[There was no note yesterday so please do not blame anybody for the omission. Too many things piled up for me and some of them had a high priority. You did have notes from Andreas Mielke and George Durman to read.]
I had wondered why there was a German Reformed Chapel in the Robinson River Valley, as it was only a short distance from the German Lutheran Church. Then, as I have been studying the communion lists at the Lutheran church (Hebron), I could not find any individual who I could say was a Reformed member. We do know there were marriages between the Reformed and the Lutheran, and that they had children baptized at Hebron. On some occasions in the records, it is written that "so and so" is Reformed. It had struck me as unusual that the individual was specified as Reformed. Why say anything? People are people.
The Reformed community in the Robinson River Valley was significant, but still it was not large enough to support a minister. Why have a chapel if the members couldn’t support a pastor? As I was studying the Hebron communion lists, it struck me that the absence of the Reformed people might be due to the practices of the Lutheran Church. Just recently I was in a Catholic church for a funeral mass, and it was made very clear that only practicing Catholics in good standing were invited to Communion.
I wrote to Pastor James Larsen at the Hebron Church and asked him about Lutheran practices. He said that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at Hebron, the Communion was probably restricted to Lutherans. This is sometimes called "closed Communion". Today, though, at Hebron, they have an "open Communion", in which all Christians are invited. Not all Lutheran Synods follow this practice, as some Synods in the U.S. still have closed Communion.
This has caused me to change my view toward the Reformed people in the Robinson River Valley. Out of a need to have a place to hold a Communion service, they perhaps did build the chapel. Ministers probably came by invitation to hold a Communion service.
There is another rite that you might wonder about, and that is baptism. Anyone can perform a baptism. A midwife or a parent can do this. If the baby is not expected to live, it can be baptized immediately by anyone who knows the formula, which is relatively simple. Because baptism could be likened to joining the Kingdom of Heaven, you could, in theory, only be baptized once. So, most churches recognize baptisms by other churches or by private individuals.
John Hofmann, Reformed church member, had twelve children baptized in the Robinson River Valley. I have always wondered who did this. Some of these baptisms were done before there was a Lutheran minister in the community, and after Pastor Häger had died. Did John Hoffmann do it himself? Possibly.
(20 Sep 01)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.