Psalms and potatoes: The congregations of the Polish-speaking Protestant Mazurians in East Prussia, Suwalki, Poland, and the United States. (Volumes I and II).

Abstract

Psalms and Potatoes examines the experience of the Polish-speaking Protestant Mazurians, Lutheran and Baptist, in East Prussia, Suwalki, and the United States. Beginning with their settlement in East Prussia by the Teutonic Knights, the study documents their conversion under Albrecht of Hohenzollern as well as the creation and development of the first territorial church. In the nineteenth century, an era of extensive reform in agriculture and education, the church in Mazuria (Masuria) was struggling to minister to its Polish-speaking constituency. Baptist missionaries travelled the province and after converting large numbers of Mazurians helped them establish Baptist congregations - self-sufficient worshipping communities. Rhenish evangelists arrived and helped Lutheran Mazurians establish Gromadki units - prayer societies that developed into semi-sufficient worshipping communities. Looking for land, Baptist Mazurians migrated in the 1860s to Volhynia in the Ukraine and then to Pound, Wisconsin, in the 1880s. They transplanted their churches, but their presence in Wisconsin excited American Baptist missionaries and encouraged them in their missionary efforts to Polish Catholic communities. Lutherans arrived in the United States in the 1880s, and a small group eventually settled in Minnesota. Kin from Suwalki migrated in the 1890s but found jobs in the mines and factories of America's industrial centers because they initially intended to return to Poland. Their premigration experience in the Gromadki initially filled their spiritual vacuum, but they needed a pastor. Their interaction with the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod led to the creation of congregations with constitutions and clerics - new experiences that transformed the Mazurian worshipping communities. Baptist and Lutheran Mazurians transplanted their premigration piety in their churches, but their children eventually lost their ethnic identity because the congregations never became ethnic institutions. The peasant migrants maintained their premigration identity, but with no fraternal organizations or ethnic advocates, the second generation never understood the term Mazurian.