Prayer house
A prayer house is a building with a church function, in which services and other events of a parish take place. Synagogues or mosques are also referred to as prayer houses. In many cases, prayer houses were originally built as a temporary measure or converted. Architecturally, they often differ from churches in the lack of a bell tower . They are recognizable from the outside as a meeting building or look like a larger residential building.
Christian prayer houses
Based on Isaiah ( Isa 56.7 ELB ) and Matthew ( Mt 21.13 ELB ), various (mostly free church ) Christian associations name their church buildings of prayer. The Baptist prayer house in Felde is the oldest free church prayer house in Germany, which is still used for worship.
In many cases, emigrants from Germany who settled in the Russian Empire in the 19th century built a house of prayer in their villages. This was especially the case in smaller villages that could not build a larger church building. In the prayer house the service took place on Sundays, during the week it was the school building. Since the buildings did not have a bell tower, the church bell was hung in a separate wooden tower next to the prayer house.
The Huthaus or Zechenhaus was the traditional house of prayer in the mine , where the miners prayed for a safe return from the mountain before they drove into the mine. One of the few surviving miners' prayer houses in Germany is located in Muttental near Witten .
In the Habsburg Empire , Protestant church buildings were limited to articulated churches and tolerance prayer houses until the 19th century .
House of prayer of the former Mennonite congregation in Maxweiler
Bessarabiendeutsches prayer house in Hannowka with a separate bell tower, around 1940
Miners' prayer house of the " Old Murder Pit " in the Ore Mountains
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See also
literature
- Gerhard Koetter: The miners' prayer house in Muttental near Witten . In: VOHM (Hrsg.): Year book of the association for local and local history in the county of Mark . tape 92 . Witten 1994, p. 223-234 .
