Kunze had long been desirous of providing facilities for theological education in this country. Under the bequest of John Christopher Hartwig, he organized in 1797 a Theological Seminary. The theological department was conducted in New York by himself, the collegiate department in Albany and the preparatory department in Otsego County.
One of his students was Strebeck. Another, Van Buskirk, a promising young man, died before he could enter the work. The Mayer brothers, natives of New York, became eminent pastors of English Lutheran churches, Philip in Albany and Frederick in Philadelphia. It was a trying time in which Kunze lived, but he planted seed which still bears fruit.
One event of the eighteenth century seems worthy of spcial [sic] mention, even when seen through the vista of a hundred and fifty years, although at the time it may have attracted little attention. Because of the side light which it throws upon history we permit it to interrupt for a moment the course of our story.
It harks back to the refugees from the Palatinate who emigrated to the west coast of Ireland at the same time that their fellow countrymen under Kocherthal came to New York. Their principal settlements were at Court-Matrix, Ballingran and other places in County Limerick near the banks of the river Shannon. As they had no minister and understood little or no English, in the course of forty years they lost whatever religion they had brought with them from Germany. It came to pass that John Wesley visited these villages. He found the people "eminent for drunkenness, cursing, swearing, and an utter neglect of religion." (Wesley's Journal, II, p. 429.)
Wesley's sermons reminded them of the sermons they used to hear in their far-off German home, and a remarkable revival occurred among them. Subsequently numbers of them followed their countrymen of the preceding generation to New York and some of them joined the Lutheran Church. Among the names to be found on the records of our church are those of Barbara Heck and Philip Embury.
Now some of our ministers, as far back as Falckner in the beginning of the century, belonged to the Halle or Francke school of Lutheranism, and the spirit of our church life at this time, as may be seen from the letters of Muehlenberg in the "Hallesche Nachrichten," was not alien to that which the Palatines had imbibed from John Wesley, himself a product of the Pietistic movement of which Halle was the fountain head. One would suppose that these Palatine immigrants from the west of Ireland might have found a congenial home in the Lutheran Church and contributed to the spiritual life of the congregation. But for some reason they did not. They withdrew from us and helped to organize in 1766 the first Methodist Society in America.
The Methodists of America number seven million communicants. Barbara Heck, Philip Embury and other Palatine immigrants were our contribution to their incipient church life in America.
In the Nineteenth Century 1801-1838
The history of our churches in the nineteenth century may be divided into three periods. The first extends from 1801 to 1838.
At the beginning of the century there were two congregations, the
German-English Church on Frankfort Street and the English (Zion) on
Pearl Street.