John Seybert and the Evangelical Heritage

The Evangelical Association was a revival movement at the beginning of the 19th century, which reached out to the large numbers of German- Americans who had settled throughout the mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states. Their founder, Jacob Albright (1758-1808), and his colaborers developed indigenous and distinctive patterns of hymnody and worship set in a German idiom. For three decades after Albright's death, the Evangelicals were without a bishop until in 1839 a promising young circuit preacher named John Seybert was made the first "constitutional" bishop of the Evangelicals. This book traces the history and ministry of this founding father of what eventually became the United Methodist Church.