John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg, a native of Pennsylvania who was formerly a soldier in the British Army and German dragoons, accepted a call to become pastor to a Woodstock congregation in 1771. After theological training, he served both Lutherans and Episcopalians for four years in a wide-ranging pastorate in the Shenandoah Valley. During this time he was drawn to in politics, serving in the House of Burgesses in 1774 and as a delegate to the First Virginia Convention. Muhlenberg became famous for his impassioned speeches for the revolutionary cause, helping to raise a regiment in the Shenandoah Valley among its German and Scots-Irish frontier population. He would lead this regiment, the 8th Virginia, as its Colonel in the Continental Army. At the conclusion of his fiery farewell sermon in Woodstock on January 21, 1776, Muhlenberg famously threw off his clerical robes to reveal an officer's uniform beneath and proclaimed, (according to later reports), “in the language of Holy Writ there is a time for all things, a time to preach and a time to pray, but those times have passed away. There is a time to fight, and that time has now come.” Muhlenberg went on to be promoted to a general in the Continental Army and led units in many battles, from Brandywine to Yorktown. Upon the end of the war in 1783, he did not return to live in Woodstock, but instead returned to his native Pennsylvania as a war hero, served in elected capacities and then was elected to the First Congress (1788-1789) and several successive Congresses. Elected to the Senate in 1801, he resigned to return to a revenue post in Philadelphia, where he died on October 1, 1807. While his statue in Congress' National Statuary Hall Collection was submitted by Pennsylvania in 1889, Muhlenberg has been revered in Woodstock for his fiery sermon and the unit he raised and inspired to fight for the nation's independence.