The Pennsylvania Ministerium sent two itinerant Lutheran pastors, Wilhelm Georg Forster and Johannes Stauch, to minister to the immigrants.
By 1818, the Ministerium had sent another ten pastors, including Paul Henkel and John Michael Steck.
However, the Ohio Conference was not an independent synod, so any candidates for the pastoral office were required to travel to Pennsylvania for ordination.
Most candidates found it difficult to make that trip across the Appalachian Mountains, so the Ohio Conference instead merely licensed them to preach.
[5] The establishment of relations with Johann Konrad Wilhelm Löhe and the immigration of additional Lutheran pastors from the German Confederation in the early 1840s resulted in an increasing conservative movement with the synod taking a stronger stance in support of the Lutheran doctrinal confessions contained in the Book of Concord of 1580.
Ten of those synods adopted a proposed constitution and in a convention on November 20, 1867, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, established the General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America.
The Ohio Synod sent representatives to the convention, but declined membership until differences on certain points of doctrine could be addressed.
Failure to reach agreement with the General Council on these points led the Ohio Joint Synod to look elsewhere for affiliations and allies.
In that controversy the Ohio and Norwegian synods held that God elects people to salvation "in view of the faith" (Latin: intuitu fidei) he foresaw they would have, while the Missouri and Wisconsin synods held that the cause is wholly due to God's grace.
[10] By the 1910s, administrative offices for the synod with a president and a few secretaries and staff had been established in Columbus, Ohio, near its publishing house and Evangelical Lutheran Theological Seminary (1830) and affiliated Capital University (1850).
Other schools included Woodville Normal School in Woodville, Ohio, from 1882 to 1923; a second practical seminary in Hickory, North Carolina, from 1887 to 1912; and Pacific Seminary in Olympia, Washington, from 1907 until 1911, when the theological department was discontinued, and 1917, when the remaining college department was discontinued.