William Alfred Passavant was an American Lutheran clergyman, editor, and philanthropist.
Background
William Alfred Passavant was born on October 9, 1821 in Zelienople, Butler County, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the youngest of the five children of Philip Louis and Zelie (Basse) Passavant. His parents were natives of Frankfurt-am-Main. His grandfather, Detmar Basse, came to the United States in 1802 to retrieve his fortune, bought 10, 000 acres of land in the Conoquenessing Valley, but returned to Germany in 1817. On Bassenheim, his estate at Zelienople, the transplanted comforts and elegance of an older society continued to flourish amidst a primitive environment. Passavant owed much to the wisdom, culture, and unassuming piety of his mother, who drew the reins cautiously on his more rampant enthusiasms, supplied him with money when money was most needed, and taught him to rely on his own judgment and intuitions.
Education
After graduating in 1840 from Jefferson College at Canonsburg, William Alfred Passavant studied for two years under S. S. Schmucker at the Gettysburg Theological Seminar.
Career
William Alfred Passavant was licensed by the Maryland Synod in 1842 and ordained in 1843, and was pastor 1842 - 1843 of a small church at Canton, a waterfront suburb of Baltimore. While at Gettysburg he did much missionary work in the adjacent hill country and published a Lutheran Almanac for the years 1842 and 1843. He was on the staff of Benjamin Kurtz's Lutheran Observer, 1842 - 1848. Early in his career he established friendships, destined to endure for life, with Charles Porterfield Krauth, John Gottlieb Morris, and Joseph Augustus Seiss. He began his ministry as a New Lutheran of Schmucker's school and was a successful practitioner of the revivalistic technique then in vogue, but under Krauth's influence he discarded his old beliefs and methods and became a champion of Old Lutheranism and one of the founders in 1867 of the conservative General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America. For the last fifty years of his life he lived in Pittsburgh and devoted his inexhaustible energies and enthusiasm to the home missionary movement and to the establishment of institutions of mercy.
Until 1855 William Alfred Passavant was pastor of the first English Lutheran Church of Pittsburgh. Through his travels and his extensive correspondence he became the most widely known and influential clergyman of his denomination in the Middle West. Though his primary object was the work among English-speaking Lutherans, he early came in contact with German and Swedish Lutheran missionaries, gave them substantial aid and advice, and communicated to them his own sustaining faith in the work. In January 1848 he issued the first number of a monthly periodical, the Missionary, which he established both to strengthen the missionary movement and to counteract the tendencies of the Lutheran Observer. For several years it gave Charles Porterfield Krauth a medium for the propagation of his theology. In January 1856 Passavant enlarged the format of his paper and made it a weekly, and in 1861 it was incorporated with the Lutheran of Philadelphia. In 1881 he established another paper, the Workman, which he edited, in cooperation with his son, until his death.
William Alfred Passavant was the dominant influence in the Pittsburgh Synod, which he helped to found in 1845. His interest in Christian philanthropy, always strong, was greatly stimulated by his visit in 1846 to Theodor Fliedner's famous deaconess institute at Kaiserswerth. Two years later Passavant opened a small hospital in Pittsburgh, and in August 1849 Fliedner visited Pittsburgh, bringing with him four deaconesses, who thus introduced the order into the United States. Passavant and William Augustus Muhlenberg were friends, and it is likely that in establishing the American branch of the Lutheran order of deaconesses and the Episcopal Sisterhood of the Holy Communion they influenced each other. Subsequently Passavant founded hospitals in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Jacksonville, Illinois, and orphan asylums at Rochester and Zelienople, Pennsylvania.
William Alfred Passavant took an active part also in founding orphanages at Mt. Vernon, New York, Germantown, Pennsylvania, and Boston (West Roxbury), Massachussets. During the Civil War his deaconesses worked under the direction of Dorothea Dix in military hospitals. He may also be regarded as the founder of the Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary and of Thiel College at Greenville, Pennsylvania, but neither of these institutions fulfilled his expectations. Though he was generous with his own money and successful in persuading others to give, his institutions all suffered from their restricted income, but his business acumen and personal devotion sustained them on their meager resources until they became permanently established. His own capacity for work was prodigious. He never employed a secretary, and those closest to him often found it difficult to relieve him of minor responsibilities that he insisted on shouldering alone.
The management of his institutions was carried on by his son, William Alfred Passavant, Jr. , who outlived his father, however, by only seven years. William Alfred Passavant died in Pittsburgh after a brief illness on June 3, 1894.
Achievements
William Alfred Passavant was best known as the founder of the Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary, of Thiel College. He brought the Lutheran Deaconess movement to the United States. Passavant was co-editor of the Lutheran and Missionary.
Connections
On May 1, 1845, William Alfred Passavant married Eliza Walter, of Baltimore. They had five children.
