When Ephrata, Pa., was announced as the site for the denomination’s first L.E.A.D. Conference last November, it was intriguing that Ephrata Cloister—site of the first schism in the Brethren movement—would be literally just down the road.
As present-day Brethren prepared to gather at Ephrata Church of the Brethren to learn about leadership in the church today, Messenger asked Jeff Bach, a leading scholar of the Ephrata Community, what might be learned from the history of that community and its charismatic, break-away leader Conrad Beissel.
Bach arranged a personal tour with staff of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, which in partnership with the Ephrata Cloister Associates administers the site now owned by the state. Led by museum educators Sophie Walters and Dan Roe, and accompanied by Bach, the tour included areas of two original buildings that are not usually open to visitors: the upper floors of the sisters’ house called Saron and the meetinghouse called Saal.
The tour was like attending a master class that inspired a new appreciation of this unique expression of Christian community, or, as a cloister brochure calls it, the “Holy Experiment.” —Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford
Three hundred years ago, on Nov. 12, 1724, Peter Becker baptized six people in Pequea Creek in what is now Lancaster County, Pa. He was on a tour with men from the Germantown congregation near Philadelphia—the first Brethren congregation in America—to preach, baptize, and organize new congregations. On Nov. 7 that year they had organized the second congregation in America, Coventry, near present-day Pottstown.
As Becker finished immersing the six people in Pequea Creek, a seventh person came forward. Conrad Beissel (1691-1768) received baptism. He had lived with Becker upon arriving in Germantown in 1720 and learned weaving from him. After a year, Beissel moved to the area around the Conestoga River, living in a communal household with three fellow immigrants. The fellowship broke up and Beissel built a small hermit cabin nearby in 1723. Michael Wohlfart joined him. In 1724, Becker invited them to the worship meeting on Nov. 12.
Born Georg Conrad Beissel in Eberbach, Germany, on March 1, 1691, he was the last of 10 children. His father, Mathes, the town baker, died six months after his birth. His mother, Anna (Köbler) Beissel, died when he was eight. After time with an uncle who was a Reformed Church schoolmaster, Beissel returned to Eberbach to learn baking from his eldest brother.
Beissel landed in Heidelberg, Germany, as a journeyman baker for a baker named Prior sometime before 1715. Here he associated with a small fellowship of Radical Pietist separatists. He experienced religious conversion in 1715. The group in Heidelberg was strongly influenced by the mystical writings of Jacob Boehme, especially their interpretation by Johann Georg Gichtel (1638-1710), who published the complete works of Jacob Boehme.
Beissel fell into conflict with the bakers’ guild for his religious activity. He left Heidelberg around 1717 and moved to the Marienborn area of the principality of Ysenburg-Büdingen. The prince there tolerated religious dissenters. Beissel lived with Jacob Schatz and family. Schatz was a baker from Frankenthal who also had to move away due to religious conflict with other bakers.
Schatz was a member of a new group, the Community of True Inspiration, founded in 1714. The Inspirationists believed that the Holy Spirit still gives divine messages directly to prophets. The messages were considered as inspired as scripture. Although Beissel did not formally join the group, he absorbed their views about divine prophecy and considered himself a prophet.
Schatz lived in the town of Düdelsheim in Ysenburg. This town had been the home of Peter Becker, later Beissel’s weaving teacher in Germantown. In 1714, Becker and his wife were baptized by the Brethren, who had formed a congregation in the Marienborn area in 1711. The Brethren insistence on scripture as it reads clashed with the Inspirationist beliefs in direct revelation from the Holy Spirit. The prince of Ysenburg could no longer tolerate the Brethren, who continued to evangelize and baptize new members. He expelled the Brethren in 1715 and they moved to Krefeld. They had been gone about two years before Beissel arrived in Düdelsheim. However, Beissel later mentioned knowing Becker’s parents and two sisters. He surely knew of the Brethren before he moved to America in 1720.
When Conrad Beissel was baptized in November 1724, his religious views were already firmly shaped since his conversion. He absorbed Boehme’s mysticism as taught by Gichtel. He embraced the belief in direct revelation from the Holy Spirit. Beissel was aware of Brethren teachings and ordinances. He was also familiar with the writings of the Philadelphian Society, a group in England devoted to Boehme’s writings that was led by Jane Leade, who considered herself to be a prophet.
A very different course
The new congregation at Conestoga chose Beissel as their leader. What no one fully appreciated was the fact that Beissel’s religious formation would lead to a very different course from the rest of the Brethren. Within the first year, he began to teach observing the Sabbath on Saturday, the seventh day, rather than on Sunday. He also preached that celibacy was superior to marriage, which he taught was only a temporary stage to be abandoned for celibacy in order to be completely devoted and united to Jesus Christ.
Tensions increased between Beissel and the original congregation of Brethren in Germantown. He visited and preached in other areas where Brethren and religious separatists lived, attracting new followers. In 1728, Beissel formally broke with the Brethren by rebaptizing several supporters in the Conestoga congregation. He “gave back” to the Brethren the baptism that he had received from them.
By 1728, Beissel and some others who adopted celibacy were living in shared cabins on the land of Rudolf Nägele, an aged Mennonite minister from Germany. In early autumn of 1732 Beissel abruptly departed and moved about seven miles away to the banks of Cocalico Creek, where the historic site of the Ephrata Community stands, now in the city of Ephrata, Pa. The creek derived its name from a Lenape word that the Germans heard as “Koch-Halekung,” meaning “den of serpents,” named for the many snakes living near the creek. Beissel moved into a rough cabin already built by Emmanuel Eckerlin, a member of Beissel’s congregation. Within three months, three other celibate men joined Beissel, forming the nucleus of a new community. In the winter of 1732-1733, Anna and Maria Eicher moved there and the brothers built a cabin for them on the opposite side of the creek.
Beissel named the growing community “Ephrata.” More commonly, the members called their place the “Camp of the Solitary.” They never called themselves a “cloister,” a term used by later historians. The members called themselves “Seventh-Dayers” (Sieben-Täger). Outsiders called them “Beisselians.”
Beissel’s teachings appealed to lingering Radical Pietist interests among some Brethren. He attracted members from other Brethren settlements, including about one third of the Germantown congregation. That number included the oldest and youngest sons of Alexander Mack Sr., who was the leading figure among the first Brethren: Johan Valentin and Alexander Jr. The approximately 12 members from Germantown went to Ephrata between 1736 and 1739, after Mack Sr. died in 1735. Mack Jr. returned to the Germantown congregation in 1748 and became their minister.
Beissel presented his views in writings published before 1732. In 1728 he wrote a book defending the seventh-day Sabbath, stating that it was a gift of grace and that it prefigured the eternal Sabbath, when Christ would return soon and establish his kingdom. Beissel released three books in 1730. One book attacked marriage and promoted celibacy. Two small booklets offered several mystical proverbs. The group published a hymnal in 1730 and another one in 1732.
Beissel’s teaching on celibacy resonated with the teachings of Hochmann von Hochenau, the one-time spiritual mentor of Mack Sr. Hochenau taught that the highest of five levels of marriage is total celibacy in order to be united with Christ. The lowest level is marriage for sexual gratification. Later, Beissel would write to a friend in Germany that marriage creates order in nature for “animal-people” who live in lust, “so that they do not chase each other like cattle.” By contrast, Mack Sr. wrote that marriage was instituted in Paradise.
Beissel’s core theology, derived from Gichtel’s interpretation of Boehme, created the framework for celibacy and the denigration of marriage. Drawing on Boehme, Beissel believed that God has both male and female characteristics, and the female aspect he personified as the Heavenly Virgin Sophia. The Philadelphian Society and Gottfried Arnold also held these views about Sophia.
According to Boehme, Gichtel, and Beissel, God created Adam to consist of both characteristics. Gichtel taught that Adam lost his female aspect when he saw the animals reproducing. Adam desired a mate also. God created Eve to be Adam’s companion, but they both had bodies of divine material and were celibate. When they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they fell into lust and their bodies became fully fleshly. Beissel built on these views to say that Adam had a two-fold fall into sin and people need a two-fold conversion to reverse the falls.
According to Beissel (and Boehme and Gichtel), because Jesus was a virginal man born of the pure virgin, Mary, Jesus had the divine female component, Sophia, that Adam lost. By faith in Christ’s redemptive death and resurrection, a seeker could experience the death of fleshly desires and a spiritual rebirth effected by Jesus Christ and Sophia together. The rebirth would create the desire to live celibately, imitating the angels. Baptism is the sign of death to physical desires. Beissel built his views on reformulations of biblical passages.
Life in the Ephrata Community
Celibate members at Ephrata adopted spiritual names and considered themselves to be spiritual priests in the order of Melchizedek. Like most Radical Pietists and the early Brethren, Beissel believed that Christ would return very soon in judgment.
The Ephrata Community practiced other ordinances of the Brethren. They observed the love feast much like the Brethren, with a time of examination, feetwashing, a love meal, and the bread and cup of communion. Ephrata members practiced the double mode of feetwashing, in which one person washes and a second person dries the feet of two people, and then pass on the towel and basin. At communion, members came forward to a table and received the elements directly from Beissel. The Ephrata Community practiced anointing for healing. Beissel created the innovation of baptism on behalf of the dead by immersing a proxy person who wished to impart baptism for a deceased person.
Between 1735 and 1746, the Ephrata Community constructed large monastic dormitories and attached meetinghouses or chapels. The brothers built five large dormitories and four attached meetinghouses. An additional dormitory was planned for 1749, but members abandoned the project.
The interiors of the monastic buildings were adorned with large and small placards written in the ornamented Gothic lettering known as Fraktur. The sisters and some of the brothers also created many handwritten, illustrated music books. The sisters created a unique book called The Christians’ ABC. It was a large folio volume consisting of two complete ornamented alphabets of upper case letters, followed by alphabets of lower case letters and numbers.
Beissel developed a unique style of musical harmonization and tune creation, beginning around 1740. Over the next 26 years, he and the members of the community created well over 1,000 hymn texts and hundreds of tunes. Christopher Herbert, a musicologist, identified three women as composers of some tunes: Sister Ketura (Catharina Hagemann), Sister Hannah (Hannah Lichty), and Sister Föben (Christina Lässle). They are probably the earliest women composers identified by name in America. The Fraktur calligraphy and music composition and singing were considered to be spiritual disciplines to renounce fleshly desires and to devote oneself to spiritual union with Christ.
Listen to music from Ephrata
Ephrata operated a prolific printing enterprise beginning around 1745. It was the second most important German-language press after Christopher Sauer in colonial America. In 1748, they printed the largest book in the colonies, the Mennonite book called the Martyrs Mirror. It contained more than 1,200 pages.
Under the leadership of the men’s prior, Israel Eckerlin (who served 1741-1745), and his oldest brother, Samuel, the community profited from mills that they built on Cocalico Creek. Devoted to poverty, Beissel opposed the profiteering of the Eckerlins and expelled them (except for their brother Emmanuel) in 1745. At that time, Beissel thoroughly reorganized the celibate orders.
The Ephrata Community reached its peak between 1745 and 1755, with about 300 members including about 40 men and about 40 women in the celibate orders. The other members were married families, known as householders, who were strongly devoted to Beissel. During these years, the community created its largest output of printing, choral composition, Fraktur pieces, and music books.
Around 1760, Ephrata started to decline as Beissel aged. Between 1762 and 1764, a disruptive three-way power struggle erupted over who would succeed Beissel and control the communal land. With Beissel’s death in 1768, the land issues were resolved and Peter Miller, Beissel’s long-time second in command, emerged as his successor.
The community continued to fade. After the last three celibate women died between 1811 and 1813, the householders reorganized as the German Seventh Day Baptists. A daughter community with celibate members and communal housing formed at Snow Hill near Waynesboro, Pa. Their last celibate member died in 1895.
The Bermudian congregation of Brethren grew initially out of Ephrata members. Eventually this congregation assimilated into what would be known as the Church of the Brethren. An additional, very small congregation with no celibate members formed at Salemville, Pa. It continues to the present, but never had celibate orders.
The Ephrata congregation ceased to meet in 1934 and in 1941 they sold the property to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to become a museum.
The first separation among the Brethren
The primary factor behind Ephrata as the first separation among the Brethren was that Conrad Beissel’s religious views were firmly set by influences of other groups during the eight years before. His was not the case of a member who gradually grew disaffected from the body. Some of his themes resonated with the Brethren, such as high regard for celibacy, shared economic resources, simple living, and the ordinances that Beissel adopted. However, Beissel built his religious framework primarily on Boehme, rather than exclusively on the New Testament.
Beissel’s strong charisma strengthened his role as a leader of a separating group. Even Alexander Mack Sr., who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1729 and attempted reconciliation, could not heal the break. Antagonism between the Germantown congregation of the Brethren and the Ephrata Community hardened the lines of separation. For these reasons, the separation of Ephrata from the Brethren provides very few insights for understanding later divisions among the Brethren.
In 1995, I interviewed the last living baptized member of the Ephrata German Seventh Day Baptist church and asked how she understood Conrad Beissel. She said that the German Seventh Day Baptists remembered him as a devout, prayerful, and gentle man. They understood his teaching about the Sabbath to represent a commandment that Jesus never set aside. She noted that in her congregation members believed that the Germantown leaders had been hasty and pushy, hastening the division on their side.
The author (or editor) of the Ephrata Chronicle (Chronicon Ephratense), published in 1786, gave an insightful interpretation for the separation of the two groups. “A close union between them was impossible,” he wrote. “For they were born of diverse causes, since the one had the letter for its foundation, and the other the spirit; and while both had the same Father, they had different mothers.” Beissel believed that direct spiritual revelations guided him. The Brethren had turned to collectively interpreting the written scripture to guard against elevating private, individual revelation.
Whatever members of the various Brethren bodies today may think about Ephrata, we would do well to remember that personality, power, cultural influences, and competing religious teachings contribute to such conflicts.
How they lived
The interior of Saron, the celibate sisters’ house, gives an idea of how the Ephrata Community lived day-to-day. The plainness of the building belies their rich spiritual life. Each woman had her own private cell as living quarters, with a wooden bench and a block of wood or a rounded stone for a bed and pillow. In the communal spaces, large hearths were used for cooking, and iron stoves provided heat. The women joined in the work that supported the community, but also had times of leisure that women in the general population would not. They spent a portion of each day in contemplative practices we’d call artistic, such as writing and drawing Fraktur, choral singing, and even composing music. –Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford
Jeff Bach is retired from 13 years of service directing the Young Center for Anabaptist and
Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown (Pa.) College, and previously was associate professor of Brethren Studies at Bethany Theological Seminary. He is the author of Voices of the Turtledoves: The
Sacred World of Ephrata (Penn State University Press, 2003).