Description
This book provides the most complete and comprehensive history of the Evangelical Congregational Church ever published and is the superb work of a corps of historians and church leaders who know, understand, and love the Evangelical Congregational heritage. They are aware of the importance of the church’s history to inform, inspire, nurture, and equip it to fulfill God’s calling in this generation and those that follow. Effectively employing primary and secondary sources, the authors begin their narration by describing the Wesleyan roots of the Evangelical Congregational Church and its predecessor denominations – the Evangelical Association and the United Evangelical Church. Each of the chapters that follow discusses how the church organized for evangelism, worship, education, missions (home and overseas), itinerant ministry, benevolent work, and much more. While appropriate attention is paid to the denomination’s gifted leadership in its bishops and denominational executives, the central and essential roles of pastors and laypeople are emphasized.This volume offers the Evangelical Congregational Church a magnificent view of its history at a critical time in its life when its evangelistic and servant ministry is as much needed as ever. Others who share the Wesleyan tradition and who are interested in the ministry of the Christian church will also gratefully find this an illuminating and fascinating story.
Dr. J. Steven O’Malley –
This study of the Evangelical Congregational Church brings into focus one of the oldest indigenous denominations of Christianity in North America, of which it is a direct descendant. The early nineteenth century German American revivalists, who were followers of a remarkable lay preacher, Jacob Albright, represented a distinctive confluence of Methodist theology and polity with a spirituality expressed in the genre of German Pietism, particularly its Reformed and Radical varieties. Unlike the more staid immigrant German church bodies (Lutheran, Reformed, Mennonite), their joyful choruses, fervent preaching, and wide ranging itinerating branded them as the “bush meeting Dutch” (Yoder). The work of an able body of scholars in the Albright tradition, this study serves both as an institutional history and an interpretation of a distinctive American religious culture. It is also a source book in the annals of the American pulpit, from the Revolutionary War era to the present, as found in the German-American context. Unlike many denominational histories, it reflects the view from the pew: showing how Evangelicals thought and lived over the past two centuries, as their denomination sought to respond to a plethora of missional challenges. As such, it is a case study in the forming of American church life, that can be instructive for students of American religion, as well as the heirs of the Albright tradition.