During the earlier months of 1742 Zinzindorf preached at Oley, Falkner’s Swamp, Germantown, and other places, and gathered the nuclei of subsequent Moravian congregations.
A house was rented in Germantown for Count Zinzindorf and his assistants, which was opened as a school May 4, of that year. The Countess Benigna assisted as a teacher, as did also Anna Nitschmann, who subsequently became the second wife of Zinzindorf. The school opened with twenty-five girls as pupils.
In Philadelphia Zinzindorf began ministrations in a barn on Arch Street below Fifth, then fitted up with seats and used in partnership by the German Reformed and the Lutherans.
His Lutheran tendencies and training fitted him to take charge of a Lutheran Church, and May 30, 1742, this congregation called him to take its charge. Indeed, it is said that he claimed to be inspector-general of the Lutherans, and had for some months supplied a Lutheran Church in Germantown.
Zinzindorf accepted the call of the Philadelphia Lutherans, but wishing to do a certain amount of missionary work elsewhere, associated John Christopher Pyrlaeus, a Saxony Presbyter, with him as assistant, and left matters much in his charge.
Reverend Henry Jacobson, in his “History of the Moravian Church in Philadelphia,” proceeds to tell what the consequence was.
Pyrlaeus, though evidently a hard worker, gave offense to a strong faction, and on July 27, 1742, while in the pulpit and officiating, a gang of his opponents dragged him down from his place, trampled upon him, and roughly[roughly] handled him, as they ejected him from the building.
The only accounts left do not enable us to identify the cowardly assailants, except that there seems to have been serious trouble between the growing Moravian faction and the conservative Lutheran element.
The affair was the prime cause of the establishment of a separate Moravian Church as soon as Count Zinzindorf returned from his preaching tour. Without this event to crystallize the tendencies of things, separation might have been long delayed.
Another view of this movement is that Zinzindorf built the church for the Lutheran congregation over which he claimed authority, upon his first arrival in the country, but that the arrival of Henry Melchior[Melchior] Muhlenberg, with direct authority from the University at Halle, in the latter part of 1742, changed the tactics of Zinzindorf, and so he made arrangements to transfer the church to the Moravians.