For six generations there has been an unbroken line of Cloeter pastors in the United States. Ernst Ottomar Cloeter was the first in 1849. I am the most recent, a pastor since 2005. I come from a line of men conscripted to be guardians and agents of the gospel in three different centuries. Each man has done this in his time – through a civil war, two world wars, a great depression, and 9/11. The importance of this heritage is not so much who has done it, but that it’s being done in each generation. In the end, ours is a lineage of inconsequential names, but a message of greatest consequence. So I am a pastor in the 21st century. And I keep on publishing, as my fathers have before.
