In a message dated 4/3/2005 1:35:56 AM Eastern Daylight Time, JYoung6180@aol.com writes: My own Reformed/Lutheran Pa German family went into the wilderness of PA and quite happily accepted the Methodist circuit rider who showed up in 1810.>> And some of my Lutheran ancestors readily accepted the Moravian Church because that was what was available to them at that time/place. I even have a Catholic ancestor whose first child born in America was baptized Lutheran because that was the only church in the area when the child was born. This is most certainly true! One of the reasons that the Methodist Church got such a toehold in the Midwest is that they were willing to ordain ministers locally and send them out into what was then the wilderness. The Lutherans, on the other hand, even though they had been in the colonies longer, were more worried about doctrinal purity in their ministers than they were about ministering to the scattered flock. At first, anyone seeking to be a Lutheran minister would have had to go to back to Germany for ordination, or (more likely) the congregation had to plead with the church authorities in Germany to send them a minister. Later, it became possible to do this in Philadelphia. But that still meant that a Lutheran minister in Western PA or Ohio would have to travel back to Philadelphia periodically (sometimes as often as once a year) to ge re-examined for doctrinal correctness and have his license renewed. The untenability of this situation left would-be Lutherans begging for ministers, and on some occasions, resulted in an organized congregation changing its church identity in favor of an available minister. Alternatively, folks could just wait until the "right" minister came around to have their unions blessed and their babies baptized. Not surprisingly, this lack of appropriate ministers and congregations led to a greater degree of assimilation of Lutherans into the dominant, English-speaking culture. My own Hagerstown ancestors (who had initially settled in Lancaster, PA around 1750) were among the Lutheran die-hards -- although we do see a couple of Reformed in the line from time to time. When they left Hagerstown and went to Fairfield County, OH, they immediately set about establishing themselves a Lutheran Church -- founded in 1812 and still in operation today as Israel's Lutheran (ELCA) -- or, as my Reformed-born Lutheran-convert grandmother called it, "the Israeli Dutchman Church". This little church was the site of the first meeting of what became the Synod of Ohio. Later waves of immigration changed this picture substantially, and led to the intra-church struggles over doctrine and language that have persisted into my lifetime in the form of the rift between the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (successor to the pre-Revolutionary and Federal period German Lutheran Churches, among others) and the Missouri Synod (formed largely by latter-day German immigrants). A fascinating subject! Susan Kundert Coshocton, OH