This, the community's first church, was a log building begun, according to its cornerstone, on June 8, 1796, and completed the following year. Renovations at the end of the nineteenth century kept it in line with its sister congregations in Millbach and Schaefferstown and mark the type of connective network among Germans that paralleled the buildings of the Society of Friends. The church's location underscored the importance of 8th Street as Lebanon's principal avenue. The adjacent Richardsonian chapel by Roby and Richter of Reading, with its massive pyramidal-roofed crossing tower, is based on the extensively published, contemporary Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge.