Johann Gottfried Arends, born December 11, 1740, came to North Carolina as a teacher in 1773 after German church leaders answered a request from sixty Rowan families carried by Christopher Lyerly and Christopher Rendleman and endorsed by Governor Tryon and King George III for the colony’s 3,000 German Protestants by commissioning Pastor Nussmann and Arends. Their pastoral and educational ministry extended seventy miles east and west. Arends was ordained at Organ Church in August 1774 after Nussmann moved to Buffalo Creek. During sixteen years of his First Communion Record, 885 names were listed in instructional groups of about twelve girls and eight boys. In 1775 Arends married Hannah Rudisill and ten years later moved near her Lincoln County home, continuing some work eastward for several years. Called the Father of the Lutheran Church beyond the Catawba River, he served more than twenty different congregations, nearly all of them in North Carolina. Approaching blindness hindered his later ministry, and when he died on July 9, 1807, some congregations still listed him as pastor. In 1803 Arends was elected first president of the synod and had been secretary of an earlier homeland-aided ministerium. Adolphus Nussmann, born July 12, 1739, was regarded as a man of tremendous faith, a scholar with theological insight, and a Franciscan Christian with compassion for his fellow man. This Lutheran apostle to North Carolina saw twenty congregations established on the most distant border of the civilized world during the American Revolution and Independence, from 1773 to 1794. Baptized on the day of his birth by the Catholic Church in Munster, Westphalia, he was converted to the Lutheran faith from the Franciscan Order, instructed in Lutheran theology at Göttingen University, and chosen by the Consistory of Hanover to answer the call from North Carolina. He supported the patriots and, though tortured by Tories, remained in North Carolina to proclaim the word of God, seeing many members of St. John’s in Cabarrus County serve in the American army. After independence, he enlisted help from the Helmstedt Missionary Society for the North Carolina mission, lived to see five other Lutheran clergymen labor in the Piedmont, sponsored a school for every congregation, and in 1785 was appointed a trustee by the North Carolina General Assembly to establish an academy in Salisbury. He died in November 1794.