Bethlehem church, in Flinders Street from 1872, links back to first German Lutherans in the Adelaide city centre
Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Flinders Street, Adelaide city. The church was South Australian state heritage listed in 1986.
The Bethlehem church, opened in 1872 in Flinders Steet, Adelaide city, grew out of the needs of the German Lutherans in Adelaide city from the 1830s.
Dresden missionaries, Christian Teichelmann, Clamor Wilhelm Schurmann and Samuel Klose, had been working among the Kaurna Aboriginal people on the Native Location near the River Torrens in the 1930s and tried to gather city centre German Lutherans into a congregation. The city German Lutherans were separated from pastor August Kavel’s congregation in the village of Klemzig, north of Adelaide, and later the Baross Valley.
The city Lutherans did get the Trinity Church in 1846 but tensions over doctrinal differences led to a separate congregation being formed in 1850. Two years later, Trinity Church had most of its male congregation leave for the Victorian goldfields.
The definite start for what became the Bethlehem congregation could be traced to 1860 when about six families withdrew from Pastor Borgelt’s Klemzig congregation on scriptural and confessional grounds. With several families who’d belonged to Trinity congregation, as well as a others not affiliated with any group, they formed the nucleus of Bethlehem Lutheran Church. After outgrowing the former Primitive Methodist church, that they took over in Waymouth Street on Light Square, the congregation bought land for the present Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Flinders Street, Adelaide city.
In 1868, the congregation decided that it should have its own permanent minister and sent instructions to Germany for his selection. Its first pastor was Dresden missionary Johann Meischel who’d been working among the Tamils of South India for the Dresden Mission Society but left because of the caste dispute. The South Australian Register reported in 1871 that money was raised to build a church suitable for the new minister and "commensurate with the position of the German Lutheran Church, which we understand to occupy a similar position among the Germans to that of the Anglican Church in England'".
The new church was designed by James Cumming in " the early Gothic style, using dark rubble stone, with rusticated quoins and dressings", and a tower provided with a bellchamber. The contractors were Brown and Thompson and the building committee comprised J.W.A. Sudholz, J. Weil and J. Reiger.
The South Australian Register noted that the bellchamber would hold three bells being cast in Germany from cannons captured from the French and presented by prince Bismarck on behalf of the emperor. The bells never arrived as the vessel shipping them was lost. Gasoliers were presented by German South Australian glass maker H.L. Vosz and the communion plate donated by the renowned craftsman and jeweller Henry Steiner.
The church was dedicated on June 23, 1872, with ministers Oster, Strempel and Teichelmann officiating. Teichelmann, who had conducted the first Lutheran service in Adelaide in 1838, preached the English sermon at the afternoon service. The two-storey Martin Luther school was built behind the church in 1883.
Adelaide’s city centre’s other Lutheran church, St Stephen’s in Wakefield Street, Adelaide city, grew from a congregation formed in Klemzig in 1848. In 1862, their first church was built in Pirie Street, Adelaide city, and moved to the bigger present church in 1900.
