St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church, and the German Lutheran beginning

Organized 14 October 1837

The founding: On 14 October 1837, twenty-three heads of families met in the Allen County courthouse to adopt a "Formula for the Discipline of the Evangelical Lutheran Church" and organize the congregation long known as the First Evangelical Lutheran Church of Fort Wayne — today's St. Paul's, at Barr and East Lewis streets. Sixty-five communicant members were entered in the records and received communion the next day, a Sunday. The first pastor was the Rev. Jesse Hoover of the Pennsylvania Synod — the same Hoover who kept Protestant worship alive for the Presbyterians between their ministers. The congregation's centennial historian, M. H. Bertram, claimed the founders "need not have restricted the term 'First' to the city of Fort Wayne, for this was also the first Lutheran church in the entire state"; Wikipedia's Fort Wayne article instead calls St. Paul's the second Lutheran congregation in Indiana. Both wordings stand; the 1837 organization itself is undisputed.

Wyneken and Sihler: In September 1838 the young Friedrich Conrad Dietrich Wyneken arrived as pastor and found a frontier of scattered, pastorless German settlements; he rode a mission circuit across Indiana, Ohio and Michigan from Fort Wayne, and in 1841–43 carried the appeal back to Germany in his famous Notruf — The Distress of the German Lutherans in North America. Pastor Wilhelm Löhe answered, sending men and money; among those who read the Notruf and came was Dr. Wilhelm Sihler, who succeeded Wyneken at St. Paul's in 1845 and founded the seminary described below. St. Paul's was an influential charter congregation of the Missouri Synod organized in 1847, and mother to a family of Lutheran congregations across Allen County. Its parochial school is treated in the Schools section, and Sihler and Wyneken appear as biographies in the People record.

Sources:

1. Martin H. Bertram, A Brief History of St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church, Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1837–1962 — the 14 October 1837 courthouse meeting, the twenty-three families, Hoover, the "first in the entire state" claim.
2. Rudolph F. Rehmer, "The Origins of Lutheranism in the Fort Wayne Area (1829–1847)," Concordia Theological Quarterly 30.2 (Spring 1967) — Wyneken 1838–41, Sihler's coming, the 1846 division context.
3. Robert E. Smith, ed., Shepherds for Christ's Sheep: Concordia Theological Seminary (CTSFW, 2017) — Wyneken, the Notruf, Löhe's answer.
4. "Fort Wayne, Indiana," Wikipedia, religion section — the "second Lutheran congregation in Indiana" wording carried against Bertram.