Heinrich Vietheer

Heinrich Vietheer (born January 27, 1883 in Uetersen , † 1968 ) was a German tent missionary and founder of the Elim congregations .

Life

Vietheer trained as a preacher and tent missionary in the community movement and in 1907 joined the Pentecostal movement that was just emerging . After the baptism of the Spirit there , the gift of speaking in tongues was revealed to him . Under the influence of Jonathan Paul he founded a Pentecostal church in Frankfurt am Main in 1909 . In 1910 he worked in Ulm . In 1912 he separated from the Pentecostal movement, but continued to evangelize in the Pentecostal sense. In 1914 he preached in Reval and after the First World War in Berlin-Lichterfelde , where he was in the service of the Brandenburg Brotherhood of the Community Movement.

In the spring of 1922 he bought a tent with around 1,200 seats and founded the Berlin-Lichterfelde e. V. From June 1922 he successfully evangelized in several cities in northern Germany in agreement with the German Evangelical Alliance . In 1924 there was a violent dispute with the local Christian community in Hamburg , whereupon the alliance distanced itself from him. Vietheer worked as a freelance evangelist, often on behalf of the Methodists . At that time he was particularly active in Saxony, including Schönheide , Schneeberg , Aue , Zwickau and Bautzen . There was also a break with the Methodists, instead the first independent Elim congregation arose in the autumn of 1926 following a Vietheer mission in Hamburg-Barmbek . Its founder was the newly awakened Hans Dittert, while Vietheer continued to move from place to place. Similar to Hamburg, the second Elim congregation was established in Dresden in 1926 . More and more churches came into being where Vietheer evangelized.

When Vietheer and Dittert settled in Lauter in 1930 and founded a Bible school there in 1932, this place soon became the focus of all Elim work. Since 1932, the movement's seat has been a council of brothers, to which Vietheer and Dittert belonged and which met in the Elim house in Lauter. After Vietheer's trip to America in 1934/1935, there were no more start-ups. In order to avoid a ban on the movement by the National Socialists, in April 1938 she joined the Federation of Baptist Congregations in Germany. Vietheer became a Baptist evangelist. During the Second World War, Vietheer retired from this service due to personal reasons during a marital conflict.

literature

• Handbook of Religious Communities for d. VELKDE working group on behalf of d. Luth. Church Office ed. by Horst Reller, Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, Gütersloh 1978, 2nd edition 1979, ISBN 3-579-03585-1