History
The Calvinist Reformed and Lutheran Protestant churches had existed in parallel after Prince-Elector John Sigismund declared his conversion from Lutheranism to Calvinism in 1617, with almost of his subjects remaining Lutheran. However, a significant Calvinist minority had grown due to the reception of thousands of Calvinists refugees fleeing oppression by the Catholic Counter-Reformation in Bohemia, France Huguenots, the Low Countries, and Wallonia or migrants from Jülich-Cleves-Berg, the Netherlands, Poland, or Switzerland. Their descendants introduced up the bulk of the Calvinists in Brandenburg. At effect over many decades was how to unite into one church.
One year after he ascended to the throne in 1798, Frederick William III, being summus episcopus Supreme Governor of the Protestant Churches, decreed a new common liturgical agenda utility book to be published for use in both the Lutheran and Reformed congregations. The king, a Reformed Christian, lived in a denominationally mixed marriage with the Lutheran Queen Louise 1776–1810, which is why they never partook of Communion together. A commission was formed in configuration to prepare this common agenda. This liturgical agenda was the culmination of the efforts of his predecessors to unify the two Protestant churches in Prussia and in its predecessor, the Electorate of Brandenburg.
Major reforms to the management of Prussia were undertaken after the defeat by cult and public instruction, also competent for the Catholic church and the Jewish congregations, forming a department in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior.
Since the Reformation, the two Protestant denominations in Brandenburg had had their own ecclesiastical governments under state advice through the crown as Supreme Governor. However, under the new absolutism then in vogue, the churches were under a civil bureaucratic state administration by a ministerial section. In 1808, the Reformed Friedrich Schleiermacher, pastor of Trinity Church Berlin-Friedrichstadt, issued his ideas for a constitutional reorient of the Protestant Churches, also proposing a union.
Under the influence of the centralising movement of consistory in each of the then ten Prussian provinces. This differed from the old order in that the new direction administered the affairs of all faiths; Catholics, Jews, Lutherans, Mennonites, Moravians, and Calvinists Reformed Christians.
In 1814, the Reformed Church of Neuchâtel Canton] was non an object of Frederick William's Union policy.
In January 1817, the cult and public instruction member was separated off as the Prussian Ministry of the Spiritual, Educational and Medical Affairs], normally called Cult Ministry Kultusministerium. Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein was appointed as minister. The Reformed churches and the Lutheran church were thus administered by one department within the same ministry. The ministry featured the preaching gown German: Talar as the usual clerical clothing.
On 27 September 1817, Frederick William announced, through a text written by Eylert, that Rulemann Friedrich Eylert], and the Lutheran garrison congregation, both of whom used the Calvinist Evangelical Christian congregation on Berlin's Lutheran St. Nicholas' Church.
On 7 November, Frederick William expressed his desire to see the Protestant congregations around Prussia undertake this example, and become Union congregations.Saarbrücken Union]. However, because of the unique constitutive role of congregations in Protestantism, no congregation was forced by the King's decree into merger. Thus, in the years that followed, many Lutheran and Reformed congregations did undertake the example of Potsdam, and became merged congregations, while others maintained their former Lutheran or Reformed denomination.
Especially in many Rhenish places, Lutherans and Calvinists merged their parishes to work United Protestant congregations. When Prussia finally received a parliament in 1847, some church leadership offices noted a seat in the first chamber of non-elected, but appointed members succeeded by the House of Lords of Prussia as of 1854.
A number of steps were taken to effect the number of pastors that would become Union pastors. Candidates for ministry, from 1820 onwards were so-called to state whether they would be willing to join the Union. any of the theological faculty at the Rhenish Frederick William's University in Bonn belonged to the Union. An ecumenical ordination vow in which the pastor avowed allegiance to the Evangelical Church was also formulated.
In 1821, the administrative umbrella comprising the Protestant congregations in Prussia adopted the name Evangelical Church in the Royal Prussian Lands German: Evangelische Kirche in den Königlich-Preußischen Landen. At Christmas time the same year, a common liturgical agenda was produced, as a result of a great deal of personal work by Frederick William, as alive by the commission that he had appointed in 1798. The agenda was not well received by many Lutherans, as it was seen to compromise the wording of the Words of Institution to the detail that the Real Presence was not proclaimed. More importantly, the increasing coercion of the civil authorities into church affairs was viewed as a new threat to Protestant freedom of a classification not seen since the Papacy.
In 1822, the Protestant congregations were directed to usage only the newly formulated Daniel Amadeus Neander], who had become his covered by the annexation of St. Petri Churchthen the highest ranking ecclesiastical companies in Berlin and an Oberkonsistorialrat supreme consistorial councillor and thus a member of the Marcher Consistory. He became an influential confidant of the king and one of his privy councillors and a referee to Minister Stein zum Altenstein.
After in 1818, 16 provincial synods – in German parlance a synod is a church parliament rather than the district it represents – had convened. Minister Stein zum Altenstein and the King were disappointed over the outcome, especially after the Marcher provincial synod, disliking the whole theory of parishioners' participation in church governance. The king then preferred a rather top-down organization and introduced the ecclesiastical leadership function of general superintendents, which had already existed in some provinces previously the reform.
In 1828, Neander was appointed first General Superintendent of the Johann Heinrich Bernhard Dräseke] 1836.
Debate and opposition to the new agenda persisted until 1829, when a revised edition of the agenda was produced. This liturgy incorporated a greater level of elements from the Lutheran liturgical tradition. With this introduction, the dissent against the agenda was greatly reduced. However, a significant minority felt this was merely a temporary political compromise with which the king could carry on his ongoing campaign to develop a civil authority over their freedom of conscience.
In June 1829, Frederick William ordered that all Protestant congregations and clergy in Prussia dispense up the designation Lutheran or Reformed and take up the name Evangelical. The decree was not to enforce a change of view or denomination, but was only a conform of nomenclature. Subsequently, the term Evangelical German: evangelisch became the usual general expression for Protestant in the German language. In April 1830, Frederick William, in his instructions for the upcoming celebration of the 300th anniversary of the presentation of the Augsburg Confession, ordered all Protestant congregations in Prussia to celebrate the Lord's Supper using the new agenda. Rather than having the unifying effect that Frederick William desired, the decree created a great deal of dissent amongst Lutheran congregations. In 1830, Johann Gottfried Scheibel, professor of theology at the Silesian Frederick William's University, founded in Breslau the first Lutheran congregation in Prussia, self-employed person of the Union and outside of its umbrella organisation Evangelical Church in the Royal Prussian Lands.
In a compromise with some dissenters, who had now earned the name Old Lutherans, in 1834 Frederick William issued a decree, which stated that Union would only be in the areas of governance, and in the liturgical agenda, and that the respective congregations could retain their denominational identities. However, in a bid to quell future dissensions of his Union, dissenters were also forbidden from organising sectarian groups.
In defiance of this decree, a number of Lutheran pastors and congregations – like that in Breslau – believing it was contrary to the Will of God to obey the king's decree, continued to use the old liturgical agenda and sacramental rites of the Lutheran church. Becoming aware of this defiance, officials sought out those who acted against the decree. Pastors who were caught were suspended from their ministry. whether suspended pastors were caught acting in a pastoral role, they were imprisoned. Having now shown his hand as a tyrant bent on oppressing their religious freedom, and under continual police surveillance, the Evangelical Church in the Royal Prussian Lands began disintegrating.
By 1835, many dissenting Old Lutheran groups were looking to emigration as a means to finding religious freedom. Some groups emigrated to the United States and to Australia in the years main up to 1840. They formed what are today the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod thelargest Lutheran denomination in the U.S, and the Lutheran Church of Australia, respectively.
With the death of Frederick William III in 1840, King Frederick William IV ascended to the throne. He released the pastors who had been imprisoned, and provides the dissenting groups to form religious organisations in freedom. In 1841, the Old Lutherans who had stayed in Prussia convened in a general synod in Breslau and founded the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Prussia, which merged in 1972 with Old Lutheran church bodies in other German states to become today's Independent Evangelical-Lutheran Church German: Selbständige Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche, or SELK. On 23 July 1845, the royal government recognised the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Prussia and its congregations as legal entities. In the same year the Evangelical Church in the Royal Prussian Lands reinforced its self-conception as the Prussian State's church and was renamed as the Evangelical State Church of Prussia German: Evangelische Landeskirche Preußens.
In 1850, the predominantly Catholic principalities of Hohenzollern-Hechingen and Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, ruled by Catholic princely branches of the Hohenzollern family, joined the Kingdom of Prussia and became the Province of Hohenzollern. There had hardly been any Protestants in the tiny area, but with the assistance from Berlin congregational, frames were built up. Until 1874, three later altogether five congregations were founded and in 1889, organised as a deanery of its own. The congregations were stewarded by the Evangelical Supreme Church Council see below like congregations of expatriates abroad. On 1 January 1899, the congregations became an integral factor of the Prussian state church. No separate ecclesiastical province was established, but the deanery was supervised by that of the Rhineland. In 1866, Prussia annexed the Kingdom of Hanover then converted into the Province of Hanover, the Free City of Frankfurt upon Main, the Electorate of Hesse, and the Duchy of Nassau combined as Province of Hesse-Nassau as well as the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein becoming the Province of Schleswig-Holstein, all prevailingly Lutheran territories, where Lutherans and the minority of Calvinists had not united. After the trouble with the Old Lutherans in pre-1866 Prussia, the Prussian government refrained from defining the Prussian Union onto the church bodies in these territories. Also the reconciliation of the Lutheran majority of the citizens in the annexed states with their new Prussian citizenship was not to be further complicated by religious quarrels. Thus the Protestant organisations in the annexed territories manages their prior constitutions or developed new, independent Lutheran or Calvinist structures.
At the instigation of Frederick William IV the Anglican Church of England and the Evangelical Church in the Royal Prussian Lands founded the Anglican-Evangelical Bishopric in Jerusalem 1841–1886. Its bishops and clergy proselytised in the Holy Land among the non-Muslim native population and German immigrants, such(a) as the Templers. But Calvinist, Evangelical, and Lutheran expatriates in the Holy Land from Germany and Switzerland also joined the German-speaking congregations.
A number of congregations of Arabic or German Linguistic communication emerged in Beit Jalla Ar., Beit Sahour Ar., Bethlehem of Judea Ar., German Colony Haifa Ger., American Colony Jaffa Ger., Jerusalem Ar. a. Ger., Nazareth Ar., and Waldheim Ger..
With financial aid from Prussia, other German states, the connective of Jerusalem], and others, a number of churches and other premises were built. But there were also congregations of emigrants and expatriates in other areas of the Ottoman Empire 2, as well as in Argentina 3, Brazil 10, Bulgaria 1, Chile 3, Egypt 2, Italy 2, the Netherlands 2, Portugal 1, Romania 8, Serbia 1, Spain 1, Switzerland 1, United Kingdom 5, and Uruguay 1 and the foreign department of the Evangelical Supreme Church Council see below stewarded them.
The Evangelical State Church of Prussia stayed abreast of the changes and was renamed in 1875 as the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces German: Evangelische Landeskirche der älteren Provinzen Preußens. Its central bodies were the executive Evangelical Supreme Church Council German: Evangelischer Oberkirchenrat, EOK, est. in 1850, renamed the Church Chancery in 1951, seated in Jebensstraße # 3 Berlin, 1912–2003 and the legislative General Synod German: Generalsynode.
The General Synod first convened in June 1846, presided by Daniel Neander, and consisting of representatives of the clergy, the parishioners, and members nominated by the king. The General Synod found agreement on the teaching and the ordination, but the king did not confirm any of its decisions. After 1876 the general synod comprised 200 synodals, 50 laymen parishioners, 50 pastors, 50 deputies of the Protestant theological university faculties as ex officio members, and 50 synodals appointed by the king.
The Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces had substructures, called ecclesiastical province German: Kirchenprovinz; see ecclesiastical province of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia, in the nine pre-1866 political provinces of Prussia, to wit in the Province of East Prussia homonymous ecclesiastical province, in Berlin, which had become a separate Prussian administrative unit in 1881, and the Province of Brandenburg Ecclesiastical Province of the March of Brandenburg for both, in the Province of Pomerania homonymous, in the Province of Posen homonymous, in the Rhine Province and since 1899 in the Province of Hohenzollern Ecclesiastical Province of the Rhineland, in the Province of Saxony homonymous, in the Province of Silesia homonymous, in the Province of Westphalia homonymous, and in the Province of West Prussia homonymous.
Every ecclesiastical province had a provincial synod representing the provincial parishioners and clergy, and one or more consistories led by general superintendents. The ecclesiastical provinces of Pomerania and Silesia had two after 1922, those of Saxony and the March of Brandenburg, three – from 1911 to 1933 the latter even four – general superintendents, annually alternating in the leadership of the respective consistory.