He also served for fourteen years as the second president of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, and helped found Concordia Theological Seminary.

Significant numbers of more distant relatives and in-laws were also Lutheran clergy members, such as Superintendent Hans Heinrich Justus Phillip Ruperti, (1833–1899), who was Friedrich's nephew.

[4] After graduation, Wyneken worked as a private instructor in Lesum (now a locality of Bremen) at the home of Consistorial Counsellor Georg von Henfstengel, himself an "Awakened" pastor.

Then, as his mentor recovered, the Pennsylvania Ministerium of Lutherans sent Wyneken westward to serve the many Protestant German farmers who had moved into Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan.

In Putnam and Allen counties in Ohio, Wyneken found Lutherans who had not heard a sermon in years, so he baptized many children, and decided to tell his fellow ministers still in Germany about the massive need for their ministry in the New World.

[7] However, first he ministered to Germans in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the nearby settlement of Friedheim, Preble Township, in northwest Adams County, whose pastor, Jesse Hoover, had died in May 1838.

Then he made Fort Wayne, a portage and canal town, his base, and traveled among the isolated settlements on the Michigan Road to the north as well as in central Indiana and western Ohio.

He joined the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of the West (despite misgivings about its ecumenical stance),[8] and also appealed to the Evangelical Lutheran General Synod of the United States of North America for more clergy, especially for the frustrating missionary survey work, when the isolated German protestants wanted to establish their own church communities.

That same year, the Stade missionary society sent G. Jensen to cover Wyneken's pastoral responsibilities at St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Fort Wayne while he and his wife returned to Germany for medical treatment of a throat ailment.

Johann Friedrich Wucherer worked in Germany to send missionaries to North America, publishing Kirchliche Mitteilungen aus und ueber Nord-Amerika.