The Pilgrim Colony: The History of Saint Sebald Congregation, the Two Wartburgs, and the Synods of Iowa and Missouri. Albert Llewellyn Hock. Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2004. 302 pages.

Pastor Albert Hock, now living in retirement after a full career in the pastoral ministry, has put together a scholarly history documenting the adventures of those who were sent to America by Johann Konrad Wilhelm Loehe. Like Loehe, their mentor, these pilgrims were highly energetic and expansionary.

Hock “began this study at the request of the church council of Saint Sebald Lutheran Church of rural Strawberry Point, Iowa, contemplating a mere pamphlet.” He soon realized that the full story of Saint Sebald could not be told without also reporting Saint Sebald’s involvement with Wartburg Seminary, Wartburg College, the Iowa Synod, and the Missouri Synod (from whom the congregation separated in Michigan).

Hock has done much careful research and put together a story that is not available elsewhere. He also includes interesting appendices, with recipes for preserving sauerkraut and pickles or making beer, and the rigorous congregational constitution based on Loehe’s model.
Saint Sebald is one of the many tiny rural congregations with a five digit street number, meaning that it is surrounded only by farmland. It seems an unlikely setting for anything important, just like the Bavarian village of Neuendettelsau, from which Loehe sent missionaries around the world, including to America. Yet Saint Sebald is the mother of a large nineteenth-century Synod, a seminary, and a college. Along the way it also sent several missionaries to Native Americans in Michigan, Minnesota, and South Dakota.
Hock relates the 1854 story of the unlikely, humble (“wretched,” he says) beginnings of the Evangelical Synod of Iowa and Other States. It was accomplished in the yet unfinished Saint Sebald church/parsonage building by three pastors (one sick in bed) and a candidate. 76 years later in 1930, when the it merged with Ohio and Buffalo into the American Lutheran Church, the Iowa Synod numbered 934 congregations.
Saint Sebald conducted a “Teachers’ Seminary” in nearby Dubuque even before the building outside Strawberry Point was completed. Soon the school moved to a site near Saint Sebald and eventually evolved into two separate schools, Wartburg Seminary, now in Dubuque, and Wartburg College, now in Waverly. Hock details the history of these schools struggling against the odds. A tiny beginning for two major institutions!
Saint Sebald’s people did not come directly from Neuendettelsau. They had first settled at Frankenhilf in Saginaw County, Michigan, near Frankenmuth, as part of a larger colony of Loehe emissaries. It was all part of the Missouri Synod then. Then Walther’s conflict with Loehe crept into the colony and heated discussions about the nature of ordination disrupted community life.
As a result, a group led by Pastor Deindoerfer and Karl Gottlieb Amman (Hock’s great-grandfather) emigrated to Northeast Iowa. Saint Sebald was named after the prominent church in Nuernberg. Hock provides interesting details about the controversy and its effect upon ordinary church members. He also notes in his introduction and epilogue that the question of ministry has never been resolved by anyone in American Lutheranism.
Hock doesn’t say so explicitly, but one cannot escape a sense of awe at Loehe and his disciples. They endured enormous hardships, just the kind of reality we’d like to inflict on our smart-aleck teenagers. These pilgrims never seemed to stop. They couldn’t stop when they had built a church; they had to have a seminary. They wouldn’t stop when they had a seminary; they had to organize a Synod. They couldn’t stop when they had their own church; they had to go to the Indians.
It is as Loehe reports to his supporters about the American venture, “Mission is never at home; it is a pilgrim. When it has wrought its blessing in one spot, it moves on and carries its blessing to other places. When we were done in Fort Wayne, we went on to Saginaw County, now we are through in Saginaw County so we are going farther” (13).
Deindoerfer moved rather than fight. That spirit too was expansionist. Conventional wisdom about the Iowa Synod is that it was always irenic. In the nineteenth century, it seemed always near to the negotiations of alignment and realignment, but seldom party to any one. Then it joined the “old” American Lutheran Church of 1930, which joined the American Lutheran Church of 1960. Throughout all the twentieth-century efforts at Lutheran unity, the Iowa synod was considered the “mediating” body between the LCMS and the LCA.
Do we not still need the spirit of Saint Sebold and the Iowa Synod?