The Lutherans of New York | Page 8

may well be proud.
It was a large parish to which Falckner ministered. There were no Home Mission Boards in those days. The New York pastor had therefore to care for many outlying stations. His diocese included Hackensack, Raritan, Ramapo and Constable Hook in the south, and Albany, Loonenburg and West Camp in the north. After the death of Kocherthal he visited regularly, not only the Dutch congregations of Claverack, Coxackie and Kinderhook, but also such German settlements as East Camp, Rhinebeck, and Schoharie.
New York itself was not neglected during these missionary journeys. Readers (Vorleezers) conducted the service while he was away. Such notices as "There will be no church today, the minister is out of town," did not appear on his bulletin board.
The care of a parish 150 miles in length left but little time for literary work, but in order that his people might be informed on the subject of their church's faith as distinguished from that of their Calvinistic neighbors, he wrote a book on the essential doctrines of the Lutheran confession. It was published by William Bradford, New York, 1708.
He also wrote a hymn: _"Auf, ihr Christen, Christi Glieder,"_ which after two centuries holds a place in German hymnals, and the translation is to be found in some of the best collections of the English language. To this day, therefore, the churches of London and Berlin alike respond to Falckner's rallying call: "Rise, ye children of salvation."
[illustration: "Trinity Church, Broadway and Rector Street, (Southwest Corner)"]
He must have been a pious man and a winning personality. The entries in the book recording baptisms and other ministerial acts abound in accompanying prayers for the spiritual welfare of those to whom he had ministered.
For twenty years he served the churches of New York and the Hudson Valley. When and where he died we know not. Early in 1723 he was in New York and in Hackensack. In September of the same year there is a record of a baptism at Phillipsburg (near Yonkers). And then no more. "He was not, for God took him."
Falckner's successor, Berkenmeyer, a native of Lueneburg, arrived in 1725. He brought with him books for a church library and also funds for a new building, contributed by friends in Germany, Denmark, and London. The "old cattle shed" on the southwest corner of Broadway and Rector Street was torn down and a stone building erected which was dedicated in 1729 and named Trinity church.
The parish which Berkenmeyer inherited from Falckner, extending from New York to Albany, and including many Dutch and German settlements on both sides of the river, proved to be a larger field than he could cultivate. He therefore sent to Germany for another minister, and resigning at New York, took charge of the northern and more promising part of the field, making his home at Loonenburg (Athens), on the Hudson. For nineteen years he labored in this field. He died in 1751.
Berkenmeyer was a scholarly man, a faithful minister, and an impressive personality. He belonged to a different school from that of his great contemporary, Muehlenberg, and the rest of the Halle missionaries, and his correspondence with them frequently savored of theological controversy.
His successor in New York was Knoll, a native of Holstein, who spent eighteen years of faithful work in Trinity church under trying circumstances. He had to preach in Dutch to a congregation that had become prevailingly German. There was a growing dissatisfaction among the people. During the first half of the century Dutch influence gradually declined and German grew stronger. The ministers were all of them German, although they preached chiefly in Dutch, with occasional ministrations in German. At last the Germans, feeling the need of ampler service in their own language, took advantage in 1750 of the presence of a peripatetic preacher and instituted the first "split" in the Lutheran church of this city by organizing Christ Church. Knoll resigned soon after and removed to Loonenburg, where he again became the successor of Berkenmeyer.
[illustration: "Henry Melchior Muehlenberg (Otto Schweizer's Heroic Stone Figure)"]
In the Eighteenth Century 1751-1800
The resignation of Knoll and the difficulties of the mother congregation were the occasion of calling to New York the most distinguished minister the American Church has ever had.
Henry Melchior Muehlenberg came to America from Halle in 1742 to minister to the congregations in and near Philadelphia. The disordered condition of the American churches opened a wide field for his administrative ability, and for the rest of his life, in addition to his pastoral activity, he accomplished a great task in the planting and organization of churches. He is rightly called the Patriarch of the Lutheran Church in America.
In response to an urgent appeal, Muehlenberg came over from Pennsylvania in 1751 and assumed the pastorate of Trinity church. Although he spent but a short time