organically related to Christ. This implied a recovery of early Protestant liturgies and a renewed emphasis upon the rite of Holy Communion, somewhat akin to the Tractarian or Anglo-Catholic movement in Anglicanism but within a Reformation vein. Some leaders, however, saw this platform as an attempt to impose heretical Catholic practice and understandings in a Protestant setting. This group, centered in southeastern Pennsylvania in close proximity to a large Catholic population in Philadelphia and thus motivated by Anti-Catholicism, objected strenuously to the Mercersburg reforms, going so far as to establish a separate seminary now known as Ursinus College. After temporarily causing the Ohio Synod to withdraw from the church, tensions mounted until compromises were worked out and parishes of either low or high church persuasion were allowed to practice their preferences peacefully. A later group of Germans who had come from the Russian empire, settling in the late 19th century, took root in Wisconsin and spread westward across the Great Plains region; this group spoke German for several generations after the Pennsylvania Dutch had thoroughly Americanized themselves, theologically as well as linguistically. These immigrants did not participate in the Mercersburg/Ursinus struggle; their theological persuasion was decidedly confessionalist, holding to a fairly strict interpretation of the Heidelberg Catechism. So strong were the convictions of some that a few churches in that group, most of which were in South Dakota, defected immediately prior to the 1934 merger, influenced by such strict confessionalism, a belief in biblical inerrancy, and a fear of losing their Reformed roots. That group retained the name Reformed Church in the United States. This schism aside, by the time of the merger talks, the RCUS had mostly joined the American Protestant mainline, sending missionaries overseas and operating health and welfare institutions (i.e., hospitals, orphanages, nursing homes) throughout much of the United States. Further, the Reformed did some work among Native Americans in Wisconsin. The RCUS' constituency composed slightly over half of the membership of the new denomination in 1934. Evangelical Synod of North America The Evangelical Synod of North America (not to be confused with the Evangelical Church, later part of the Evangelical United Brethren Church) was founded in 1840 at Gravois Settlement, Missouri, by a union of Reformed and Lutheran Christians in a manner similar to the creation of the Prussian Union in the early 19th century. In its early years, this union was known as the German