As a result of such provisions, missionary efforts of other denominations, such as the Baptists and the Methodists, made considerable headway not only among English Settlers, but also among German Protestants who wanted to adopt the language and culture of their new homeland.
However, early Methodist Churches also used German. The Laughery Methodist Mission was established in 1845. Its early records, written in German, show immigrants from the same villages in the Osnabrueck vicinity from which the Huntersville families also came. Those records are now in DePaw University archives.
There were two major German Protestant deominatiions in the Batesville vicinity. the Lutherans and the Evangelical Protestants.
The Evangelical Protestant Churches trace their origin to the State Church of Prussia which was organized in the early 19th century at the behest of Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia to unite Lutheran and Calvinist (Reformed) churches. Other German states followed suit. Today almost all of the Protestant Churches in Germany are known as "Evangelical Lutheran" as a result of this merger.
Six ministers in the United States from the new state churches in Germany organizd the German Evangelical Synod of North America in 1840. However, Lutheran churches in America were not forced to merge with Calvinist churches. Consequently, most of them maintained their earlier identity and organized their own synods.
German congregations on the frontier needed ministers. The association of a congregation with either a Lutheran synod or the Evangelical Protestant synod was sometimes determined by the particular pastor the congregation had chosen.
Thus both Lutheran and Evangelical Protestant churches in the Batesville vicinity trace their history back to what are today called Evangelical Lutheran Churches in Germany. The mother church of Adams Lutheran is the Evangelical Lutheran Church at Heiligenfelde, Germany, and the mother churches of Huntersville Evangelical Protestant (U.C.C.)Church are the Evangelical Lutheran Churches at Engter and Venne.
The Evangelical Protestant Churches later merged with other Reformed(Calvinst) churches to become known as Evangelical & Reformed. In recent years, they have further combined with the Conregational and Christian churches (which had previously merged) to form the United Church of Christ. These U.C.C. churches include Huntersville, Penntown, St. Jacob's at Blue Creek, Fink's Church and St. Peter's at Klemme's Corner.
Lutheran churches in this area, such as Crossroads and Adams Church, eventually became associated with the American Lutheran Church. These two denomoninations are in the process of combining with a third denomination, the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches to form the new Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
The next chapter will deal with the political and economic background of northern Germany and how it affected immigration to this area of Indiana.