German Evangelical Church Congress 1983

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Logo of the German Protestant Kirchentag

The 20th German Evangelical Church Congress 1983 took place from June 8th to 12th, 1983 in Hanover . It was the third German Protestant Kirchentag after 1949 and 1967 in the Lower Saxony state capital. The President of the Kirchentag was the SPD politician Erhard Eppler . The biblical motto " return to life" was taken from the Old Testament ( Ez 18,21-23  LUT ). The advertising poster for the Kirchentag showed a buffer stop at an ending railway track under the Kirchentag motto.

With 114,500 permanent participants, the strong growth in the 1981 Kirchentag was just kept up. As in 1981, the majority of the participants were younger than 30 years. 800 services were held, 300 more than in 1981. Around 95,000 people attended the closing service in the Lower Saxony Stadium and on the neighboring all- around facility , where Bishop Klaus Engelhardt gave the sermon.

A major theme of the Kirchentag was the NATO double resolution and the associated deployment of Pershing II missiles and land-based cruise missiles for autumn of that year , which was largely rejected, in some cases very clearly. There had already been disputes in advance because the peace movement had called for demonstrations , as it did at the previous Kirchentag in 1981 . Signs of protest were purple scarves that were distributed by the tens of thousands and worn around their necks or heads by the participants. The scarves had the inscription: “The time is here for a no without any yes to weapons of mass destruction” and a drawing showing a huge hand pushing a man with a bomb under his arm out of a church. The bishops Hans-Heinrich Harms and Joachim Heubach stayed away from the Kirchentag to protest against this protest. Overall, however, the mood was significantly less confrontational than in 1981.

In the same year, the 500th year of Martin Luther's birth was celebrated in the GDR at six smaller regional Protestant church days in various cities and at a large national church day in Dresden . The theme of the anniversary hardly played a role at the Hanoverian Kirchentag.

literature

  • You only see purple. Kirchentag 1983: Pray and fight for peace. In: Die Zeit , June 3, 1983.
  • Hans-Jochen Luhmann, Gundel Neveling-Wagner (ed.): German Evangelical Church Congress Hanover 1983. Documents. Kreuz, Stuttgart 1984.
  • Manfred Seitz : Return to which life? Kirchentag between a major event and community. In: Ders .: Renewal of the Church: Church Building and Spirituality. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1985, pp. 103-107.
  • Eckart Conze , Jan Ole Wiechmann: Epplers Kirchentage. Protestantism, politics and the peace question around 1980. In: Tobias Sarx u. a. (Ed.): Protestantism and Society. Contributions to the history of the church and diakonia in the 19th and 20th centuries. Jochen-Christoph Kaiser on his 65th birthday. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2013, pp. 309–322.

Web links

Commons : Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag 1983  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files