Course-1
The Catechisms:
These basic formularies of the Christian Faith have been employed since the earliest centuries of the Patristic Age of the Church. As the wider culture changes, and as missionaries engage new forms of culture, ‘the catechism’ has adapted with these realities. The goal is to not only provide a form of teaching new Christians and growing Christians, but also a resource for continuing Christians to regularly be edified in the essence of Faith & Doctrine as expressed through their Church branch.
Luther developed his Catechisms (1529) out of sermons he delivered on its topics at his congregation in Wittenberg from prior years. The Large Catechism was intended for the pastor and the head of the household; the Small Catechism for every person to review during private devotions or in worship—from the layman to the clergyman, regardless how long they had been in the Kingdom.
The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) was put together by Frederick III, prince-elector of the Electoral Palatinate, initially as a legal document presented to Emperor Maximilian II. Prince Frederick, formally a Lutheran ruler, had been accused of violating the Peace of Augsburg as a “Calvinist”. The prince refuted these claims with a systematic defense of his beliefs using only Scripture. Although it became one part of the Reformed ‘Three Forms of Unity’ over a half-century later, the prince never considered himself anything but Lutheran.
Course-2
Anglicans & Saxons in Pre-20th Century North America:
The Anglican presence in the Colonies began with the Jamestown Settlement in 1607. Even with the expulsion of the British Empire from the American Colonies in 1783, the Church of England continued to have a presence in the Canadian provinces, where many British Loyalist communities fled; the Episcopal Church was quickly established in 1785 to continue the Anglican expression in the new republic.
The Saxon-Lutheran presence began with Rev. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg’s well-known Pennsylvania Ministerium in 1748 (which merged into the ULC in 1918). But Lutheranism in the Colonies technically started nearly a century earlier with the founding of the Swedish-Lutheran New Sweden colony in the Mid-Atlantic, along the Delaware River.
The history of these two founding expressions of the European Reformations on the American Continent is a fascinating story of perseverance, risk, and parochial & sectarian rivalries—and each being affected by its two significant martial conflicts: the Revolution & the Civil War.
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