Albertus van Raalte in Deutschland - pagina 11

Church. Since 1873 marriage and birth records were written by the local government and not anymore by the churches. Even till 1873 every new born child had to be registered in the official church and every couple had to see the reformed minister of their municipality in order to get a marriage certificate. In some places members of old reformed congregations had to pay taxes for the local Reformed Church even after 1900. The severe persecutions by church and government made many Oldreformed people, families and even nearly complete congregations emigrate to the US. Jan Berend Sundag, one of the leaders and later minister of the ORC was imprisoned 28 times mostly between 1838 and 1845. He was in jail between some days and four weeks for preaching the gospel.i Others like Schoemaker, Diek, Broene, Huisken and Oelerink too were imprisoned for the same reason.ii The financial punishment was doubled every time for everyone who was caught by the policemen at a forbidden church service. Some people lost many possessions for attending these services.iii Services were broken up by armed policemen.iv The emigration started in 1847 and went on for other reasons till after World War I and even World War II. Even after World War II nearly ten percent of the church of Hoogstede emigrated to the United States about 25 of the 250 members. Among them where large families and singles, children and adults. A hundred years earlier all but one of the founding consistory members of the two ORC congregations in Hoogstede and Emlichheim had emigrated. These two consistories had been established on the 25th of May in 1845 in the neighboring Dutch city of Coevorden. This is about ten kilometers from Emlichheim and nearly twenty from Hoogstede.v It was impossible at that time in 1845 to institute a church outside the official church in the Kingdom of Hannover without being imprisoned. The ORC of Hoogstede ceased its existence soon in 1850 because most of the members had gone to the US. It was not re-established until 1953. The church of Emlichheim had to elect new elders and deacons in 1847 because the consistory had left for America.vi In the next 35 years, about twenty percent of the members of the ORC of Emlichheim followed them. These more than one hundred members mostly became a part of the Graafschap Christian Reformed Church, which was founded in 1857. I suspect that among them there are many more than the four percent who were registered as having religious reasons for their departure, while for over ninety percent economic motives were listed.vii Many more people from the northern part of the County emigrated than from the southern part. The poor northern part had connections with Van Raalte, the more affluent southern with De Cock.

Bridges to the US Historian Herbert Brinks calculated that the ORC: ”… lost a large percentage of its ministers to emigration. Thirty percent of the pastorate from Ostfriesland and 15 percent from Bentheim were drawn to the New World.”viii He gives the names of eleven ministers emigrating between 1866 and 1912. To illustrate the drain of the ORC, the situation in Uelsen may suffice. In 1881 J.H. Vos left. His three successors followed him: W.R. Smidt in 1882, H. Potgeter in 1885, and J.H. Schulz in 1892. This means that in the decade between 1881 and 1892, four of the eight ministers who served the church at Uelsen since 1848 had left for the US.ix The ministers were held responsible by the local government and the police for unrest. Police, local government and the local reformed church in 1882 in Emlichheim tried to prevent the building of a Oldreformed church. Even 1884 windows of the parsonage of Henricus Beuker in Emlichheim were broken by people, who did not want to have an oldreformed minister at this place. x Also personal frustration might have stimulated their departure. Their congregations hardly increased. They decided to start over again with the same zeal in the US. It seems to me like a closed circle: ministers left their congregations and emigrated. Since many members of their congregations followed them, the congregations became weaker and less capable of supporting their minister. Rev. J. Plescher and H. Potgeter left Neermoor for the US in 1885 and 1889 too for financial reasons. Other congregations also were pretty small and poor. But of course a minister never will write or tell somebody that this is a reason to leave for another church. Many must have been frustrated living and working in poor circumstances. The situation in the US proved to be too tempting. Herbert Brinks discovered that ten out of the fourteen German ministers who served the ORC in Ostfriesland between 1854 and 1900 received calls from the Ostfrisian-Americans, and seven accepted the call.xi Brinks goes on: ”Emigration affected the Neermoor congregation with exceptional force as more than a third of that

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