Jacob C. Gottschalk - Ministry

Ministry

Around 1690 the Germantown Mennonite congregation elected William Rittenhouse as its first preacher and Jan Neuss as a deacon. The first ordained bishop of the congregation was Jacob Gottschalk who came to America in 1702.

In 1708 Jacob joined in a letter to friends in Amsterdam requesting their European friends to send them some catechisms, besides psalm books and Bibles as there was but one copy of the Bible in their whole membership.

In 1712, had the Dordrecht Confession of Faith translated into English and printed.

In 1725, he met with sixteen other ministers from southeastern Pennsylvania and adopted the Dutch Mennonite Dordrecht Confession of Faith (1632). They also wrote the following endorsement of which he was the first to sign:

We the hereunder written Servants of the Word of God, and Elders in the Congregation of the People, called Mennonists, in the Province of Pennsylvania, do acknowledge, and herewith make known, that we do own the foregoing Confession, Apendix, and Menno's Excusation, to be according to our Opinion; and also, have took the same to be wholly ours. In Testimony whereof, and that we believe that same to be good, we have here unto Subscribed our Names.

In 1745, he arranged with the Ephrata Cloister to have them translate from Dutch into German and print Thieleman J. van Braght's 1660 The Bloody Theatre or Martyrs Mirror of Defensless Christians, the work took 15 men three years to finish and in 1749, at 1512 pages, was the largest book printed in America before the Revolutionary War. One of the original volumes is now on display at the Ephrata Cloister.