Village church movement
The village church movement in Germany was a centered cultural work in the country, only in later times did it also support the religious and social concerns of the peasant class .
After the First World War , the "German Association for Rural Welfare and Home Care" , headed by the writer Heinrich Sohnrey (1859-1948), campaigned for a stronger form of the village church to counteract rural exodus. He found a helper in Hans von Lüpke (1866–1934), who was the leading figure in the village church movement as the editor of the magazine “Die Dorfkirche” . Another sponsor was the Brandenburg building officer Georg Büttner (1858–1914), whose main task was the architectural and structural church building in the country.
Social development
The medieval representation of the social order was based on the tripartite division of the classes. The clergy had to pray, the prince had to protect and the peasantry had to work. However, this also meant that the peasant class was given a vital social function and strengthened the importance of the villages . The abolition of the medieval villication - the previous two-part manorial rule, which consisted of the manor and small farms - now introduced the village to new social forms in the countryside. Until well into the 19th century, before the term rural exodus became popular, most of the people lived in villages. The fortified church or the village church were at the center of these residential collections . A rural social order and a peasant world developed between the land and the Bible . With the age of industrialization and the emergence of new fields of work, which had settled on the outskirts of the cities and at the same time offered new jobs and income opportunities, people moved out of the villages.
German village church movement
This is how the "German Village Church Movement" came into being at the beginning of the 20th century. The best-known representative was Hans von Lüpke, who published the magazine "Die Dorfkirche, Illustrated Monthly for the Care of Religious Life in Local and Popular Form" . As it was already stated in the subline, the village church movement had set itself the task of cultivating religious life in a native and popular form. The impetus for publication came from the writer and teacher Heinrich Sohnrey, and the senior civil servant Georg Büttner could be won as a further author of articles .
Regional meetings with readers were held together. While the Catholic Church pursued similar goals with the " Catholic rural people movement " , the Protestant side organized itself as the "German Village Church Association" . In 1913 the first German Village Church Congress was held. Between the two world wars, the two organizations partly rubbed off against the consequences of the discussion on dialectical theology , the church struggle and the cultural struggle and were exposed to strong tensions. In the Weimar Republic , the first country folk high schools based on the example of Denmark were established. Compared to the “movements” and “associations”, they offered educational programs for people from rural areas or from agriculture.
New beginning
After the Second World War , a reconstruction of the offer of ecclesiastical and religious movements began .
In 1951 the new beginning and a reorganization began as a “working group for the village church service within the EKD” . The village church days were integrated as a working group into the Protestant church days . The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hanover , for example, maintains the Church Service in the Country (KDL) for this purpose .
The Katholische Landvolkbewegung (KLB), which took its first steps parallel to the German Village Church Movement , emerged as an association in the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, which particularly takes care of the concerns of Christians in rural areas. Its founding year also goes back to 1951, the association was founded in the Himmelspforten monastery in Würzburg . Saint Niklaus von Flüe was chosen as the patron saint . The KLB sees itself "as an advocate for people in rural areas, it wants to be a mouthpiece for religious, cultural and social issues and contribute to the reorganization and rethinking of the peasantry".
literature
- Michael Klein: Between own church law and the village church movement. Historical studies on the relationship between church and country (= Science & Technology 16). dissertation.de, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89825-652-9 .
- Angela Driver: Folklore and Protestant theology: the village church movement 1907–1945. Verlag Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-412-14603-X .