Bethlehem Lutheran Church

Texas Lutherans formed their first synod in Houston in November 1851, when five ministers sent from the Pilger Mission at St. Chrischona, near Basel, organized it under a chairman who had come from the Pittsburgh Synod. It joined the General Synod in 1853, left it in 1868 and entered the General Council in 1869, the year Bethlehem first hosted a synod meeting. Swiss-trained pastors kept arriving, at least eighty-five by 1896, when a vote to join the Iowa Synod split the Texas Synod in two. Bethlehem itself was founded in the spring after the synod's founding.

What the plaque says

Bethlehem Lutheran Church The Rev. Christian Oefinger, serving as pastor of the Castroville Lutheran Church, led in founding this congregation in March 1852. The first church building was dedicated in 1854, coincidental with a synod convention held in Castroville. Bethlehem Lutheran Church hosted synod meetings in 1869, 1875, and 1894. The present brick structure, dedicated in 1914, was built largely by parishioners. St. John's Lutheran Church of New Fountain, founded in the late 1850s by the Rev. A. Kitterer and served by Bethlehem's pastors, merged with this congregation in 1949. (1977)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Landmark Inn State Historic Site — 9.7 mi
  A store and stage stop at the Medina River ford in Henri Castro's Alsatian town, with a mill race under the ground and rooms you can still rent for the night.
• Frontier Times Museum — 23 mi
  A museum built of fossils, petrified wood and cave formations in Bandera, holding a printer-historian's collection of frontier relics and oddities.

More markers nearby

• Town of Quihi — 0.2 mi
• New Fountain United Methodist Church — 1.8 mi
• Vandenburg — 5.5 mi
• Medina County — 7.2 mi