Russell Kleckley's book is a splendid volume that historians in multiple fields will find useful. The account's central figure is Johann Ernst Bergmann, a German Lutheran pastor who served his congregation in Ebenezer, Georgia, for nearly four decades. During this time, Bergmann wrote sixty letters, primarily to his European sponsors, the leaders of the August Hermann Franke's Orphan House in Halle, Germany. Prior to Kleckley's project, Bergmann's correspondence had never been translated into English and collected in a single volume. The organisation of the material is exceptionally clear. After setting the background for the study in the introduction, each of the eleven chapters has a short introduction followed by Bergmann's correspondence. Thanks to thorough footnotes and index, it is relatively easy to connect statements in each chapter's introduction with the letters that follow. First and foremost, Bergmann's letters address his concerns about the temporal and spiritual condition of his Lutheran congregation in Ebenezer, Georgia. His flock was comprised of the descendants of Germans who were expelled from Salzburg for refusing to convert to Catholicism early in the eighteenth century. Like many other migrants to America, these German-speaking farmers sought to maintain their faith, culture and language in this new land. And like so many immigrant efforts, the Ebenezer experiment would eventually be overwhelmed and absorbed by the surrounding English-speaking environment. Second, Bergmann was an astute observer of how the surrounding culture changed between the 1780s and the 1820s. In so doing, Pastor Bergmann often chose the middle ground in dealing with controversial issues. While he despised the sceptical rationalism of Tom Paine, he believed Jefferson, a friend of Paine's, ‘has promised much that is good’. Bergmann believed that pastors should encourage congregants to live Christian lives and not focus on doctrinal details, but he had little use for the pan-Evangelical camp meetings where converts returned to worldly behaviour soon after the meetings had concluded. While he never directly criticised slavery as an institution, Bergmann castigated the ‘vile’ and supposedly ‘Christian’ slaveholders who abused their slaves. His interesting comments come, in part, from being a perpetual outsider. He led a German-speaking church in an Anglophone society, had Federalist sympathies in Republican Georgia and called for holiness in a culture that had little use for such a thing. Even his personal life had contradictions. He had four children but only one lived to adulthood. That son, Christoph Bergmann, became a minister, but served the Ebenezer congregation as an English-speaking Presbyterian minister, not a German-speaking Lutheran pastor. Yet through it all, Bergmann remained faithful to his ministerial call. In the last letter he sent to Germany, he wrote that despite his many difficulties, ‘the Lord knows how to direct everything for the best; whoever calls on Him will be saved’.
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