid upon both England and America by God the supreme Ruler. I prayed the almighty and gracious redeemer for his gracious protection, and this at least gave me a quiet and peaceful sleep pro tempore.”
Against the odds Henry survived the war and kept at his ministry. He worked on a new hymnal with 750 hymns, though he made a point of leaving out any that “expect the last judgment of the world in the too-near future and mention the signs that precede it.” In 1784 he retired and, to his great surprise, was awarded an honorary doctorate from Germany.
On September 29, 1787, Henry wrote his last entry after a prolific career of journaling—and, fittingly, about the baptism of a child. The next day he took ill, and he died on October 7, surrounded by his large family. His tombstone reads, “Who and what he was, future ages will know without a stone.”
