Muhlenberg's 200th

A Lutheran pastor, in sober black clerical gown, stood up in his pulpit at Woodstock, Va. and preached with godly fervor and patriotic warmth. "There is a time for all things," he ended, "a time to preach and a time to pray. But there is also a time to fight, and that time has now come!"

So saying, he flung open his gown to reveal beneath it the blue-&-buff uniform of the Continental Army. It was January 1776. A drum beat before the door; a bugle call rang through the church; and before the end of service 300 members of the congregation had enlisted, with their pastor as Colonel. To the close of the Revolution, Pastor John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg kept the field, rising to be a major general.

Next week that stirring scene and many another in the lives of the Muhlenberg (family--greatest in the history of U.S. Lutheranism--will be re-enacted at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pa. The occasion: the 200th anniversary of the arrival in the U.S. of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711-1787), sire of Washington's general and ancestor of many another famed parson, statesman and educator. He was the real founder and patriarch of the Lutheran Church in the U.S., was called Gachs-wunga-roracks by his Indian friends because "his words went through the hearts of men like a saw through a knotty plank."

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