The Somerset-East Reformed Church is the fourth oldest congregation of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa (NGK) in the Synod of the Eastern Cape and the 15th oldest in the entire South African denomination. Foundation Before the foundation of a separate congregation in Somerset East in 1825, the area was split between the Graaff-Reinet and the southern portion of the Uitenhage congregations. The magistrate, William MacKay, was the one who urged a separate congregation and church building. On May 27, 1825, only five months after the Governor of Cape Colony set up the drostdy ("district") Somerset East and Mackay as appointed its first magistrate, the latter wrote a letter to the Governor, Lord Charles Somerset, expounding on his plan. The answer, while as private as the original letter, had to have been encouraging, since only a month after it was received, the magistrate and heemraad gave the official go-ahead. The Church Ordinance of 1804, promulgated by then Dutch Commissioner-General Jacob Abraham de Mist and in effect until an 1843 Ordinance superseded it, gave the power to a public body to establish congregations in outlying districts on the government's behalf. At a meeting held in the Somerset Drostdy on July 9, 1825, it was decided to petition the governor to establish a church in the town. Since the Governor couldn't act on his own, he sought permission from Count Henry Bathurst, 3rd Earl Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, but the latter reported that there was not enough money in the colonial coffers to support a church being built. First pastor and church council Permission was nevertheless granted to establish a separate congregation, and in October 1825, the Rev. George Morgan, one of the first six Presbyterian preachers from Scotland to come to the Cape to address its shortage of Afrikaner pastors and to help Anglicize the Boers, appointed a church council including the elders Robert Hart (also one of Somerset-East's first three heemraad) and F.J. van Aardt and the deacons Gideon Jordaan, Michael Bosch, Willem Prinsloo, and P.M. Bester. The first verger was Hendrik Waldeck, who lived on a salary of R25, "in addition to the various tithes and incomes he made presiding over baptism and weddings." "Fortunately, in those days people often married and had many children," wrote the Rev. Andries Dreyer in Gedenkboek van die Nederduits-Gereformeerde Kerk Somerset Oos ("Commemorative Book of the