Welcome to November! Louisa May Alcott, in her novel Little Women, had the character of Meg remark that "I do believe November is the most disagreeable month of the year." So far, it hasn't been that bad - the fall colors are still quite brilliant around here - but it has been rather on the blustery side. My neighborhood has lost power multiple times in the past week due to the wind, which is not at all usual for us. I'm hoping that it will continue to be tolerable for a little while longer, at least, because I've got to get out of here and collect some more markers to get me through the winter. I only have the rest of November to go for the blog, and then I'll be taking my usual December hiatus after detailing the year's interesting facts, but I want to be prepared for January and February with a decent stockpile.
For this week, though, we're going to take a ride down to Montgomery County, where I had stumbled across one of my favorite things to include in this blog. I love talking about subjects from colonial times, and especially churches from the time period, because they tend to have really unique stories behind them. This one is no exception.
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| The marker stands on the church property at the intersection of Swamp Pike and Leidy Road |
A lot of these refugees came from what is known as the Palatinate, or the Rhine Valley, which is the southern portion of Germany near Switzerland. (This includes my own German ancestors, who came from the Heidelberg region in or about 1710 and helped to found what is today Emmaus in Lehigh County.) A sizeable number of these arrived in Pennsylvania and settled in what we now call Montgomery County, in and around the community of Gilbertsville. As was common in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, they originally held worship services in private homes or in barns, but by the 1720s, they wanted to establish a proper church for their religious needs.
They needed an educated person to lead their services, someone who could read the Bible to them and expound on the lessons. For this, they turned to a young man named John Philip Boehm. He was the son of a Reformed pastor, and had grown up in Germany and been educated as a schoolteacher. Prior to moving to Pennsylvania, he had taught in the Reformed church school in Worms, Germany (yes, that is the real name of the town). Upon arriving in the Falkner Swamp region and finding there was a distinct lack of ministers, he was willing to be the lay reader. But the Falkner Swamp congregation, along with congregations from two neighboring municipalities, wanted him to be their religious leader.
There was just one problem with this, he replied. John Philip was not an ordained minister. They didn't care; he did.
The two sides finally reached a compromise. He would draft a kirchenordnung (literally, "church order") to serve as a form of church government for the Falkner Swamp Reformed Church. If they would agree to adopt this constitution, which created a governing board for the congregation and held them to the Heidelberg Catechism and Palatinate Church Order, he would fill in as pastor. He would lead worship services and serve communion. However, since he was not ordained, he would not perform baptisms, so the congregants would have to go to churches with actual pastors for that particular rite. The people consented to his terms, and John Philip served his first communion to Falkner Swamp on October 15, 1725. Under his document, church leaders elected by the congregation were in charge of caring for the church and its people. They even weathered the storm of none other than Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf, who - in his well-meaning way - at one point sought to unite all of the German congregations in the state under one banner, but John Philip successfully defended the Reformed faith and prevented this from happening.
For the first two years, all was well. John Philip ministered to the Falkner Swamp congregation as well as the nearby congregations of Skippack and Whitemarsh Township. By administering the sacraments, he became the founder of the German Reformed Church of the United States. But in 1727, actual ordained German Reformed ministers started arriving in the Philadelphia area, and one of these was a man named George Weiss. He had a problem with John Philip's ministry, and began raising complaints that because he was not ordained, his teachings and communion weren't valid. But John Philip's congregations loved him and wouldn't give him up easily, so instead they reached out to the ministers of the Collegiate Dutch Reformed ministers of the New York Collegiate Reformed Church, asking for help. Since the Dutch Reformed leaders could see that the congregations desperately wanted to keep their chosen shepherd, John Philip was invited in 1729 to the Dutch Reformed church, where he was formally ordained.
The ordination eliminated any further complaints about John Philip's ministry, with the added bonus that he could now baptize his followers along with administering all the other sacraments. He went on to have a long career ministering to various congregations across all of southeastern Pennsylvania - helping congregations to form, preaching, baptizing, giving communion, and teaching. He and his wife, Anna Maria Stehler, had six children and raised them on a 200-acre farm in Whitpain Township, Montgomery County. John Philip became a citizen of Pennsylvania in 1740. He died nine years later on a return trip from what today is the Troxell-Steckel House in Egypt (Whitehall), Lehigh County, where he had been giving communion. A church named in his honor had been built in 1747 near his farm, and he is buried under the altar.
Falkner Swamp saw the German Reformed Church go through more than a century of change. In 1867, the German Reformed Church dropped the 'German' from its name, although I can't seem to find a specific reason why; if I had to guess, it was to make it more welcoming to people of other national origins. In 1934, they merged with the Evangelical Synod of North America, becoming the Evangelical and Reformed Church, which united the theological traditions of the Reformed faith with that of Lutherans. Finally, in 1957, they underwent one more 'mutation' by joining with the Congregational Christian Churches, and ever since they've all been known as the United Church of Christ. A number of the more conservative churches, however, declined to participate in either of these mergers and remain in the Reformed faith to this day. Falkner Swamp did not join the United Church of Christ until 1961, but has been under its auspices ever since. It remains the oldest continuously serving German Reformed church in the country.
Something tells me that John Philip Boehm would have been pleased to know that the congregation he was originally hesitant to serve is still flourishing.
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
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