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 2020, the EKD had a membership of 20,236,000 members, or 24.3% 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 German Evangelical Church was a successor to the German Evangelical Church Confederation from 1933 until 1945.
The Prussian Union of Churches was a major Protestant church body which emerged in 1817 from a series of decrees by Frederick William III of Prussia that united both Lutheran and Reformed denominations in Prussia. Although not the first of its kind, the Prussian Union was the first to occur in a major German state.
The Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Hanover is a Lutheran church body (Landeskirche) in the northern German state of Lower Saxony and the city of Bremerhaven covering the territory of the former Kingdom of Hanover.
The Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia is a United Protestant church body in the German states of Brandenburg, Berlin and a part of Saxony.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Brunswick is a Lutheran church in the German states of Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt.
Johannes Friedrich is German Lutheran theologian and was a German Lutheran bishop.
Friedrich Karl Otto Dibelius was a German bishop of the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg, up to 1934 a conservative who became a staunch opponent of Nazism and communism.
The Pfarrernotbund was an organisation founded on 21 September 1933 to unite German evangelical theologians, pastors and church office-holders against the introduction of the Aryan paragraph into the 28 Protestant regional church bodies and the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche (DEK) and against the efforts by Reich-bishop Ludwig Müller and the German Christians (DC) since April 1933 to merge the German Protestant churches into one Reich Church that would be Nazi in ideology and entirely lacking any Jewish or Christian origins. As a Christian resistance to National Socialism it was the forerunner of the Confessing Church, founded the following year.
Markus Dröge is a German theologian and was from 2009 until 2019 bishop of the Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia (EKBO).
A Landesbischof is the head of some Protestant regional churches in Germany. Based on the principle of summus episcopus, after the Reformation each Lutheran prince assumed the position of supreme governor of the state church in his territory. After the First World War, all the German monarchies were abolished and in some regional churches a member of the clergy was elected as Landesbischof.
The Lübeck Martyrs were three Roman Catholic priests – Johannes Prassek, Eduard Müller and Hermann Lange – and the Evangelical-Lutheran pastor Karl Friedrich Stellbrink. All four were executed by beheading on 10 November 1943 less than 3 minutes apart from each other at Hamburg's Holstenglacis Prison. Eyewitnesses reported that the blood of the four clergymen literally ran together on the guillotine and on the floor. This impressed contemporaries as a symbol of the ecumenical character of the men's work and witness. That interpretation is supported by their last letters from prison, and statements they themselves made during their time of suffering, torture and imprisonment. "We are like brothers," Hermann Lange said.
Events in the year 1875 in Germany.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Northern Germany is a Lutheran member church of the Evangelical Church in Germany. It was established on 27 May 2012 as a merger of the North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Mecklenburg, and the Pomeranian Evangelical Church. It covers the combined area of all those former member churches, which are the federal states of Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Nordkirche is the only Landeskirche in Germany which covers parts of both New states of Germany and West Germany. It is also called Nordkirche. It has 1,892,749 members (31/12/2020). There are 1,704 ordained pastors and more than 84,000 volunteers working for Nordkirche (4/2016).
The Protestant Church in Baden is a United Protestant member church of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), and member of the Conference of Churches on the Rhine, which now functions as a regional group of the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe (CPCE). The Evangelical Church in Baden is a united Protestant church. Its headquarter, the Evangelical Superior Church Council is located in Karlsruhe.
Events in the year 1950 in West Germany and East Germany.
Events in the year 1962 in Germany.
August Friedrich Karl Marahrens was a German Protestant bishop who served as Landesbischof of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Hanover
