Establishment of a relationship with American Lutherans brought extensive missionary help, but resulted in a transition to a self-sufficient church body that was not always easy.
During the next hundred years, the Amsterdam church provided a total of six ministers, but there were often long gaps between the ending of one pastorate and the beginning of the next.
Moreover, members of Ebenezer were still required to pay the taxes to support the state-sponsored Dutch Reformed church.
In 1828, their pastor, Johannes Vos, was removed from his position by the vestry of the congregation while he was away performing weddings of slaves at Plantation Catharinasburg, Upper Canje.
[5] Due to the severing of ties to the Amsterdam church, Ebenezer was unable to find Lutheran ministers.
His work led to the development of worship services in Hindi, and to a strategy of training local people to be catechists and for ordination.
[6] In 1943, on the two hundredth anniversary of ELC's founding, the church began publishing The Southern Cross bimonthly.
That same year, a constitution establishing the Evangelical Lutheran Church in British Guiana (ELCBG) was adopted.
The formation of the Lutheran Church in America (LCA) in 1962 resulted in the ELCBG coming under that body's Board of World Missions.
The Catechist Training School, in which missionaries served as faculty and which had produced most of the local clergy, was closed in 1972.
The inter-Protestant Guyana Extension Seminary was intended to serve similar purposes, but did not adequately provide the needed church workers.
As a result, the ELCG's conventions in 1979 and 1980 expressed great concern that the move to self-sufficiency was occurring to quickly.