​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.

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