Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Slovakia

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ECAV Church in Trnava (1924)

The Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Slovakia (ECAV) (Slovak Evanjelická cirkev augsburského vyznania na Slovensku ) is a Lutheran church in Slovakia and as such a member of the Lutheran World Federation .

With around 225,513 members (approx. 4% of the population), the ECAV is the second largest church in Slovakia after the Roman Catholic . It currently has 326 parishes and 657 church buildings and around 355 active pastors. The leading bishop (general bishop) has been Miloš Klátik since 2006 . There is also a bishop for the eastern and western districts.

history

As early as the 1520s, the ideas of the Reformation were spreading in what is now Slovakia. In the middle of the 16th century, the majority of the population, especially in the largely German-speaking cities, was Lutheran . The Zips formed a focus . The first organization came about at the Synod of Žilina in 1610. Subsequently, however, the Counter Reformation , with the climax in the “decade of mourning” 1671–1681, led to a sharp decline in the number of Protestants. Even the restoration of limited religious freedom in the Ödenburger Landtag in 1681 did not change the largely unlawful situation. An orderly structure of the church was only possible again after the tolerance patent of Emperor Joseph II in 1781.

In the 19th century, the Lutheran Church in the Kingdom of Hungary had roughly the same number of Hungarian-speaking, German-speaking and Slovak-speaking members. Lutheran pastors like Ján Kollár , Michal Miloslav Hodža or Samo Chalupka were among the supporters of the Slovak national movement . The pastor and later senior Carl Eugen Schmidt (1865–1948) ensured an emphatically Lutheran orientation, particularly in the German parishes .

After the establishment of Czechoslovakia, separated from the “mother church” in Budapest, the Lutheran congregations had to form an independent church after 1918. This process was completed in 1922 with the adoption of a church constitution. From 1948 to 1989 the church was controlled by the communist government, and in 1993 it adopted a new constitution.

General Bishops

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ LWF Statistics - Slovakia The Lutheran World Federation