History
The Evangelical Congregational (EC) Church traces its roots to the conversion of Jacob Albright, a Pennsylvania German farmer, in a Methodist class meeting. His conviction was to bring the Christian faith to his neighbors at a time when the Methodist Church did not allow worship services to be conducted in the German language. His converts took the name Evangelische Gemeinschaft (Evangelical Association) in 1816, and the church prospered until the 1890s, when a large minority of the Association reorganized as the United Evangelical (UE) Church in 1894. Faculty and students from the Association’s Schuylkill Seminary moved to the former campus of Palatinate College in Myerstown in 1894 and established Albright College. Subsequently the college relocated to Reading, PA in 1928 after the Evangelical Association and the United Evangelical Church merged in 1922 to form the Evangelical Church which subsequently merged into The United Methodist Church. At the same time, the East Pennsylvania Conference and other congregations of the United Evangelical Church that had abstained from the merger reorganized as the Evangelical Congregational Church and bought the campus of the college that they had so long supported as the site for a publishing house, retirement home, and educational institution.
Read more about this topic: Evangelical Theological Seminary
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