Tested and not found — Lutheran, Brethren, Baptist, and the newest faiths

Searches run November 2026

What is not in this township was tested, and the tests print as findings. No Lutheran congregation seated in New Carlisle or Olive Township was found: the South Bend Area Genealogical Society's church-records index, read end to end, carries Lutheran records only for South Bend, Mishawaka, and North Liberty (Grace Lutheran; St. John Evangelical Lutheran, North Liberty), and directory searches for a New Carlisle Lutheran church returned none nearer than South Bend and Mishawaka. The township's German settlement appears in Chapman as Evangelical, Evangelical Association, German Baptist, and Catholic households, not as a seated Lutheran congregation — and Chapman's German Lutheran church at Woodland, built 1868, belongs to his Madison Township chapter, a different township, and imports nothing here. No Church of the Brethren or German Baptist congregation seated in town or township was found either: the index's Brethren entries are North Liberty (Church of the Brethren; Pine Creek), Lakeville (County Line), and Osceola (Bethel), and the German Baptist membership in Chapman's Olive-area sketches stands at household strength only. No Baptist congregation seated in town or township appears in Chapman's churches section, in the index — whose New Carlisle entries are only Olive Chapel and St. Stanislaus Kostka, with Hamilton Methodist at county level — or in the modern directories searched. One Baptist trace stays unresolved, printed as a trace and not as a congregation: Fellowship Baptist Church of South Bend's own history relates that in the fall of 1965, under the Rev. Robert L. Edwards, the then Stewart Memorial Baptist Church "purchased what later became the New Carlisle Baptist Church and held services there," the building and property being sold in 1967 — a passage that does not establish a seated New Carlisle congregation's founding or course, and which banks among the named gaps. Of the newest faiths, the town's one Christian Science trace is St. Mary's Episcopal's prominent lay member who "decided to become a Christian Scientist" — a household, not a congregation — and no mosque, synagogue, Latter-day Saint, Jehovah's Witness, or other body was found seated in town or township in the searches named: the genealogical index read in full, the town church-directory searches, and the New Carlisle Business & Community Association directory. The tested none is the finding.

Sources

1. South Bend Area Genealogical Society, church-records index — read in full, November 2026.
2. Chapman (1880), Olive and Madison Township chapters — first-hand, ldsgenealogy.com transcription.
3. Fellowship Baptist Church, South Bend, church history — the 1965–67 passage at its own wording.
4. Episcopal Diocese of Northern Indiana Archives, St. Mary's page — the Christian Scientist line.