| Map of the Bremen Evangelical Church in Germany | |
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TheBremen Evangelical Church (German:Bremische Evangelische Kirche) is aUnited Protestant member church of theEvangelical Church in Germany in theFree Hanseatic City of Bremen.
The seat of the church is inBremen. It is a full member of theEvangelical Church in Germany (EKD), and is aUnited church combining both Lutheran and Reformed traditions. Brigitte Boehme became the church's first female president in 2001. The church had 176,786 members as of December 2020[1] in 68 parishes. Laic presidency is one of the special characteristics of the Bremen Evangelical Church. It has no theological headmaster. The parishes have a high degree of autonomy, and there is a great variety between liberal and conservative ones. Each member of the church has the free choice, which parish he wants to join.Bremen Cathedral is the most prominent place of worship, but it has no higher status than any other parish. The Bremen Evangelical Church is a member of theUnion of Evangelical Churches in the EKD and of theCommunion of Evangelical Churches in Europe. InBremen the church has its own academy. The church has allowed theordination of women and theblessing of same-sex unions.[2]
The area covered by the Bremen Evangelical Church (BEK) is essentially equivalent to the city of Bremen. In the city ofBremerhaven, which together with Bremen forms the stateFree Hanseatic City of Bremen, only the most important Protestant church, the united ProtestantMayor Smidt Memorial Church, belongs to the BEK. The bulk of the other Protestant church parishes in Bremerhaven is Lutheran and they belong to theEvangelical Lutheran Church of Hanover, some form part of other not regionally-delineated Protestant denominations. The area covered by these parishes belonged to the formerProvince of Hanover before 1947.
The election of the synod is for six years. The elected leader of the "Kirchentag" is also leader of the church.
When theProtestant Reformation swept throughNorthern Germany, Bremen's first Protestant prayer took place in one of the chapels of St. Ansgar's Church, Bremen on 9 November 1522. Since that year Bremen was a prevailingly Protestant city.St Peter's Cathedral then belonged to thecathedral immunity district (German:Domfreiheit; cf. alsoLiberty), an extraterritorialenclave of the neighbouringPrince-Archbishopric of Bremen. The then still Catholiccathedral chapter closed St Peter's in 1532, after a mob of Bremen'sburghers forcefully interrupted theCatholic mass and prompted Jacob Probst, the pastor of the nearbyOur Lady Church, to preach aLutheran sermon.
TheRoman Catholic Church was condemned as a symbol of the abuses of a long Catholic past by most local burghers. In 1547 the chapter, meanwhile prevailingly Lutheran, appointed the DutchAlbert Hardenberg, called Rizaeus, as the first Cathedral preacher ofProtestant affiliation. Rizaeus turned out to be a partisan of the ratherZwinglian understanding of theLord's Supper, which was rejected by the then Lutheran majority of burghers, city council, and chapter. So in 1561, after tremendous quarrels, Rizaeus was dismissed and banned from the city and the cathedral shut again its doors.
However, as a consequence of that controversy the majority of Bremen's burghers and city council adoptedCalvinism until the 1590s, while the chapter, being simultaneously the body of secular government in the neighbouring Prince-Archbishopric, clung toLutheranism. This antagonism between a Calvinistic majority and a Lutheran minority, though of a powerful position in its immunity district (belonging since 1648 toBremen-Verden and annexed to theFree Hanseatic City of Bremen in 1803), remained determinant until in 1873 the Calvinist and Lutheran congregations in Bremen reconciled and founded aunited administrative umbrella, the still existing Bremian Evangelical Church, comprising the bulk of Bremen's burghers.
In 1922 the Bremian church counted about 260,000 parishioners.[4]
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