Anton Friedrich Remmers

Anton Friedrich Remmers

Remmers at a Northwest German mission workers meeting (bottom row, third from left)

Anton Friedrich Remmers (born April 27, 1816 in Jever ; † February 9, 1881 there ) was a bookbinder , evangelist and long-time head and elder of the Jever Baptist congregation . He was one of the founding personalities of the German Baptists . Its field of action went far beyond its beautiful Frisian addition homeland.

Life

Remmers' father, the Jever shoemaker Heinrich (Hinrich) Remmers, died in 1824. His mother, Sophie (née Eils) from Varel , had married the Jever merchant Jürgen Heinrich Juergs (also called Juergens ) after the early death of her first husband . Anton Friedrich Remmers grew up in his house. After attending elementary school, he learned the bookbinding trade and after completing his apprenticeship went on the wanderings that were common at the time . Around 1838 Remmers came to Hamburg and found a job in his uncle's bookbindery.

While strolling downtown Hamburg, Anton Friedrich Remmers met the tailor Hinrich Anton Lücken (1814–1843), who also came from Jever. In Hamburg, gaps had found a connection to the Baptist congregation founded by Johann Gerhard Oncken in 1834 and invited Remmers to get to know this congregation better. Remmers was deeply impressed by the atmosphere and especially by Oncken's sermons and was baptized on December 5, 1838 . Oncken soon recognized the special talents of the new parishioner and appointed him to responsible parish work.

At the end of 1839 Anton Friedrich Remmers returned to Jever. Initiated by the young Baptist church in Oldenburg i. O. a house group had already been established there , which was quietly constituted as a congregation of baptized Christians with 19 members under Oncken's chairmanship on August 30, 1840 , due to state and regional church repression . In collaboration with Johann Ludwig Hinrichs, Remmers soon took on management duties , but was not officially ordained as an elder and headmaster until 1849. In 1858 he built the prayer house on Elisabethufer in Jever, which is still used today by the community, largely from his own resources .

Remmers' missionary work, which he carried out alongside his job as a bookbinder, was not limited to Jever. He began with the establishment of preaching places in the area around Jever and carried out large worship meetings in East Frisia, in which hundreds of people took part. These activities were not without contradiction. State and church authorities responded with police measures. This resulted in fines and prison sentences for unauthorized preaching and the administration of sacraments . In the Oldenburg State Archives alone there are over 50 official documents that reflect these persecutions. However, they left Remmers undeterred. He made a significant contribution to the emergence of numerous communities in north-western Germany. Some church foundations ( Westerstede , Varel , Wilhelmshaven , Nordenham ) go back directly to him.

Anton Friedrich Remmers also undertook a considerable number of mission trips on behalf of Johann Gerhard Oncken. Six months after his baptism, he traveled to Berlin, where, under difficult conditions , he helped to build up the community founded by Gottfried Wilhelm Lehmann . Further trips, most of which he made on foot, took him to Memel , where he was involved in founding and building up the community. In the following years it became the nucleus of Lithuanian and Latvian Baptism . Remmers was also involved in the development of Dutch Baptism . The American Baptist Foreign Missionary Society's news magazine regularly reported on Remmers' work and published his letters.

Remmers died in 1881 after a long illness. He was buried with a large participation of the population in the Jever cemetery, where his grave is to this day.

family

On July 16, 1851, Anton Friedrich Remmers married Catharina Dorothea Krey from Tangstedt in Holstein . The couple had two daughters and three sons. A portrait of his son Heinrich Remmers, who was born in 1855 and died in Hamburg in 1908, is in Jever Castle . Two years after the death of his first wife, in 1879 he married Juliane Dorothea Niemetz (nee Schloenhardt), the widow of the Memel Baptist preacher Niemetz. This marriage remained childless.

literature

• Heinz Buttjes: 150 years of Baptists in Jever. Baptist sectarians, vagabonds , Jever 1990
• Rudolf Donat: How the work began - formation of the German Baptist congregations , Kassel 1958
• Margarethe Jelten: Under God's roof tiles. Beginnings of Baptism in Northwest Germany , Bremerhaven 1985
• Joseph Lehmann : History of the German Baptists (Vol. I and II), Hamburg 1896
• Archive of the Evangelical Free Church Community (Baptists) Jever: History of the community of Christian baptized believers in Jever (handwritten, on the first pages of the community register), around 1855

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Margarete Jelten: Anton Friedrich Remmers 1816 - 1881. A collection of family data , Bremerhaven, p. 4
2. ↑ For gaps see Margarete Jelten: Book Two. A second church book as an early baptismal register of the Baptists in Jeberland , Bremerhaven 2006, p. 17; After his apprenticeship in Hamburg, Lücken worked as a missionary and colporteur in Jeverland . He died in Hamburg in 1843.
3. ↑ In a letter to the Baptist Missionary Magazine (vol. 38, 1858, p. 140) Remmers announced the construction of the prayer house. ; Accessed September 3, 2009.
4. ↑ See as an example: Letter from Mr. Remmers , in: The Baptist Missionary Magazine , Vol. 39 (1859?), P. 116 (published by google books ); Accessed September 3, 2009.