Evangelical Ewe Church
The Evangelical Ewe Church was founded in 1922 as an independent church in Togo and Eastern Ghana .
The Ewe Church was founded in 1847 by German missionaries. The starting point of the Christian mission was the Volta region with the Ewe people who lived there . The first community in what is now Togo was founded in 1893 (Mission Tove ). The two parts of the independent Evangelical Ewe Church, founded in 1922, the Eglise Evangélique Presbytérienne du Togo (EEPT) and the EP Church (Evangelical Presbyterian Church, Ghana), refer to the year 1893 as the year their churches were founded.
As early as the 1860s, the inspector of the North German Mission , Franz Michael Zahn , campaigned for the use of the Ewe language and the independence of the Ewe Church in what is now Ghana . As early as the 1890s, the North German Mission promoted the Ewe culture by giving preference to the Ewe language over the colonial German language in the mission schools. The mission also tried to preserve the traditional local structures. This attitude was shaped not least by the mission inspector Franz Michael Zahn, who was critical of the colonialism and who was head of the mission until 1900. After the division of the former German colony of Togo after the end of the First World War , it was the promotion and maintenance of local structures that helped the Christian community in the former German colony to merge as the "Evangelical Ewe Church".
After Togo had been divided into a British ( British Togoland ) and a French ( French Togoland ) mandate zone, the local representatives of the mission constituted the Evangelical Ewe Church in May 1922 at the first Synod of Missions in Kpalimé . At the same time it was divided into the Eglise Evangélique Presbytérienne du Togo (EEPT) on the territory of Togo and the EP Church (Evangelical Presbyterian Church) as the Ghanaian part of the church. However, both presented themselves under the common constitution of the "Evangelical Ewe Church", which at that time comprised 11,000 believers. Pastor Robert Kwami was appointed as leader and synodal secretary . Kwami was also the one in 1932, just before the seizure of power of Hitler attended, with 150 presentations in 82 locations in North Germany for attention. This lecture tour, which was accompanied by a racist smear campaign by the National Socialists in Oldenburg , and the so-called Kwami affair caused a sensation not only in Germany, Dutch and English daily newspapers also reported on this prelude to the church struggle .
After the German missionaries had to leave the former German colony in 1921, the British colonial power allowed the North German Mission Society to send staff from 1923 to 1939. The outbreak of World War II again interrupted cooperation with the German missionaries. At this point in time the Church had around 40,000 members in British Togo and around 18,000 in French Togo.
In 1954 the name of the Evangelical Ewe Church was changed to Evangelical Presbyterian Church . The Eglise Evangélique Presbytérienne du Togo (EEPT) currently has around 150,000 members and has 89 pastors. The EP Church (Evangelical Presbyterian Church, Ghana) has around 200,000 believers.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Who or what is the “Bremen Mission”? ( Memento of the original from February 2, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ The Evangelical Presbyterian Church (a short chronology)
- ↑ Evangelical Presbyterian Church, Ghana ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
literature
- M. Schlunt: The Protestant Ewe Church in South Togo . Bremen 1912.
- August Wilhelm Schreiber: The Evangelical Church in Togo . In: Julius Richter (ed.): The German Evangelical World Mission . 2nd edition, Nuremberg 1941.
- G. Däuble: Our Protestant Ewe Church . Bremen 1934.
- G. Däuble: souvenir sheets of an old Ewe missionary in Togo, West Africa. Bremen 1936.