Evangelical Church Association of the West. The epicenter of the component Evangelical tradition was (and is to this day, within the UCC) Saint Louis, Missouri, with a particularly heavy concentration of parishes within a 75-mile radius, in Missouri and Illinois. Elsewhere, Evangelicals tended to settle in large cities of the Midwest, including Cincinnati, Louisville, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago. Rural Evangelical strongholds included southwestern Indiana, southern Michigan and Iowa. In the Southern United States, the ESNA was found primarily in central Texas and New Orleans. These concentrations of German settlement also witnessed a large influx of more confessionally-oriented Lutherans, who formed the current-day Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod in opposition to the syncretism they believed the Evangelicals represented. Almost all other of the contemporaneous Germans were Roman Catholic. Although their faith was chiefly the product of a forced union by the government in Prussia, the Evangelicals by conviction wished to minimize the centuries-old points of contention between Lutheran and Reformed doctrine and practice. This attitude of moderation was enabled in large measure by the rise of pietism, which stressed a more emotional, less rationalistic approach to the teachings of the Bible, thus disinclining scholars and pastors toward technicalities or polemics. Many Evangelical parishes were founded by pastors trained in interdenominational missionary societies such as the St. Chrischona Pilgrim Mission in Basel, Switzerland, in the early 19th century; they immigrated to the United States to assist settlers fleeing Prussian militarism. Even to a greater degree than the Reformed, the Evangelicals became most noted among American Protestants for their establishment and staunch support of hospitals, orphanages, and homes for the elderly. Probably most similar in ethos (among English-speaking Protestant groups) to the Methodists, pastors emphasized pietist preaching and catechizing young people for the rite of confirmation, a rite still cherished highly to this day by congregations deriving from ESNA roots. Reflecting a later generation of immigration, the German language persisted for several generations in most congregations before such services were gradually phased out in the era between the World Wars, due in part to anti-German sentiment among some Americans. In 1919, they began missionary efforts in Honduras, establishing what is now called the Evangelical and Reformed Church in Honduras . In terms of governance, the Evangelicals most resembled American Lutheranism of the time, with high regard for the pastor's authority but essentially congregational in structure, with a lay council handling temporal matters such as property