1590), Memel (as of 1592), Wehlau (as of 1608), and Labiau (as of 1707). In 1751, the Pomesanian and Sambian consistories were merged in the Prussian Consistory in Königsberg, led by general superintendents since 1812. By the mid-1720s, the rising number of Lutheran parishes were organised in inspections (renamed Kirchenkreis in the 19th century; i.e. deaneries), such as in Stallupönen/Stalupėnai (Nesterov), Fischhausen/Žuvininkai (Primorsk), Schaaken in Prussia, Labiau, Insterburg, Tilsist, Ragnit and Memel. The overall number of Prussian parishes with Lithuanian service rose to 92 in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries due to the ongoing establishment of new churches, while services in Lithuanian were given up in many parishes, rather in the south than in the north of Lithuania Minor, due to the assimilation of Lithuanian speakers to German. After the plague, the depopulated areas were also resettled with Lutheran refugees of German language from Salzburg. So by the second half of the 19th century the number of parishes offering Lithuanian services had shrunk to 67 (116,998 parishioners), with an additional seven Roman Catholic parishes (3,395 faithful), mostly of immigrants from Lithuania proper, and five Baptist congregations of Lithuanian language (with 400 congregants). By 1913 only 45 parishes offered Lutheran services in Lithuanian, in part a consequence of the banning of Lithuanian as a school language in Germany in 1873. So the Pietist laymen group called sakytojai (, i.e. lay preacher traditionally holding prayer hours in private homes before the actual service in Lithuanian, during the prior German service would take place; cf. also Shtundists) kept the Lithuanian language from vanishing. Lithuanian Lutheranism between the wars Before World War II there were 80 Evangelical Lutheran Church in Lithuania congregations in Lithuania proper, and 72 pastors were serving about 25,000 members. Whereas in the Klaipėda Region (a Lithuanian autonomous region between 1924 and 1939) 40 pastors, many maintaining services in Lithuanian, served about 137,750 mostly Lutheran parishioners (among them 35,650 Prussian Lithuanians) in 1930. However, the parishes in the Klaipėda Region remained members of the Ecclesiastical Province of East Prussia until 1925, a subsection of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union, a church of united administration of Lutheran and Reformed congregations founded in 1817 by combining the Lutheran and Reformed churches in then Prussia. The parishes formed the Memel deanery, the Heydekrug/Šilutė deanery and the new Pogegen/Pagėgiai deanery, comprising since 1919 those parishes of the deanery of Tilsit,