Baptist Congregation Oldenburg

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Baptist Congregation Oldenburg (also called Evangelical Free Church Community Oldenburg since 1942 ) is the third oldest congregation of the Federation of Evangelical Free Church Congregations in Germany and the oldest of the Evangelical Free Church State Association of Baptists in the northwest . It was founded on September 10, 1837 with nine people. In 1904 she was granted the rights of a registered association. On 10 June 1971 she was awarded by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Culture , the corporate status .

The Kreuzkirche , today's church of the Oldenburg Baptists, is located at Eichenstrasse 15 in the Eversten district . In 2011, the community had 505 members and, according to its own information, an at least as large circle of friends.

history

Carl Weichardt

The Grand Ducal court glazier Johann Heinrich Carl Christian Weichardt and the art gardener Johann Dietrich Knickmann are closely connected to the beginnings of the Oldenburg Baptist Congregation. Both of them had come to the conviction through personal Bible study that scriptural baptism presupposes the person being baptized's personal faith and that their infant baptism is therefore to be regarded as invalid. With their wish to be baptized as believers , the two craftsmen turned to the Reformed Bremen pastor Friedrich Ludwig Mallet in early 1836 , who, along with Gotfried Menken and Georg Treviranus, was one of the leading theologians of the revival movement. As the pastor of the Evangelical Church in Bremen , Mallet could of course not meet the wishes of the two Oldenburgers. However, he arranged a contact to the Hamburg merchant and Christian bookseller Johann Gerhard Oncken , with whom he had worked closely in the field of people's mission in Bremen and in the Bremen area. Friedrich Mallet knew that Oncken had meanwhile become a Baptist .

Beginnings

After a detailed exchange of letters, Oncken visited the two craftsmen in June 1836, who had since been joined by two other baptism candidates. In a diary entry by Johann Gerhard Onckens it says:

"On June 7, we went a little Hunte , which flows through the city, down, and the delicious Regulation Christ was there performed on four candidates for baptism. Peace and joy filled our hearts on the way home. "

The four baptized people, especially Carl Weichardt, turned out to be committed missionaries. A house Bible group was created, which a number of Oldenburg citizens joined. When Oncken paid a second visit to Oldenburg in September 1837, six more baptism notifications were received. The place of baptism was again the Hunte, where the Weichardt circle met on the evening of September 9th. The following report can be found in Oncken's diary already mentioned:

“We benefited from the most beautiful weather and learned that God's ways are ways of security and peace even if one is persecuted because one is walking in them. Some boatmen had threatened us to drown ourselves if we dared to baptize. But we were protected from above, and everything around us was peaceful and quiet as the mirror of the river into which we descended. "

The following day, the Oldenburg Baptist Congregation was constituted under the chairmanship of Onckens. On this occasion, Carl Weichardt was ordained an elder and thus appointed leader of the young congregation. The deacon entrusted Oncken the Glover Anton Stecher. Weichardt's first official act was to carry out another baptism, which was carried out on the evening of the founding day.

Persecutions

Imposed perquisites for unauthorized religious gatherings

Even before the official founding of the community, the police were investigating the Weichardtschen Kreis because of the illegal formation of conventicles . On April 30, 1837, the police officer Mehls reported in writing that a total of fourteen people had gathered in the house of the glazier “11 o'clock in the morning”. Proceedings were then initiated against the persons named in the report, the outcome of which, however, has not been documented. In a report from the church consistory to the city's magistrate dated June 12, 1837, there is also a reference to “a certain Oncken from Hamburg” who is said to have “performed baptisms here in Oldenburg and is guilty of separatist activities” some time ago ]. ”Since the warnings issued by the authorities remained fruitless, an attempt was made to prevent the spread of the baptismal movement by imposing fines and imprisonment . The following, incomplete table provides an overview of the penalties imposed and the reasons for them:

year Punished person (s) Reason Punishment / consequence
1837 (April) 14 church service participants in the Weichardt house unauthorized conventicle being unknown
1837 (July) Shoemaker Wessels unauthorized celebration of the Lord's Supper in private rooms Warning as a full confession has been made
1837 (October) Wiechmann unauthorized celebration of the Lord's Supper in private rooms 2 days in prison
1837 (October) Wiechmann forbidden conventicles tolerated; Repeat offenders 5 Reichsthaler, 2 days in prison
1837 (October) 10 additional worship participants unauthorized religious gatherings partly imprisonment, partly fines
1837 (November) Carl Weichardt unauthorized celebration of the Lord's Supper in private rooms 5 Reichsthaler
1837 (November) Anton Stecher unauthorized celebration of the Lord's Supper in private rooms 5 Reichsthaler
1837 (November) Baker Böning unauthorized celebration of the Lord's Supper in private rooms 2 days in prison
1838 (March) Carl Weichardt Refused to baptize his 6 month old son Order of compulsory baptism
1840 (January) Carl Weichardt Conducting unauthorized religious gatherings 10 Reichsthaler
1840 (January) Anton Stecher Conducting unauthorized religious gatherings 10 Reichsthaler
1840 (January?) Wiechmann's wife Tolerating unauthorized religious gatherings in your home 2 days in prison
1840 (August) Carl Weichardt unauthorized religious instruction of children ( Sunday school ) unknown
1841 (September) Carl Weichardt illicit baptism 25 gold thalers
1844 (April) Baker Böning Participation in banned separatist gatherings Attachment of furniture and household effects; 40 Reichsthaler

In 1845 there was even an exchange of letters between the Grand Ducal Government and the Police Authority of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg . By way of a request for official assistance, the Oldenburgers asked for the interrogation of two "men named Onken and Koepner, allegedly sent as missionaries by a Hamburg Anabaptist society". What was meant were the aforementioned Johann Gerhard Oncken and Julius Köbner , the co-founder of the German and Danish Baptists. Both "came to the local country on various occasions, probably only for the purpose of expanding the separatist system" and are said to have " become followers of their sects, baptized and distributed the Lord's Supper" in several places, "namely in Jever , Oldenburg and in the office of Berne . The Hamburg police granted the request and sent the protocols drawn up after Oncken and Köbner's interrogations to Oldenburg.

Twice a year the Oldenburg magistrate had to provide the Consistory with information about the urban “sectarian”. This information turned out to be very positive for the Weichardt circle. Apart from "the measures brought about by their convictions and religious acts" they had not given rise to any complaint. From 1845 onwards, the reports kept repeating the following remark: "There are no reports of any conventicles that have taken place." Nine years later, the Magistrate was once again commissioned by the Consistory to pay particular attention to the Baptists in the Oldenburg city area.

The files show that it was not the state authorities that were primarily the initiators of the police actions directed against the Baptists, but rather the “regional or state church clergy pushed for these shameful scenes, for which the current church laws offered a good handle”. This was particularly evident in the forced baptism of children from Baptist families. A pastor, accompanied by a clerk and a police officer, entered the Baptist house and had the baby taken out of the cradle to be sprinkled. Since their parents often refused them the water they needed and the baptismal bowl, they turned to the neighbors for help. Every now and then the water was brought in a medicine bottle. Such compulsory baptisms existed until 1848. An Oldenburg pastor of the regional church described in his memoirs an officially ordered infant baptism as follows:

“In such a case, Pastor Claussen had him [Carl Weichardt] announced that he would appear at his house at this or that hour to carry out the baptism. Then the parents left the house, ignoring the whole procedure as much as possible. Pastor Claussen came with the sexton and some witnesses, and the baptism was performed in the absence of the parents. "

Rolf Schäfer commented on this and other processes like this:

“[...] the struggle over the doctrine of baptism did not take place with the help of arguments - especially since the Baptists were not taken seriously theologically - but with the instruments of power of the bourgeois order. Therefore, the newborns were forcibly baptized before 1848. "

At the beginning of the 1850s, the persecution of the Baptist church was replaced by its limited tolerance. The liberal resolutions passed by the Frankfurt National Assembly in the revolutionary year of 1848 also changed the position of dissidents in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg . Even the Oldenburg Council of Churches revealed a more liberal stance: "After the current conditions of the various religious communities in the state have been shaped, every church must feel obliged to tolerate the development of another denomination." In the course of this liberalization, the Baptists in the state of Oldenburg were allowed To erect places of worship, to lay out cemeteries and to invite publicly to events. Even marriages, which until then could only be legitimized by a clergyman of the state church, were now possible, albeit in exceptional cases, before a civil official. In 1855, the Oldenburg Baptist preacher and missionary August Friedrich Wilhelm Haese was able to marry his bride Metta Schütte in front of representatives of the Varel office and thus carry out the first civil law marriage in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg. Applications by the Oldenburg Baptists for recognition as a religious community under public law continued to be rejected until the beginning of the 20th century. It was not until October 28, 1904 that the Oldenburg Baptist congregation was entered under number 25 in the register of associations of the Oldenburg District Court.

Further developments

Despite the difficulties described, the Baptist movement had spread strongly in the state of Oldenburg. In an application dated January 26, 1862 by the municipalities in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg to the State Ministry for the granting of corporate rights , it states, among other things:

“There are already seven parishes in the Duchy of Oldenburg, which have around 600 members (communion companions), while the number of followers who usually attend our public services may amount to 2000 people; […] On 70 stations, where some members, some friends live, our preachers and missionaries preach the gospel, often to listeners who extremely rarely or never visit church, which is in connection with the movement of temperance , that of represented to all of our members, a beneficial influence on the morality and spiritual well-being of many has been shown. "

A number of independent Baptist churches, including developed over the next decades from the quote mentioned "70 Stations" Oldenburg region Westerstede -Felde, Varel , Delmenhorst and Jeddeloh I . A church planted in Sage in 1858 was abandoned at the beginning of the 1880s. The Sager prayer house , built in 1863, was sold in 1881 and is still used today as a residential building.

On June 10, 1971, the Baptist Congregation Oldenburg, registered as a registered association since 1904, was granted corporate rights by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Culture.

Churches of the Oldenburg Baptists

Baptist Chapel on Wilhelmstrasse (1868 - 1905); Synagogue since 1995

The Oldenburg Baptist Congregation held its church service meetings from 1837 in the house of the art glazier Carl Weichardt. It was located at Am Stau near the Huntehaven. Due to persecution by state and church authorities, the young community was forced to change its meeting places frequently until the late 1840s. Workshops, living rooms and also places in the open air served as meeting places.

In 1850 the community succeeded in renting a larger hall on Burgstrasse / corner of Winkelgang. He was in a town house in the craftsmen's quarter of the city center (Poggenburg / corner Abraham, Burgstrasse). Eighteen years later, the first Baptist chapel in Oldenburg was built on Wilhelmstrasse . Due to the strong growth of the community, a new church was consecrated on Steinweg as early as 1905. The church, which has since been demolished, originally had a neo-Gothic facade and resembled the nearby Church of Peace of the Methodist Congregation. This facade was lost during an expansion and renovation in 1953. In the same year the chapel on Steinweg was given the name Kreuzkirche der Baptisten .

The chapel on Wilhelmstrasse was initially sold to the Guttempler as a club house. At the beginning of the First World War in 1914, the property rights were sold to the Oldenburg Evangelical Hospital, which used the former chapel as a ward until the 1990s. In 1995 the newly founded Jewish community in Oldenburg acquired the church and converted it into a synagogue and a cultural center.

In 1973 the new cruciform church on Eichenstrasse in Eversten was completed and given its intended purpose. An extension took place in 2007. On the site of the Kreuzkirche there is also the community-based Diakoniewerk Kreuzwerk , which primarily offers nursing and care for the elderly as well as domestic care.

Personalities associated with the Oldenburg Baptist Congregation

Some of the people who have become famous beyond the borders of the Oldenburg Baptist Congregation include:

literature

  • Joseph Lehmann: History of the German Baptists ; first part: Education, expansion and persecution of the communities until the dawn of real religious freedom in 1848 , Hamburg 1896, pp. 98-103.
  • Rudolf Donat: How the work began. Formation of the German Baptist Congregations , Kassel 1958; see especially the chapter from the Elbe region to East Frisia and to Mecklenburg. The spread in north-west and north-west Germany , pp. 97–120
  • Rudolf Donat: The growing work. Expansion of the German Baptist Church through sixty years (1849 to 1909) , Kassel 1960, pp. 24–29; 334-338; 405ff
  • Rudolf Sichelschmidt: Order and promise. 125 years of the Oldenburg Baptist Congregation , Oldenburg 1962
  • Margarete Jelten: Under God's roof tiles. Beginnings of Baptism in Northwest Germany , Bremerhaven 1984
  • Margarete Jelten: From Hamburg to Oldenburg. Keywords from Oldenburg 1836 as keywords for Oldenburg 1986. On the Federal Council meeting May 7-10, 1986 , Bremerhaven 1986
  • Evangelical Free Church Community Oldenburg (Hrsg.): Mission and way. 1837 - 1987: 150 years of Ev.-Freikl. Oldenburg municipality , Oldenburg 1987
  • Evangelical Free Church Community Oldenburg KdöR (Hrsg.): Tradition und Weite. 175 years of the Baptist Church in Oldenburg , Oldenburg 2012

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Association of Evangelical Free Churches: Yearbook 2011/2012 , Kassel 2012, p. 217
  2. ↑ Internet presence of the Evangelical Free Church in Odenburg: History ( Memento from September 26, 2012 in the Internet Archive ); Accessed July 27, 2012
  3. ↑ Margarete Jelten: Under God's roof tiles. Beginnings of Baptism in Northwest Germany , Bremerhaven 1984, p. 36; Johann Gerhard Oncken was baptized with six other baptized children in April 1834 by the American theology professor Barnas Sears in the Elbe near Hamburg-Steinwärder and was then appointed elder of the newly founded Baptist community in Hamburg.
  4. ↑ a b Rudolf Donat: How the work began. Origin of the German Baptist Congregations , Kassel 1958, p. 99.
  5. ↑ Oncken reported on his visit to Oldenburg in the Baptist Missionary Magazine (ed. Baptist General Convention), Vol. XVII, Boston 1837, p. 66
  6. ↑ Margarete Jelten: From Hamburg to Oldenburg. Keywords from Oldenburg 1836 as keywords for Oldenburg 1986. On the Federal Council meeting May 7-10, 1986 , Bremerhaven 1986, p. 17.
  7. ↑ Evangelical Free Church Oldenburg (ed.): Sendung und Weg. 1837 - 1987: 150 years of Ev.-Freikl. Oldenburg municipality . Oldenburg 1987, p. 5.
  8. ↑ Rudolf Donat: How the work began. Origin of the German Baptist Congregations , Kassel 1958, p. 100
  9. ↑ Compare to this Evangelical Free Church Community Oldenburg (Hrsg.): Sendung und Weg. 1837 - 1987: 150 years of Ev.-Freikl. Oldenburg municipality . Oldenburg 1987, pp. 9-13
  10. ↑ a b Rudolf Donat: How the work began. Origin of the German Baptist Congregations , Kassel 1958, p. 100 f.
  11. ↑ Margarete Jelten: Under God's roof tiles. Beginnings of Baptism in Northwest Germany , Bremerhaven 1984, p. 123 f.
  12. ↑ Evangelical Free Church Oldenburg (ed.): Sendung und Weg. 1837 - 1987: 150 years of Ev.-Freikl. Oldenburg municipality . Oldenburg 1987, p. 13.
  13. ↑ Rudolf Donat: How the work began. Formation of the German Baptist Congregations , Kassel 1958, p. 101.
  14. ↑ Johannes Ramsauer: From the memories of church life in the Duchy of Oldenburg in the 19th century , in: Oldenburgisches Kirchenblatt , No. 37/1932, p. 24.
  15. ^ Rolf Schäfer u. a. (Ed.): Oldenburgische Kirchengeschichte , Oldenburg 1999, ISBN 3-89598-624-0 , p. 405.
  16. ↑ a b Evangelical Free Church in Oldenburg (ed.): Sendung und Weg. 1837 - 1987: 150 years of Ev.-Freikl. Oldenburg municipality . Oldenburg 1987, p. 15.
  17. ↑ Prayer House Felde : 1850; Prayer house Jever , Baptist chapel Varel : 1858; Oldenburg Baptist Chapel: 1868
  18. ↑ Felde Baptist Cemetery
  19. ↑ See also the article Frerich Bohlken .
  20. ↑ a b Evangelical Free Church in Oldenburg (ed.): Sendung und Weg. 1837 - 1987: 150 years of Ev.-Freikl. Oldenburg municipality . Oldenburg 1987, p. 17
  21. ↑ Quoted from Evangelical Free Church of Oldenburg (ed.): Sendung und Weg. 1837 - 1987: 150 years of Ev.-Freikl. Oldenburg municipality . Oldenburg 1987, p. 15; Extract from the application of the municipalities in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg ... from January 26, 1862 (copy)
  22. ↑ See on church planting in Jeddeloh I Heinrich Kruse / Klaus Kruse: Dorfchronik Jeddeloh 1. 800 years , Jeddeloh I 1990, p. 143 ( online ; PDF; 14.6 MB)
  23. ↑ Margarete Jelten: Under God's roof tiles. Beginnings of Baptism in Northwest Germany , Bremerhaven 1984, p. 248f.
  24. ↑ The information in this section relates to the Evangelical Free Church of Oldenburg (Hrsg.): Sendung und Weg. 1837 - 1987: 150 years of Ev.-Freikl. Oldenburg municipality . Oldenburg 1987, p. 45 ff .; compare Hans-Volker Sadlack: Museum der Baptistenkapellen , in: Zeitschrift Die Gemeinde , No. 3/2009 of February 8, 2009, p. 15
  25. ↑ Website of the Diakoniewerk Kreuzwerk . Retrieved June 29, 2017.
  26. ↑ Evangelical Free Church Oldenburg (ed.): Sendung und Weg. 1837 - 1987: 150 years of Ev.-Freikl. Oldenburg municipality . Oldenburg 1987, p. 209.