Kidnapping and forcefully transporting Martin Stephan across state line under armed guard qualifies as a federal offense today. There were signs of physical and mental assault of Bishop Stephan. Force had been used to strip him of his clothes and take his money from him. Besides being a federal offense, kidnapping was a dehumanizing thing to do to anyone, especially to a fellow Christian.
The land issue was not settled by this court. Koerner said the eighty acres in question were a gift to Stephan, but G. Guenther and Loeber contended that Stephan had purchased eighty acres with his own money not borrowed from the Credit Fund, and the community had given Martin another forty acres. The Credit Fund retained the forty acres because the deed was never filed in Pastor Stephan’s name. The eighty acres Stephan had purchased was deeded in Stephan’s name, and those eighty acres were awarded to Pastor Stephan by the court. This land dispute was never settled until many years later during the ministry of Martin’s son.
Although some of Pastor Stephan’s books, clothing, and furniture were returned to him, the two chalices that were his private property were never returned, and it is not clear why. According to Stephan family documents and Stephan’s own words, one of the chalices was a gift to Pastor Stephan by a Polish count on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his ordination. This count knew Julia’s family when they were the architects for the royal family quarters. This chalice or “cup” is the same one that Julia inquired about in a letter to her son Martin. This second chalice is still in use by Trinity Lutheran Church in St. Louis, Missouri. This chalice was a gift to Stephan in 1830, the three hundredth anniversary of the Augsburg Confession. The curator of the museum of Trinity Lutheran Church in Altenburg maintains the official story that the chalice in their possession was a gift from some duke in Germany and supposedly is the property of the Saxon immigrants, though it was Martin’s personal chalice.
Stephan said in his 1842 letter to Fluegel that he liked the settlement Koerner made and appreciated his efforts, although he thought that they were hampered in regaining all his belongings because he did not have enough money to pay the attorney. It is this comment to which Koerner replies and was referenced by Fluegel. Perhaps they both took it as an ungrateful remark on the part of Stephan. Martin believed that it was all rightfully his, and as far as he was concerned, the court settlement did not settle the injustice of it all.
Even though the Society was not incorporated, they sustained legal liability. Certain individuals had entered into verbal contract with Stephan to support him financially. They assumed this ended when they deposed him from office. It is a moot point perhaps, but Koerner makes it clear that people in Randolph County, Illinois, did not appreciate giving welfare to a person from another state who was supposed to have been paid by his congregation.
As Attorney Koerner said, the paltry $210 settlement in Illinois relieved Martin’s “most pressing needs,” but only for a short time. Nevertheless, this out-of-court settlement Koerner negotiated with the Society, meager though it was, gave some sense that Koerner confirmed Martin’s grievous mistreatment. The money itself did little to sooth Stephan and was certainly not enough to help him get established. Contrary to many reports that the court case was dismissed, there was a settlement in Stephan’s favor, but not enough for him to survive. He needed to find work.
NOTES
1 William Koepchen, appendix B to “Martin Stephan and the Saxon Emigration of 1838,” (unpublished ms., Stephan Family Archives and Concordia Historical Institute, 1935).
2 Koepchen, appendixes A–B to “Martin Stephan and the Saxon Emigration of 1838.”
3 Mary Todd, Vested Authority (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2000), 49. Todd quotes cases 600 and 601 in the Circuit Court of Perry County from CHI files. Martin Stephan filed suit against Barthel, Bimpage, Jaeckel, Keyl, and Marbach in case 600 “Trover and Conversion.” In case 601 Stephan vs. Loeber, Keyl, Buenger, Bimpage, Barthel, Marbach, Palisch, and Jaeckel “Trespass Vi et Armis.” These suits were filed in 1841 to recover $5,000 in damages for each suit. In June of 1842 the defendants in both cases were found guilty on two counts, one of trespass and one of unlawful appropriation of property. Todd maintains that the court awarded Stephan damages in the sum of one cent and court costs. No action was taken against the defendants after they were found guilty of trespass and taking Stephan’s money. This court record and Koerner’s letter are in disagreement.
31
Martin Stephan’s Last Days
Stephan’s erstwhile followers were struggling to live, work, and understand their role as a Christian community in their new world, while Stephan himself apparently had entered a quiet period. As he slowly recovered from pneumonia, he learned of churches in the area that needed to fill in preaching duties for their Sunday services. Some of these churches already had pastors but needed substitutes when they were ill or on vacation. Sometimes Pastor Stephan preached in churches other than Lutheran, mostly in Methodist and Presbyterian churches in the Kaskaskia area, but only in churches with a German population. How ironic it must have felt for the senior pastor to speak in other Protestant churches. Some of these were the same Reformed Protestant Churches that he resisted joining in Germany. Nevertheless, hunger was a strong motivator. Stephan accepted his lot and was able to provide himself and Louise with more substantial food than their daily fare of potato soup and dry bread.
There are few accounts, letters, or records of what he did or said beyond 1843. His son Martin had returned to Germany, and he probably never saw or heard from either his wife or his son after 1843. By 1845 Stephan settled his legal suit with the Perry County community. He was handicapped in his inability to speak English and never did learn it. With the German folks he did quite well, and for a time he taught school and then taught other people to speak German. But he still had a ministry, and he used every opportunity to teach the Christian Scriptures. At times he spoke in churches affiliated with Lutherans from Norway, Denmark, and Sweden that already had some state and national organization. He conducted services in German every two weeks in the county court house in Kaskaskia.
Since he had no pension, benefit plan, or social security, he needed to work even though he was now sixty-eight years old. He remained in poor health. Whether he was eligible to receive welfare checks from the town of Kaskaskia after he exhausted the meager settlement from the Society is unknown. That $210 was barely enough to keep him going for a couple of months.
At long last he heard about a rural congregation in search of a pastor. Trinity Lutheran Church was not far away in Horse Prairie, Illinois, near Red Bud. It was a fledgling congregation organized in 1842. A neighboring German immigrant congregation in Bremen, Illinois, built a log church in 1840. The Bremen congregation’s two pastors, A. Balzer and W. Brinner, occasionally preached to this newly formed Trinity congregation. Both ministers were clergy in the United Evangelical Church. Trinity’s first full-time pastor, Rev. Gotha, served the congregation until 1845. Worship was conducted in the member’s homes until 1844.
That year, a Mr. Henry Moehrs donated an acre of his land for a church building and cemetery. A twenty-five by eighteen foot log cabin was completed in the fall of 1844 and dedicated to the service of the Triune God, hence the name of the congregation. Although the building was modest, the members were quite happy to have a house of worship of their own.
In 1845, the Trinity pastorate was vacant again, and Pastors Balzer and Brinner conducted worship services and pastoral care. They invited the congregation to join this group of organized Lutheran Churches, but members of Trinity rejected the invitation.1 In the fall of that year, the congregation learned of a Lutheran pastor living in Kaskaskia, Illinois, who might be willing to pastor the congregation in Horse Prairie. When the elders contacted him, he was ready. The Trinity 1992 sesquicentennial booklet identifies this pastor as “Pastor Martin Stephan, the leader of the Saxon immigrants to Perry County, Missouri. Pastor Stephan was the first resident pastor and the church building also s
erved as his parsonage.”2 Finally, six long years after his expulsion, Martin Stephan found his place in the New World.
The dual use church building was just barely large enough to house Pastor Stephan and his housekeeper. In spite of all the rumor and gossip that traveled among the neighboring communities, no one seems to have questioned his relationship with his housekeeper Louise Guenther. The members of Trinity appeared to be accepting of this situation. Perhaps they assumed a marriage bond, or out in the wilderness employing a resident housekeeper may not have been as uncommon an occurrence as one might imagine.
It seems ironic that while the residents and immigrants in Perry County were arguing about the role and authority of the clergy, Stephan received a legitimate call as pastor by a congregation. They invited him to preach to them and administer the sacraments. His gift to the church as a minister was recognized, and the congregation gave him an opportunity to complete his career as their pastor.
For Stephan, this call was a second chance. To minister and belong to a congregation again must have healed some wounds of humiliation. He completed the calling to ministry he had begun thirty-seven years earlier in Haber, Bohemia. Even though this final ministry lasted only four months, he did what God and the congregation called to him to do. He preached, administered the sacraments, and taught them. According to the historians of Trinity, Pastor Stephan died in his sleep the night of February 26, 1846, at the age of sixty-nine years and seven months.3
Authors of the Trinity congregation sesquicentennial anniversary celebration booklet describe Pastor Stephan’s burial. “At [his] funeral, the casket was carried around the church, which was a funeral custom at this congregation. A picket fence was placed around the Stephan’s grave which was one of the first graves in the cemetery. A wooden 10 foot cross was erected at his grave site. The present grave marker was placed in 1988 in Trinity Cemetery.”4 This monument is a large granite stone set at the entrance of Trinity cemetery, which is adjacent to the current church building (See photo spread). The actual burial site of Martin Stephan is set deeper in the cemetery nearer to the original church building, because he was among the first ten people to be buried in this cemetery.
The engraving on the cemetery marker reads, “MARTIN STEPHAN, Born August 13, 1777, Stramberg, Moravia. Lutheran Pastor in Dresden, Germany and Kaskaskia, Illinois. Leader of Saxon Immigration to Perry County, Missouri in 1839. First Lutheran Bishop in America. First resident Pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church, Red Bud-Prairie, Illinois. Died, February 26, 1846, Prairie.”
NOTES
1 Jane Lucht, Martin Clausen, and Henry Kuring, “Trinity Lutheran Church, 150th Anniversary” church pamphlet (Horse Prairie, Ill., 1992).
2 Lucht, Clausen, and Kuring, “Trinity Lutheran Church, 150th Anniversary,” 4.
3 Records of Trinity Lutheran Church, Horse Prairie, Illinois. Stephan family records date Martin’s death on February 21,1846, with burial on February 24. There is no record of Martin Stephan’s death because Randolph County, Illinois, kept no records until 1877. The death date on the cemetery marker commemorating Martin Stephan’s leadership of the Saxon Emigration coincides with the Trinity Church Records of 1942. Both marker and church records use the date February 26,1846, as the day of his death. However, Pastor August Suelflow, founder of Concordia Historical Institute in St. Louis stated in the 150th anniversary service that Martin Stephan died at midnight on February 21 and was buried on February 24.
4 Lucht, Clausen, and Kuring, “Trinity Lutheran Church, 150th Anniversary,” 4.
VIII
Afterglow
32
View from the Twenty-first Century
Well into the twentieth century rumors and fanciful stories still circulated about Stephan’s final days. According to a letter by Theo M. Stephan to his nephew and brother, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) commissioned D. H. Steffens, a Lutheran pastor, to write a centennial piece on the Saxon emigration. In this letter Theo describes Steffens’s allegation that Martin Stephan died because of visual hallucinations, suggesting that he was mentally unstable. Theo Stephan wrote D. H. Steffens inquiring who his authority was for this assertion. Steffens replied that his source was a pastor in Chicago by the name of Hertel. When Theo Stephan contacted Pastor Hertel, he denied that he had ever said such a thing.1
Some stories suggest that Stephan had committed suicide. Others dispute his Christian burial. A recently released translation of Pastor Ernst Moritz Buerger’s diary of his ministry among the Saxon immigrants was published by the Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly. Buerger is the pastor whom Stephan chastised for his remarks in an Easter sermon, and Stephan sent him to minister to the people down in Perry County who were clearing the land. Buerger wrote some harsh words in his diary about Stephan and his sins:
Following an investigation with [sic] Stephan, he was deposed and banished from the settlement to Illinois. There he is said to have served a congregation for a period of time, and to have died without any evidence of repentance. That was the end of a man who had once been a faithful witness of Jesus Christ, who had directed many souls upon the way of salvation. What a warning example!
An editorial note by the translator Edgar Buerger adds a gracious disclaimer in a footnote. “Since many of (Stephan’s) family have served the church, even our own Synod, this may well be a prejudiced judgment. E. J. B.”2
The facts support no basis for these rumors. Again, many years after Stephan’s death, in 1911 J. H. Hartenberger and Gottlieb Roehrkasse, pastors of the Lutheran church in Red Bud, Illinois, a few miles from Horse Prairie, penciled a note on a small piece of notepad to the effect that Stephan remained seated when he preached. Even though it is undocumented, this piece of paper found its way into the archives of Concordia Historical Institute. Since Pastor Stephan was known to be quite frail during his final tenure, this is no revelation. But, fifty-five years after Stephan’s death these Lutheran clerical colleagues wrote that the housekeeper was frightened when Martin Stephan died, and she would have gone to get the help of a neighbor, but it was a dark night and she was afraid. The Red Bud, Illinois, pastors wrote that the neighbors made a coffin and buried him: “He was buried without the presence of a pastor.”3 These unsubstantiated notes proved to be false.
In an anniversary sermon videotaped by a member of the congregation, Pastor August Suelflow noted that Pastor Stephan was given a Christian funeral service and burial by a Lutheran pastor. Suelflow praised the congregation in that same sermon for their love and loyalty to their first resident pastor. Stephan’s Christian burial by one of the vacancy pastors mentioned earlier was also attested to by the current church historian, Jane Lucht.4
Events of 1839 and their aftermath spawned ongoing controversy. Although Pastor Stephan’s theology of the Holy Ministry was hotly contested by Walther and Marbach, later theologians would confirm some of Stephan’s teaching. Two years before Stephan’s death, Pastor Wilhelm Loehe of Dresden was sending theological graduates from Germany to help establish the Lutherans in America, and some of their congregations sought to merge with the Missouri Synod.
Loehe was a scholarly theologian who believed the Lutheran Reformation to be perpetual; that is, the church is always reforming itself through the work and wisdom of the people of God to meet new conditions and changing culture. He held and encouraged the Lutheran Church in Germany and in the United States to continue in the apostolic tradition, that is, to teach and practice as the apostles of Christ did. The apostolic church is universal, worldwide, and based on the teaching of the apostles. The ministry of the apostolic church is one of the keys to the function of the church. Ministry is done by pastors and laity, and both are equal in importance in their separate functions.
For Loehe, the Holy Ministry was a spiritual gift of God to the church. Ministry consisted of people with different gifts such as presbyters, evangelists, prophets, pastors, and teachers, as scripture taught. He opposed C. F. W. Walther’s opinion that the office of the M
inistry is the same as the “priesthood of all believers” and agreed with Stephan that the Office of Holy Ministry is a gift from God to the church, yet does not supersede the priesthood of all believers. He called the difference one of function, not of rank.5
In his merger conversations with Loehe, Walther would not hear of anything that had to do with what he perceived as ranking the pastor above the congregation. Walther did not view the clergy as those people who equipped the laity to do the ministry. Yet, it was right before him in St. Paul’s letter to the congregation at Ephesus. Ephesians 4:11–13 reads in the New Oxford Annotated Bible, “The gifts he [Christ] gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastor and teacher to equip [emphasis added] the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.” Walther had to give ground on this biblical function of clerical ministry in order to reconcile all those in the new church body who were still skeptical about the power of the clergy over the laity. However, he held firmly to his position that congregations authorized ministry with a call to a pastor and authorized that person to minister to laity in the congregation. In Walther’s mind, ordination was not separate from the call and was not a consecration to an office higher than that of any other believers.
In Pursuit of Religious Freedom: Bishop Martin Stephan's Journey Page 32
