Philip William Otterbein

Philip William Otterbein (June 3, 1726 – November 17, 1813) was a U.S. (German-born) clergyman. He was the founder of the United Brethren in Christ, a group that is a forerunner of today's United Methodist Church.

Philip William Otterbein was born in Dillenburg (near Wiesbaden), Germany, into a family that included many clergy. He attended the Reformed seminary at Herborn and was ordained June 13, 1749. He volunteered for missionary work in Pennsylvania, and arrived in New York on July 27, 1752. He served several German speaking parishes near the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, finally moving to the Second Evangelical Reformed Church in Baltimore, where he was pastor from 1774 until his death in 1813. The building where Otterbein preached is still used for worship, and the congregation is now called Old Otterbein United Methodist Church. It is located next to the Baltimore convention center, and is close to the baseball field Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

In 1767 or 1768, Otterbein was present at a worship service in Long’s Barn near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Martin Boehm, a Mennonite who had been born in Lancaster, preached, and after the service Otterbein came forward and greeted Boehm with words that became famous in United Brethren tradition: “Wir sind Brűder” (We are brothers). From that day forward they had a close working relationship. Norwood comments that “They were an interesting pair: Otterbein the stately university-trained minister and Boehm the Mennonite farmer with a full beard.” A few years later Boehm was excommunicated by the Mennonites.

By 1773 Otterbein was organizing religious classes on the Wesleyan model, and on the day he began pastoral duties in Baltimore, May 4, 1774, he met Francis Asbury who would be his friend throughout the remainder of his life. Asbury asked Otterbein to be one of four clergy who would lay hands on him when Asbury was ordained (or consecrated) as Methodist bishop, December 27, 1784, when the Methodist Episcopal Church was officially organized. Otterbein died on Wednesday, November 17, 1813. His funeral took place on Saturday, the 20th; the funeral sermon was preached by Rev. J. D. Kurtz in German and delivered in English translation by William Ryland who would later serve several terms as Chaplain of the Senate. In a memorial sermon in that same year, Asbury called him “the great, the holy Otterbein.”

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