Jacob Gottschalk (Godtschalk) Henricks van der Heggen (c.1670 – c.1763) was the first person to serve as a Mennonite bishop in America.
He died in May 1763, and his grave is unmarked; however, there is a memorial stone at the Towamencin Meeting churchyard at Kulpsville, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania[1] that reads: In memory of Bishop Jacob Gottshall 1670-1763 Born in Goch, Germany, ordained a bishop in the Germantown Mennonite Church in 1702 and also served the Skippack and Towamencin congregations.
[4] In 1725, he met with sixteen other ministers from southeastern Pennsylvania and adopted the Dutch Mennonite Dordrecht Confession of Faith (1632).
They also wrote the following endorsement of which he was the first to sign:[5] We the hereunder written Servants of the Word of God, and Elders in the Congregation of the People, called Mennonists, in the Province of Pennsylvania, do acknowledge, and herewith make known, that we do own the foregoing Confession, Apendix, and Menno's Excusation, to be according to our Opinion; and also, have took the same to be wholly ours.
In Testimony whereof, and that we believe that same to be good, we have here unto Subscribed our Names.In 1745, he arranged with the Ephrata Cloister[6] to have them translate from Dutch into German and print Thieleman J. van Braght's 1660 The Bloody Theatre or Martyrs Mirror of Defenseless Christians, the work took 15 men three years to finish and in 1749, at 1512 pages, was the largest book printed in America before the Revolutionary War.