Erika Reihlen (born 2 August 1936) is a former president of the German Evangelical Church Assembly. She served from 1991 to 1993. [1] She is active in women's causes and on the BORA Women's Shelter Board of Directors. [2] She has also been involved in Protestant/Catholic dialogue and was a children's dentist. Her husband Helmut is also a known figure in the church. [3]
Within Christianity, there are a variety of views on sexual orientation and homosexuality. Even within a denomination, individuals and groups may hold different views, and not all members of a denomination necessarily support their church's views on homosexuality.
Evangelicalism, evangelical Christianity, or evangelical Protestantism, is a worldwide trans-denominational movement within Protestant Christianity that maintains the belief that the essence of the Gospel consists of the doctrine of salvation by grace alone, solely through faith in Jesus' atonement. Evangelicals believe in the centrality of the conversion or "born again" experience in receiving salvation, in the authority of the Bible as God's revelation to humanity, and in spreading the Christian message. The movement has long had a presence in the Anglosphere before spreading further afield in the 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries.
The Evangelical Church in Germany is a federation of twenty Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist) and United Protestant regional churches and denominations in Germany, which collectively encompasses the vast majority of Protestants in that country. In 2019, the EKD had a membership of 20,713,000 members, or 24.9% of the German population. It constitutes one of the largest national Protestant bodies in the world. Church offices managing the federation are located in Hannover-Herrenhausen, Lower Saxony. Many of its members consider themselves Lutherans.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) is a mainline Protestant Lutheran church headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. The ELCA was officially formed on January 1, 1988, by the merging of three Lutheran church bodies. As of 2019, it has approximately 3.3 million baptized members in 8,972 congregations.
The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) is the second-largest Presbyterian church body, behind the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the largest conservative Calvinist denomination in the United States. The PCA is Calvinist in theology and presbyterian in government. It is characterized by a blend of Calvinist practice and broad evangelicalism.
The World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) is a global organization of evangelical Christian churches, serving more than 600 million evangelicals, founded in 1846 in London, England, United Kingdom to unite evangelicals worldwide. WEA is the largest international organization of evangelical churches. The headquarters are in Deerfield, Illinois, with UN offices in New York City, Geneva, and Bonn. It brings together 9 regional and 143 national evangelical alliances of churches, and over one hundred member organizations. Some of the national alliances include Protestant churches which are not traditional Evangelical churches in the strict sense (anabaptism). Moreover, the WEA includes a certain percentage of individual evangelical Christian churches. As of March 2021, the Secretary General of the WEA is German theologian Thomas Schirrmacher.
Katharina von Bora, after her wedding Katharina Luther, also referred to as "die Lutherin", was the wife of Martin Luther, German reformer and a seminal figure of the Protestant Reformation. Beyond what is found in the writings of Luther and some of his contemporaries, little is known about her. Despite this, Katharina is often considered one of the most important participants in the Reformation because of her role in helping to define Protestant family life and setting the tone for clergy marriages.
The Lutheran World Federation is a global communion of national and regional Lutheran denominations headquartered in the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva, Switzerland. The federation was founded in the Swedish city of Lund in the aftermath of the Second World War in 1947 to coordinate the activities of the many differing Lutheran churches. Since 1984, the member churches are in pulpit and altar fellowship, with common doctrine as the basis of membership and mission activity.
The Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) is an American church body holding to presbyterian governance and Reformed theology. It is most distinctive for its approach to the way it balances certain liberties across congregations on "non-essential" doctrines, such as egalitarianism in marriage or the ordination of women, alongside an affirmation of core "essential" doctrinal standards.
A presiding bishop is an ecclesiastical position in some denominations of Christianity.
Katrin Dagmar Göring-Eckardt is a German politician from the German Green Party. Starting her political activity in the now-former German Democratic Republic in the late 1980s, she has been a member of the German Bundestag since 1998. She became co-chair of her party caucus in the Bundestag (2002–2005) and the Greens' Vice President of the Bundestag on 18 October 2005, a position that she held until 2013. In the November 2012 primary election, the Green Party chose her and Jürgen Trittin as the top two candidates for the Greens for the 2013 German federal election. She also stood as joint top candidate for the Greens in the 2017 German federal election, alongside Cem Özdemir.
The German Evangelical Church Assembly is an assembly of lay members of the Evangelical Church in Germany, that organises biannual events of faith, culture and political discussion. It sees itself as a free movement of people brought together by their Christian faith and engagement in the future of the Evangelical Church and wider society. The assembly partakes in bible study, lectures, and discussions, and also hosts concerts.
Lutheran viewpoints concerning homosexuality are diverse because there is no one worldwide body which represents all Lutherans. The Lutheran World Federation, a worldwide 'communion of churches' and the largest global body of Lutherans, contains member churches on both sides of the issue. However, other Lutherans, including the Confessional Evangelical Lutheran Conference and International Lutheran Council, completely reject homosexuality.
Ordination is the process by which individuals are consecrated, that is, set apart as clergy to perform various religious rites and ceremonies such as celebrating the sacraments. The process and ceremonies of ordination varies by denomination. One who is in preparation for, or who is undergoing the process of ordination is sometimes called an ordinand. The liturgy used at an ordination is sometimes referred to as an ordinal.
Methodist views on the ordination of women in the rite of holy orders are diverse.
The Open Brethren, sometimes called Christian Brethren, are a group of Evangelical Christian churches that arose in the late 1820s as part of the Assembly Movement. They originated in Ireland before spreading throughout the British Isles, and today they have an estimated 26,000 assemblies worldwide.
Irmgard Schwaetzer is a German politician of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and a Protestant church official. Since 2013, she has been chairing the Synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD).. She is the central founding figure, as well as honorary chairwoman of the Liberal Women.
Baroness Elisabeth Charlotte Motschmann is a German journalist and politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who has been serving as a member of the Bundestag since 2013. In parliament, she is her party's spokeswoman on media policy spokeswoman. Throughout her career, Motschmann has focused on women's issues and children's rights. She opposes abortion, supports the ordination of women in Christian churches, and has advocated for establishing a legally regulated quota for women in leadership in the corporate sector in response to women's economic inequality and the gender-gap in chief executive positions in German companies.
Silke Launert is a German judge and politician of the Christian Social Union (CSU) who has been serving as a member of the Bundestag from the state of Bavaria since 2013. She represents Bayreuth.