Friedrich Wilhelm Baedeker

Friedrich Wilhelm Baedeker

Friedrich Wilhelm Baedeker (born August 3, 1823 in Witten / Ruhr; † October 9, 1906 in Weston-super-Mare ) was a Germany-born evangelist , revival preacher and missionary who operated from England and worked mainly in Russia , where he preached both at the Tsar's court and in many prisons. In Germany he was instrumental in spreading the sanctification movement and shaped the early phase of the Evangelical Alliance .

Live and act

Early years

Friedrich Wilhelm Baedeker was one of six children of the pharmacist and ornithologist Friedrich Wilhelm Justus Baedeker (1788-1865) from Witten . He attended high school and began a commercial apprenticeship in Dortmund in 1829, where his mother's parents lived. This was followed by two years of military service in Cologne. Baedeker then began studying philosophy in Bonn, which he continued in Freiburg and only completed a doctorate much later.

Baedeker married Auguste Jacobi in June 1851, but she died three months later. The early death of his wife triggered a serious life crisis for Baedeker. He traveled restlessly all over Germany, then in 1854 London and finally Australia for two years, where he taught German and French. Returned temporarily to Witten in 1858, he traveled to England again in the summer of 1859, where he settled in Weston-super-Mare on the west coast and together with Henry Girdlestone (1833–1904) founded a "high school for boys". He accepted British citizenship. In 1862 he married again, to the mother of one of his first students, the widow of a captain of the British fleet.

conversion

In 1866, at the urging of a friend, Baedeker attended the lectures of the evangelist Lord Radstock (1833-1913) in Weston-super-Mare. Addressed personally by Radstock, he found conversion in a pastoral conversation in an adjoining room . He commented on this experience with the sentence: "I went in as a proud, German unbeliever and came out as a humbled, believing disciple of the Lord." Shortly afterwards, his wife also found faith in Jesus Christ .

A significant improvement in his heart and lungs soon after his conversion enabled Baedeker, for whom even walks had been too strenuous in the end, to go on longer trips again. These trips to many countries subsequently became Baedeker's trademark and earned him the title “God's World Traveler”.

Open Brethren

The meeting with the father of an orphanage, Georg Müller, in Bristol, who was also of German descent, set the trend for Baedeker's faith and service . Through his influence, Baedeker joined the Open Brethren (Open Brothers). For many decades this free church movement had a meeting place in Baedeker's house in West-super-Mare. Through his many missionary trips, Baedeker is considered the founder of the open brotherhood movement in Western and Eastern Europe. In addition, Baedeker also had a significant influence on the founding of other free church congregations worldwide.

First missionary work in Witten

In 1867 Baedeker began to work as an evangelist in his German homeland and especially in Witten. In a lecture on the cosmopolitan city of London, he also included a confession of his faith. Some listeners had noticed this and met with Baedeker on Christmas morning in a confirmation room for further discussions. From this meeting, a small revival developed and spread . In regular meetings for prayer and Bible discussion, Baedeker presented the basic lines of the Bible and thus provided a spiritual foundation for the new converts. The circle remained together even after Baedeker's return to England. August Dörnemann, who had been one of the initiators of the circle with his brother Fritz, was a co-founder and later a long-standing elder of the Free Evangelical Congregation Witten, founded on the initiative of Friedrich Fries .

Although Baedeker also sought contact with local church pastors, he was critical of the national church . Particularly with regard to the doctrine of baptism , he took the view that infant baptism , which is common in the popular churches, leads to a dead Christianity because it kills any call to conversion and thus even disregards the free grace of God . Accordingly, Baedeker favored the baptism of faith .

Sanctification movement

After 1870 came revivalism that the new type of evangelism by Dwight L. Moody and decisively by Robert Pearsall Smith widespread Holiness was marked. In April and May 1875 Smith traveled to Germany and Switzerland for a five-week lecture tour, where he was very popular, but also caused a stir, especially in the national churches. In Berlin, the lectures were held with thousands of listeners in the old garrison church. Smith was translated by Baedeker, apparently so successfully that Baedeker was asked to take on the role of translator in Basel, Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Wuppertal. This commitment made Baedeker widely known in the awakened circles in Germany and Switzerland.

At one of Baedeker's own lecture series in Berlin, the great niece of the Prussian Field Marshal von Blücher , Toni von Blücher (1836–1906), experienced a conversion. The “Christian Community” that she brought into being developed, also through Baedeker's influence, in the spirit of the “open brotherhood movement”. In 1905, at his suggestion, a non-denominational Alliance Bible School was set up, which later moved to Bergneustadt - Wiedenest and is now a center for theological training and missionary work under the name Forum Wiedenest , which is still close to the Brethren movement.

Smith was also translated by Baedeker in Düsseldorf. A gathering of aroused came into being around the businessman and evangelist Theophil Wilms (1832-1896). In 1880, during a one-year stay in Düsseldorf, Baedeker gave the decisive impetus that, after long hesitation on the part of Wilms and other responsible persons, this assembly finally developed into a free community. Baedeker had contributed significantly to the "order of the Free Evangelical Congregation in Düsseldorf".

Missionary work in Russia and worldwide

In 1876 Baedeker traveled to Russia for the first time, where, through Lord Radstock's mediation, he got access to the houses of influential families of the aristocracy in Saint Petersburg . Among other things, through Lord Radstock and the influence of the sanctification movement, a revival had broken out in aristocratic circles, which had an impact on the Tsar's court and promoted “ Stundism ” in Russia and led to the formation of free-church communities outside the Russian Orthodox Church . In 1877, Baedeker moved to Russia with his wife and adopted daughter to do missionary work in the western and southern provinces. While his focus was initially on working among the German-speaking population, he also turned to Russian circles on invitation. In addition, Baedeker made frequent trips to other countries to do missionary work there. He traveled to Bohemia , Moravia , Slovakia , Hungary , Galicia , Poland , Armenia , Turkey , Greece , Sweden , Finland , Japan , China and India . He traveled by carriage, sleigh, steamboat, train or even on foot, preached himself in English, German or French and employed interpreters who simultaneously translated into the respective national language. Baedeker lived on donations, but according to the principle of the faith missions popular at the time , he did not solicit them.

Through the mediation of an influential countess, Baedeker received permission from the head of the Russian prison system to visit Russian prisons and to distribute Bibles to the prisoners. He tirelessly exercised this right for 18 years, visiting prisons and penal colonies throughout Russia, distributing many thousands of Bibles made available to him by the British and Foreign Bible Society . In 1887 he met the young Finn Mathilda Wrede (1864–1928), who was known as the "angel of the prisoners".

In 1891, Baedeker's activities in prisons and penal camps changed, as awakened Christians increasingly suffered arrest and exile as a result of counter-reactions by the Russian Orthodox Church to the revival movement and stundism. In cooperation with the church, the state punished leaving the church, preaching or spreading “heretical or sectarian teachings” with the loss of civil rights. Baedeker now turned to the service among the "exiled brothers".

Promotion of the alliance movement

With his diverse international contacts, Baedeker also played an essential role in the development of the alliance movement . He was often a guest of the Düsseldorf businessmen Theophil Wilms and August Rudersdorf, through whom a lively exchange between German and English brothers and sisters arose. All three visited u. a. the sanctification meetings initiated by Baron Julius von Gemmingen (1838–1912) in Gernsbach .

Baedeker proposed annual faith conferences for Germany based on the model of the English Keswick Conventions . This idea was taken up by Anna Thekla von Weling (1837–1900), who invited the first alliance meeting to Bad Blankenburg in 1886 , from which the annual alliance conferences developed, which became the nucleus of the German Evangelical Alliance . While all the important representatives of the revival and sanctification movement were invited to speak at these conferences, Baedeker usually led the morning prayer meetings, some of which left a deep impression. Baedeker chaired the committee of the Blankenburg conferences for many years. It is also thanks to him that, in the development of the German alliance, the free churches were given a place alongside the numerically overweight regional churches.

death

On October 9, 1906, Friedrich Wilhelm Baedeker died at the age of 83 in his home town of Weston-super-Mare of complications from pneumonia.

literature

• Daniel Herm: Friedrich Wilhelm Baedeker. In: The message. 113, 1972, pp. 110-113; PDF online at bruederbewendung.de
• Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz :  Friedrich Wilhelm Baedeker. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 1, Bautz, Hamm 1975. 2nd, unchanged edition Hamm 1990, ISBN 3-88309-013-1 , Sp. 335–336.
• Ulrich Bister, Stephan Holthaus (ed.): Friedrich Wilhelm Baedeker. Life and work of a missionary to Russia. Jota, Hammerbrücke 2006, ISBN 9783935707404
• Hartmut Weyel: Friedrich Wilhelm Baedeker (1823-1906). In: Wolfgang Heinrichs, Michael Schröder, Hartmut Weyel: The future needs a past. Biographical portraits from the history and prehistory of free evangelical communities. Vol. 2, Bundes-Verlag, Witten 2010, ISBN 978-3-933660-03-9

Web links

Commons : Friedrich Wilhelm Baedeker  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The article is based primarily on Hartmut Weyel: Friedrich Wilhelm Baedeker (1823–1906). In: Wolfgang Heinrichs, Michael Schröder, Hartmut Weyel: The future needs a past. Biographical portraits from the history and prehistory of free evangelical communities. Vol. 2, Bundes-Verlag, Witten 2010, ISBN 978-3-933660-03-9 , pp. 11-22
2. ↑ Quoted from Hartmut Weyel: Friedrich Wilhelm Baedeker (1823–1906). In: Wolfgang Heinrichs, Michael Schröder, Hartmut Weyel: The future needs a past. Biographical portraits from the history and prehistory of free evangelical communities. Vol. 2, Bundes-Verlag, Witten 2010, p. 12
3. ^ Daniel Herm: Friedrich Wilhelm Baedeker. In: The message. 113, 1972, p. 112; PDF online at bruederbewendung.de