The Prayer Book in German: Anglicans and Lutherans in 18th century North America

On Canadian Thanksgiving Day, in giving thanks for the role of the United Empire Loyalists in ensuring that, after the American War, the Anglican way took root in the lands of Canada, we were introduced to the SPG missionary John Doty.  As he ministered to a small community of Loyalists in Sorel, Quebec, he informed the Society in London that it was a "mixed society consisting of Dissenters, Lutherans, and churchmen". He noted, however, that his being the only Protestant service in the area, "all attend Divine worship":

The Dissenters conforming to the liturgy, and the Lutherans, without exception, declaring to be members of our church.

It is the reference to the Lutherans that is particularly interesting because it continues a pattern that was seen in the American colonies before the rebellion.  For example, SPG and the Bishop of London helped to support Swedish churches in Delaware, including employing missionaries in Swedish orders to minister to these communities.

As one study notes, SPG's requirement that its missionaries be in Anglican orders, had an exception: 

SPG waived this requisite for Swedish missionaries because the Swedish Lutheran Church, which had retained an episcopal form, was considered to have a special relationship to the Church of England ... The Society applied this policy consistently throughout the decades before the American Revolution.

Where Lutheran clergy were not available, Anglican clergy - particularly SPG missionaries - routinely ministered to Swedish and German communities. Anglican and Lutheran clergy could also be found working together, ministering to the same Swedish communities. The study also references SPG sending Prayer Books in German when requested to do so by the clergy ministering to those communities.  

The participation of Lutherans in Doty's newly-founded Anglican church in Sorel, therefore, was a continuation of a well-established relationship. Nor did it stop there.  When Brunswickers, who had fought for the Crown in the American War, also settled in Sorel, "Mr. Doty requested the Society to provide some German Prayer Books ... The German Prayer Books were subsequently received and followed faithfully by the Lutherans". Here was a further expression of the close relationship between Anglicans and Lutherans maintained in the colonies before the War.  

What is the significance of this relationship between Anglicans - not least the High Church SPG - and Lutherans in the American colonies and then in Canada? To begin with, it reflects the long-standing aspirations seen in Laud's hopes for a Union of the Churches of the Northern Kingdom, post-1662 emphasis on Anglican similarities with Lutheranism, and early 18th century Anglican accounts of Lutheranism (continued, of course, with the Hanoverian succession).  What is more, such relationships continued well into the 19th century with, for example, the Bishop of London officially requesting the Bishop of Gothenburg in 1837 to confirm the children of English residents of that city. In other words, when the Lutherans in Sorel declared themselves to be members of the Church of England, and when Doty ministered to them without any hesitation or qualification, this was no frontier experiment but the expression of a deep and enduring Anglican-Lutheran understanding - a deep and enduring understanding which has now found expression in the Porvoo Communion.

It also contrasts, of course, with later Anglo-Catholic prejudices, already indicated by the Tractarian opposition to the Jerusalem Bishopric proposal (an initiative which was, as Nockles states, "in the best traditions of Laudianism"). When, for example, the then thoroughly Anglo-Catholic Church Times in 1920 responded to the participation of English bishops in the consecration of a Swedish bishop by declaring that beneath the ceremonial of the Church of Sweden lay "the narrowest type of Lutheran Protestantism", it is easy to imagine how utterly confused the earlier SPG missionaries in American colonies would have been.  It was precisely because the Church of England and the Church of Sweden were Protestant episcopal churches that such a close relationship existed in the 18th century and beyond.  The Anglo-Catholic rejection of this historic relationship was the result of the Tractarian invention of an ahistorical view that Anglicanism was not Protestant.  

Finally, and rather more speculatively, the experience in the American colonies might also assist in explaining the strange tale of the proposal by John Adams that the Church of Denmark consecrate bishops for Protestant Episcopalians in the newly-independent United States of America.  It does not seem so odd when we consider the close relationship between the Church of England and Lutherans in the former colonies.

(The drawing is the Lutheran church in Germantown, Pennsylvania, built in 1750. Prior to this, the Lutheran congregation worshipped in a local Anglican church.)