The immediate occasion was an attempt to discipline a Magdeburg preacher who had expressed heretical views.
Early leaders in the movement were Leberecht Uhlich and Gustav Adolf Wislicenus, both of whom were forced out of the Evangelical Church for expressing liberal views.
In 1847, a union was effected between them on the basis of a simple profession of faith in God and called Free Congregations (Ger.
By this time their gatherings, held symbolically in the open air, had come to number more than two thousand, including delegates from England and America.
Those still in existence in 1859, about fifty in number, under Uhlich's leadership, formed a “Union of Free Congregations in Germany,” upon a highly rationalistic basis.