Henry Ziegler: Missionary Preacher and Teacher

by Donald Housley

Giants in American Lutheran history created the institutions and sustained the faith of the Church in the 19th Century. Leaders such as George Lochman, Samuel Schmucker, Benjamin Kurtz, and William Passavant were particularly concerned with the plight of the many Lutherans in distant places, without parishes, steady ecclesiastical leadership or firm religious standards. This concern arose in part as a response to evident need but also as an expression of the evangelical mission of Lutheran piety, the spiritual tradition in which many of these men had come to be believers. The product of their concern can be seen in the life of Henry Ziegler, a child of the frontier whose life was committed to sustaining Lutherans in distant places.

Ziegler 's youth was typical of those lived in remote places during the early 1800's. The son of an impoverished, German-American farmer, sometime blacksmith, whose successive moves through rural Pennsylvania failed to bring success, Ziegler worked hard as a youth, clearing forests, chopping wood, forging iron tools, helping his family to survive. Baptized as a child, Ziegler's religious upbringing was a "sometime thing", dependent upon sporadic visits by missionary clergy. At the age of 18, after a walk of eight miles to the services of a Cumberland Presbyterian minister, Ziegler was converted. He was subsequently catechized by a Lutheran home missionary.

After his conversion, Ziegler had a strong conviction that he was called to preach the Gospel, but he had virtually no resources to prepare to do so. So, he turned to the infant institutions being created among Lutherans in the 1820's and 1830's. The Parent Education Society of the General Synod gave him $100 as one of its first "beneficiaries." And, in 1835, Ziegler strapped his possessions on his back and walked 250 miles to Gettysburg, where he enrolled in the preparatory department of Pennsylvania College. One year later he entered the college itself and, although his studies were interrupted several times by the need to raise funds, Ziegler graduated and moved on to the Seminary from which he graduated in 1843.

Then Ziegler began a ministry which never departed from the missionary impulse with which it had begun. He was licensed to preach by the West Pennsylvania Synod and traveled to the upper Susquehanna valley to assist "Father" J. P. Shindel who had a large charge, including Zion in Sunbury and smaller churches along the west branch of the Susquehanna River. Just one month before Ziegler joined him, Shindel had been locked out of the First Lutheran Church in Selinsgrove by parishioners opposed to his revivalistic ways. With the pietistic remnant, Shindel moved across the street, founding the Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church which he ministered to in German while Ziegler did so in English.

For this work in Selinsgrove, Ziegler received no pay but room, board and the use of a horse. He stayed with John App, a prominent local farmer and businessman, whose daughter he married in 1844. One year later, he was ordained by the newly established Pittsburgh Synod, "the Missionary Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church." He planned to serve in Africa or India, or at least, in rural, western Ohio, but, due to the entreaties of his old Gettysburg classmate, William Passavant, Ziegler was convinced to become the Pittsburgh Synod's first Missionary President. He returned to the communities of his youth where, in the succeeding five years, Ziegler traveled 11,074 miles, preached 450 services in English and 180 in German, gave 161 catechetical lectures, baptized 92 children and organized 7 churches which served Lutherans in places as vacant as those from which he had come.

This missionary work, the essence of outreach by Lutheran pietists, was sustained by Ziegler during the 1850's as he founded St. Mark's out of a revival in Williamsport and moved to Gettysburg to become the field agent for the Parent Education Society which, in its early years, had enabled him to receive an education. This was frustrating work because Lutheran churches were poor and the Society was closely identified with Samuel Schmucker, who was in eclipse due to the emerging strength of "Confessional" or "Symbolic" orthodoxy among the Lutherans in the Middle Atlantic states. After two years of this difficult work, Ziegler moved from the Parent Education Society to Salona near Lock Haven, again ministering to a new charge.

As the appeal of piety diminished among Lutherans, Benjamin Kurtz and others looked to the establishment of a new seminary which would quickly prepare young and old converts to preach the Gospel in "vacant places." All that Ziegler had done since his conversion at age 18 had prepared him to believe in and support this effort. So, while ministering to the multi-church charge at Salona, Ziegler helped to raise money from and interest in the new school among Lutherans in central Pennsylvania.

Suggesting the "boosters" of Selinsgrove as likely sponsors of the school and his father-in-law, John App, as a likely source of property, Ziegler was influential in the founding of the Missionary Institute, the forerunner of Susquehanna University. In 1858, as the school was launched, Ziegler moved to Selinsgrove to become Kurtz' assistant. In name, the Second Professor of Theology at the Institute and the Assistant Superintendent, Ziegler did almost all of the teaching and administering there because Kurtz was ill and did not move from his Baltimore residence.

Although begun in controversy and conflict, and never a favorite among the growing numbers of orthodox Lutherans, the Missionary Institute was designed to serve in ways which were particularly appropriate for Lutherans in the 19th century. Its purpose was to provide a free education of a limited type to men of any age whose ministerial calling had been stirred by conversionmen like Henry Ziegler.

In this troubled time, the Institute survived only because of this man's work. Kurtz, debilitated by hemorrhaging in his lungs and his notorious reputation, gave the infant school little substantial help. In 1865, when Kurtz died, Ziegler succeeded him as Superintendent and First Professor of Theology. In fact, Ziegler was the Theological Department and, to a significant degree, the Institute in these years. He taught most of the lessons given to the Theological students, wrote textbooks to supplement his lessons and make up for a weak library and traveled to raise funds to support students and the Institute building. Sensitive to the poverty of theology students, most of whom had families, Ziegler raised money for and actually constructed five student houses which were initially provided rent-free.

This was truly a labor of love for Ziegler. By the 1870's the Institute building was falling apart due to inadequate maintenance and Ziegler's salary was continually in arrears. These needs, coupled with the commitment to provide theology students with a free education, meant Ziegler not only was the fount of theological instruction at the school but also the principal fund-raiser. These many duties wore him out. He was never really in good health during his term as Superintendent and had taken several long vacations to build up his strength. Finally, in his last years of teaching, Ziegler did not have the strength to walk the 100 yards from his home to the Institute building. Recitations were held in his parlor. In 1881, poor health forced him to resign. He and his wife then moved to the midwest to live with a son. A two-year stay as a patient-assistant manager at a hospital which his classmate, William Passavant, had founded in Milwaukee was followed by years as a writer of books espousing theological arguments stemming from the pietistic American Lutheran tradition. Moving back to Selinsgrove in 1893, Ziegler died there in 1898.

Henry Ziegler's life embodied much of the history of Nineteenth Century Lutheranism. He benefited from the emerging structure of its denomination, and subsequently attempted to sustain the faith of his pietistic origins among Lutherans in distant parts. In this, he was disappointed. The tides of the time were against him and he tired swimming against the stream.

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