Light and Hope Publishing Company (Berne, Indiana, USA)
Light and Hope Publishing Company was founded about 1898 by J. A. Sprunger, a Mennonite minister living at Berne, Indiana, who had been ordained in Switzerland in 1890, but was a member of the Berne Mennonite (General Conference Mennonite Church) Church. He was very close to the newly formed Missionary Church Association about the same time. The company published the journal Licht und Hoffnung and the English counterpart Light and Hope. Sprunger, a wealthy millowner, also operated a deaconess training school and an orphanage by the same name, later also a hospital. Among the workers in both print shop and orphanage in Berne were William Egle, H. C. Bartel, and John Horsch. In 1902 Sprunger moved both the orphanage and the publishing company to Cleveland and soon to Birmingham near Cleveland. Here H. J. Dyck joined the group of workers. Numerous workers from "Light and Hope" went as missionaries to China under the H. C. Bartel mission. Sprunger died in 1911. The print shop was then sold to George Lambert, a minister in the Mennonite Brethren in Christ (MBC) church. It later became the Gospel Herald Publishing Company operated by H. B. Musselman, an MBC minister from Eastern Pennsylvania. Mrs. J. A. Sprunger moved back to Berne upon her husband's death, taking the publishing company and the journal with her, which she owned until her death in 1934. At her death the company and the journal were bought by Christian H. Musselman, who had come to Berne in 1913, and founded there in 1925 the Economy Printing Concern. After Musselman took over the Light and Hope Publishing Company he continued to sell the remaining books of J. A. Sprunger, especially the two-volume work The Gospel in Types (English and German editions), also Outline of Prophecy. In addition he published other volumes of Bible exposition and sermons, in 1950 a reprint edition of the German Martyrs' Mirror and several Mennonite family histories. Musselman was a Mennonite from the Giebelstadt-Würzburg congregation in Germany, who came to Scottdale, Pennsylvania, in 1910, and worked in the Mennonite Publishing House until 1913. In 1915 he joined the Missionary Church Association in Berne. He has become in a sense the publisher for the Missionary Church Association.
| Author(s) | Harold S Bender |
|---|---|
| Date Published | 1959 |
Cite This Article
MLA style
Bender, Harold S. "Light and Hope Publishing Company (Berne, Indiana, USA)." Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1959. Web. 3 Dec 2024. https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Light_and_Hope_Publishing_Company_(Berne,_Indiana,_USA)&oldid=166292.
APA style
Bender, Harold S. (1959). Light and Hope Publishing Company (Berne, Indiana, USA). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Retrieved 3 December 2024, from https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Light_and_Hope_Publishing_Company_(Berne,_Indiana,_USA)&oldid=166292.
Adapted by permission of Herald Press, Harrisonburg, Virginia, from Mennonite Encyclopedia, Vol. 4, pp. 1102-1103. All rights reserved.
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