August Kraft (missionary)

August Kraft (born February 28, 1863 in Altwildungen , † March 7, 1928 in Hola ) was a German free church missionary and revival preacher .

Life

August Kraft was born as the fourth child of the farmer Philipp Kraft and his wife Luise. His mother died in 1874. His father married Friederike Michel in 1875, but died in 1881.

From 1870 to 1879 Kraft attended elementary school in Altwildungen. He then did an apprenticeship as a carpenter , first with his uncle Phillip Fink, then in Barmen with the master carpenter Ernst Bangert. During his apprenticeship, Kraft had contact with the Gemarker youth club , where he received decisive impulses for his faith. He also got to know the FeG pastor Friedrich Sprenger, who had an influence on him. After completing his apprenticeship, Kraft moved with Sprenger to Remscheid-Lüttringhausen , but returned to Barmen just eight weeks later.

In Elberfeld , Kraft made the acquaintance of a master carpenter from Haan , who finally hired him. However, Kraft left the job in Haan after around seven months. His restless life finally led him back to Elberfeld via Wülfrath , Heidelberg and Wiesbaden . In 1884 Kraft became seriously ill, so the doctor advised him not to return to his profession. Ultimately, he found a job in an orphanage in Neukirchen. In 1885 he applied for admission there to begin training at the local mission seminar of the orphan and mission institution in Neukirchen . After his training, due to political circumstances, it was initially not possible to leave the country as a missionary, so that from 1891 onwards, at the invitation of Heinrich Menge, Kraft held missionary and Bible studies in the area around Waldeck . With Prince Heinrich von Waldeck, for whom the church was too liberal, he won a weighty advocate who supported him in his efforts to organize evangelistic events even against the resistance of the regional church .

The increasing resistance to Kraft's efforts to initiate a revival within the Volkskirche finally culminated in physical disputes and the distancing of his work from the regional church, which resulted in the formation of free evangelical communities in the Waldecker Land . On the recommendation of the Witten preacher and bookseller Friedrich Fries , Kraft was accompanied by the administrative secretary Gustav Nagel from 1892 before he attended the Evangelical Preacher's School in Basel . In 1892, Kraft left the Waldeck area to return to Neukirchen, where he entered the missionary service in February 1893 and left for East Africa via Amsterdam . In what is now Kenya, he took over the work of missionary Ferdinand Würtz, who learned the Pokomo language and translated some sections of the New Testament into the national language of Kipokomo. On February 17, 1895, he married his long-time friend Emilie Mutz in Zanzibar , with whom he had four children. In August 1900 the family returned to Germany to take a longer home leave. The first mission on the Tana River was followed by two more from 1902 to 1907 and then from 1909 to 1916.

In the conflict within the Neukirchen missionaries regarding the question of baptism , Kraft remained largely neutral and argued that the Neukirchen mission is not committed to a church or free church. In the course of the First World War , in which the British and Belgians conquered East Africa, Kraft was taken prisoner in Burundi on June 4, 1916 and was finally interned in southern France . He then worked from 1920 to 1925 as a householder in the Neukirchen mission house, until he finally emigrated to Africa again at the age of 63 , where he took up residence in Hola, a small town on the Tana River. The climatic conditions, the lack of results from the missionary work and depression were the cause of repeated states of exhaustion. His depression finally led to suicide on the night of March 7-8, 1928 . Kraft shot himself with a shotgun .

literature

• Hartmut Weyel; Wolfgang Heinrichs, Michael Schröder, Hartmut Weyel (eds.): The future needs an origin . Biographical portraits from the history and prehistory of free evangelical communities , Witten, Bundes-Verlag, 2010