The Prussian Union Forcibly Merges Lutheran and Reformed Churches

Sixty nine years after Lutheranism was established in North America between 1742 and 1748, already recorded here, and thirty years before the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, organized in Chicago in 1847, also recorded here, the Prussian crown dissolved Lutheranism's separate legal identity within its own territory. On 27 September 1817, King Frederick William III of Prussia decreed the union of the kingdom's Lutheran and Reformed churches into a single state controlled Evangelical Church, later requiring congregations to surrender the name Lutheran and adopt a new liturgy that Lutheran clergy read as compromising their doctrine of the real presence in communion. Christopher Clark's peer reviewed study of the union in The Historical Journal traces the decade of decrees, fines, imprisonments and confiscated churches Prussia used against pastors who kept using historic Lutheran rites, and the movement of confessional Old Lutherans who refused the merger into an organized dissenting church of their own. The International Lutheran Council's own account of the union's bicentennial situates the resulting Old Lutheran emigrations to Australia and North America within the same decades that produced the confessional immigrant Lutheran synods, the Missouri Synod chief among them, that the Prussian state church the union created was never able to absorb.