Secularism Is Killing Our Country—Where Are the Culture Warriors? by DAVID LANE for Charisma News
In declaring that “modern Christianity has to get back to playing the long game,” we particularly have in mind the likes of Johann Conrad Weiser Sr. (1662-1746), Conrad Weiser Jr. (1696-1760), Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711-1787), his wife, Anna Maria (Weise) Muhlenberg (1727-1802) and their sons Frederick, Peter and Henry Ernest, all pastors.
Born in Einbeck, Germany, Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (an Anglicanization of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg) was a Lutheran pastor sent to North America as a missionary, requested by “three forlorn Lutheran congregations in Pennsylvania (German-speaking Pennsylvania colonists), with neither church buildings nor pastors.” Now considered by historians as the patriarch of American Lutheranism, Muhlenberg was to be the answer to their prayers.
Arriving in Philadelphia at age 31, Pastor Muhlenberg took very active steps to plant the Lutheran church on solid ground. Working tirelessly to cultivate what he referred to as “practical, active Christianity,” he was described as a man with “incredible tact, patient firmness, spiritual power and [an] indefatigable” capacity to travel. Throughout his ministry, he made extensive mission journeys in the colonies and states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia. Most of these journeys were by horseback or wooden sailboat or canoe.
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Knowing as many as five languages, he also established a rapport with other European Lutherans in the New World, according to dailykos.com and elcm.org. He conversed with Germans, Dutch and Swedes in New York and New Jersey in the 1750s, preaching to congregants and establishing a dialogue with other Lutheran preachers. He organized new congregations and actively worked to keep all the Lutheran churches with whom he had contact closely in association with one another as well as establishing the training of new pastors in America.
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Muhlenberg is a prime example of the 17th- and 18th-century spiritual founders of America. Manifesting both a close relationship with Jesus Christ and a thorough knowledge of His Word, their fortitude and skills were fundamental to the emergence of a divinely inspired exceptional culture, for several centuries distinguished by moral excellence in the lives of its Christian people. Culture, after all, is purely the public manifestation of religion.
In 1745, Henry Muhlenberg married Anna Maria Weiser, the daughter of colonial leader Conrad Weiser Jr., a key interpreter and diplomat between the Pennsylvania Colony and Native Americans. As an aside, back in Germany, Weiser Jr.’s mother, Anna Magdalena Uebele Weiser, had died of fever when he was 13. His father, Johann Conrad Weiser Sr., wrote of her faith: “Buried beside her ancestors, she was a God-fearing woman and much loved by her neighbors. Her motto was, ‘Jesus I live for thee, I die for thee, thine am I in life and death.'”
