August Hermann Francke
1663 CE–1727 CE · Modern · Lübeck
August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) was a Lutheran theologian, educator, and social reformer who became the foremost institutional architect of German Pietism. Appointed to the chair of Greek and Oriental languages at the newly founded University of Halle in December 1691, he spent the rest of his life building the Franckesche Stiftungen — a complex at Glaucha that grew to encompass an orphanage, schools for poor and wealthy children, a teacher-training seminary, a pharmacy, and a printing press, housing some three thousand residents by his death. His emphasis on experiential conversion, Scripture-centred pedagogy, and charitable practice shaped an entire generation of Lutheran clergy and missionaries. The Halle mission, channelled through the Danish-Halle Mission to India and through graduates who reached North America, made Francke's model a seedbed for the global Protestant missionary movement of the eighteenth century. His voluminous reports on the Halle institutions circulated widely in England and the colonies, inspiring philanthropic and educational reform far beyond Germany.
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LübeckGermany
What they did here
Francke was born on 22 March 1663 in Lübeck to Johannes Francke, a jurist; the family relocated to Gotha in 1666 when his father was appointed court counsellor to Duke Ernst I of Saxony-Gotha-Altenburg.
About Lübeck
Lübeck is a Baltic port in Schleswig-Holstein, northern Germany. Granted city rights in 1160, it developed in the 12th and 13th centuries into the leading city of the Hanseatic League, the trading network of medieval northern Europe, and its brick Gothic old town, with the cathedral begun in 1173 and St Mary's Church, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its main churches have been Protestant since the Reformation, and the Pietist leader August Hermann Francke was born in the city in 1663. Jewish families, many of them refugees from Poland, settled in neighbouring Moisling from the mid-17th century, and a community later established itself in Lübeck proper after emancipation in the 19th century.
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