Reorus Torkillus Organizes the First Lutheran Congregation in North America at Fort Christina

Sixty years after the Book of Concord unified Lutheran doctrine in 1580, already recorded here, and sixty six years before Ziegenbalg and Plutschau founded the Danish Halle mission at Tranquebar in 1706, also recorded here, the Swedish pastor Reorus Torkillus arrived at Fort Christina on the Delaware River, near present day Wilmington, on 17 April 1640, having sailed with the second expedition to the colony of New Sweden aboard the Kalmar Nyckel. Torkillus organized the first Lutheran congregation to exist in what would become the United States, holding services in a blockhouse at the fort and beginning plans for the settlement's first log churches before his death there in 1643, when John Campanius succeeded him. The congregation he founded outlived the Swedish colony itself, which Dutch and then English forces absorbed within two decades, continuing to worship in Swedish under a line of Swedish born pastors well into the eighteenth century; its burial ground later held the church still standing today as Holy Trinity, Old Swedes, among the oldest church buildings in the United States still standing substantially as built. Torkillus's 1640 arrival predates by more than a century the German led ministerium Henry Muhlenberg organized in Pennsylvania in 1742, and marks the continent's first Lutheran congregation rather than its first durable denominational structure, a distinction historians of American Lutheranism draw carefully between the early Swedish river settlements and the German synod that followed them.