Hallesche Pastoren in Pennsylvania, 1743–1825

Hallesche Pastoren in Pennsylvania, 1743–1825. Eine kritische Quellenedition zu ihrer Amtstätigkeit in Nordamerika. Ed. by Mark Häberlein, Thomas Müller-Bahlke and Hermann Wellenreuther.
Part 4: Briefe und andere Amtsdokumente der Pastoren Johann Dietrich Matthias Heinzelmann (1724–1756) und Justus Heinrich Christian Helmuth (1745–1825). Ed. by Wolfgang Splitter, Markus Berger and Jan-Hendrik Evers in collaboration with Lara Grünberg and Nikolas K. Schröder

This eight-volume edition focuses on 13 Lutheran clergymen who were sent to Pennsylvania between 1744 and 1786 by the Glaucha Institutions (now the Francke Foundations in Halle) to provide pastoral care to German Lutherans. There, and soon also in neighboring regions of British North America, they served as parish pastors from 1745 to 1825. They were preceded by Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg (1711–1787), who had been invited to go overseas by the director of this institution, Gotthilf August Francke (1696–1769), in early September 1741. With Mühlenberg's arrival in Philadelphia at the end of November 1742, the institutions, as a Royal Prussian privileged association of educational, charitable, missionary, and commercial enterprises, took on a task that would only come to an end shortly after the First World War.
The fourth volume of this edition comprises 137 letters from pastors Johann Dietrich Matthias Heinzelmann and Justus Heinrich Christian Helmuth, who were sent from Halle to Pennsylvania. While Heinzelmann died just five years after his arrival in Philadelphia (1751), Helmuth, who arrived there in 1769, corresponded for more than half a century with colleagues at the Glauchaschen Anstalten in Halle as well as with colleagues and church congregations in North America. His letters are important testimonies to the transformation of North American Lutheranism, which increasingly emancipated itself from European authorities in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and took its own place in the pluralistic religious cosmos of the independent American republic. In addition, they address Helmuth's engagement with the theological, pedagogical, and intellectual trends of his time.