Carsten Langhein was born in the little town of Willstedt-Lemsahl near Hamburg in the Dukedom of Holstein on the 20th of June 1809. He married Katharina Dorothea on 25th April 1847 and moved to the Tangstedt district of Hamburg. Langhein was a brick layer by trade and supplemented his income by bringing peat and firewood into Hamburg. It was on one of these trips that he stepped into a second-hand shop to buy a wardrobe but came out with a religious tract. Langhein who was born and raised in the State Church went back to the gentleman who had given him the tract and was converted on the spot. He was Baptised into the local Baptist Church on March 4th, 1849. The Baptist Churches in Germany were characterised by a zeal for making disciples, the slogan of it's founder Johann Gerhard Oncken being 'every Baptist a missionary'. Langhein's life was marked an unwavering commitment to the Great Commission of Christ. (Matthew 28:19-20)
Langhein was amongst the German Agricultural Settlers of 1858 who settled in the border region of the Eastern Cape then known as British-Kaffraria. On April 14th, 1861 along with his wife and three other German Baptists, Mr. and Mrs. Carl Gustav Adolf Schmidt and Mr. Christian Friedrich Sandow, the first German Baptist Church was founded at Frankfurt near King William's Town. These five Baptists, all of whom were 'lay-people' started spreading the Baptist message amongst the Germans and when they welcomed their first trained minister, Rev. Carl Hugo Gutsche in December 1867 they had 283 members! The work consisted of 15 stations and by 1869 the German Baptists numbered over 500. Their missionary zeal did not bring salvation only to Germans, but to many Xhosa- and Afrikaner people as well.
Soli Deo Gloria
