CCCC Heritage: Evangelical & Reformed Church

Alwyn York, Conference Historian

Since the 1990’s, a number of churches which originated in the Evangelical & Reformed Church have come into the CCCC. My previous article introduced this denomination. In this article I will give an overview of its history.

The Evangelical and Reformed Church was the merger of two previously separate denominations. In 1934 the Reformed Church in the United States merged with the Evangelical Synod of North America. These two denominations shared the common bond of German ethnicity, but had separate histories and different theological traditions. I will give a brief thumbnail description of the two strands that came together to form the E & R Church.

The Reformed Church in the U.S. had a longer history in America. In the early 1700’s Germans began to take advantage of the opportunity William Penn had provided to settle in his colony and enjoy religious toleration. Germany had been ravaged by a long period of religious warfare, so the fertile farmlands and the atmosphere of peace and liberty in Pennsylvania proved very attractive to German immigrants. German Reformed churches were started north of Philadelphia in the 1720’s and spread across the state, eventually permeating Pennsylvania as much as Congregational churches did in New England.

As the settlement of the United States progressed, German Reformed settlers spread south to Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina and westward into Ohio. Later migrations in the 19th century brought German Reformed people into Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

Theologically the German Reformed churches looked back to the heritage of the Reformation, specifically the teachings of Zwingli and Calvin. The Heidelberg Catechism was the central point of identity for the German Reformed churches. My first pastorate was in a German Reformed church in Wisconsin. Its constitution specified that its youth were to be instructed in this catechism. Learning the catechism in preparation for confirmation was a vivid memory for all those who had grown up in the church.

The Evangelical Synod was the product of later waves of German immigration than those which gave rise to the Reformed Church. It was based in the center of the United States, rather than the east, as the Reformed Church had been. The Evangelical Synod was a union church, deliberately incorporating a diversity of theological viewpoints. It was the continuation in America of the Evangelical Church of the Prussian Union, which was established by King Frederick William in 1817. The Kaiser decided that henceforth in Prussia there would no longer be a Lutheran church and a Reformed church, but one Evangelical protestant church. After centuries of religious warfare in Germany, the idea of a union church which tolerated religious diversity was appealing to many. Immigrants who had been part of the union church in Germany looked for its continuation in the United States.

In 1840, just outside St. Louis, a group of pastors formed the German Evangelical Church Society of the West. The church took as its doctrinal standards, the (Lutheran) Augsburg Confession, Luther’s Catechism and the Heidelberg Catechism, and allowed for liberty of conscience on those points on which these confessions might differ. A history of the E & R Church describes the Evangelical Synod as having a “nonsectarian and irenic spirit.”