Johanneskirche (Billensbach)
The Johanneskirche is a Protestant church built in 1955/1956 in the suburb of Billensbach in the Baden-Württemberg city of Beilstein (Württemberg) . The church was v. a. known for their artistic stained glass windows.
Emergence
The seven hamlets Billensbach , Etzlensendung , Gagernberg , Jettenbach , Kaisersbach , Klingen and Maad , which once belonged to Schmidhausen and with this came to the city of Beilstein in 1971 , were originally part of the Protestant parish of Beilstein , in contrast to Schmidhausen, which belongs to Gronau . Since the inhabitants of the hamlet had a long way to go to worship because they did not have their own church, at the beginning of the 20th century the desire arose for independence from the mother community and the establishment of their own church. Money was collected several times for the construction of the church, but these efforts failed each time in the confusion and hardship of the First and Second World Wars .
In 1949, worried by the increasing advertising by new religious groups in rural areas, the Wuerttemberg upper church council sent its own vicar to the seven hamlets for the first time , who stayed in the Billensbach schoolhouse and held regular services there. Thanks to the energy and commitment of Werner Ullrich († 2005), who was vicar in Billensbach from 1954 to 1963, it was possible to bundle the available resources and strengths that, after a long dispute over the building site, Ä. At the end of 1955 the construction of a church could begin. After a year of construction, it was inaugurated on December 2, 1956 with a festive service. As a result, Billensbach became an independent parish with a rectory in Billensbach in 1962. Up until 1992 there was still a total church congregation consisting of Beilstein and Billensbach on paper , but this had no functions and did not influence the complete independence of both individual congregations. After the Oberkirchenrat had prescribed savings, the two parishes again merged to form the new parish of Beilstein-Billensbach on January 1, 2006.
The construction of the Johanneskirche brought the seven hamlets wider attention for the first time. As the financing posed great challenges for the small community, each family made a fixed contribution; Due to the fact that the financing of these donations was left to the individual and some families may have used a 'form of investment' that was common in rural areas at the time, the headline of the newspaper Bild : “32 pigs will become a church”. After the inauguration, the attention became more sophisticated: various newspapers depicted the new building as a model of modern church building, architecture and art students as well as pastors and adult education groups came to visit by bus, and in the 1970s the church developed into a popular wedding venue.
Since it was stolen in the late 1970s, the church has only been open for worship, but it can be visited during guided tours (end of July to end of September, Sundays 2 to 5 p.m.) and upon registration at the rectory.
Design and works of art
Even before and during the Second World War , several well-known Stuttgart artists had settled in a kind of artist colony in the seven hamlets . Through their participation in the implementation of Werner Ullrich's overall concept, the Johanneskirche became an unusually successful and sophisticated sacred building for its rural location.
The church, which is rather inconspicuous from the outside, wants to detach the entering visitor from the landscape surrounding him outside, so that he can fully immerse himself in the artistic and religious overall effect, which is based on motifs from the Gospel of John and the Revelation of John . The visitor finds himself in a deliberately completely asymmetrically designed interior, in which the individual works of art do not simply hang or stand 'next to each other', but rather form an artistic whole with high religious expressiveness in dynamic tension.
Already on the forecourt, the visitor is welcomed by an angel (wall mosaic by Paul Heinrich Ebell ) who invitingly shows him the way to the entrance. Inside, the visitor first enters a low, dark corridor that runs parallel to the nave and stands for the transience of human life. This is illustrated by three glass windows by Peter Jakob Schober , which symbolize youth, adulthood and old age, morning, noon and evening at the same time, under the motto times of life .
At the end of the corridor you come across the baptismal font designed by Alfred Lörcher , which, with baptism, represents the acceptance of people into God's love and grace. Above it, a candlestick donated by the mother community of Beilstein for Christmas 1961 commemorates the triune God who blesses the person to be baptized. Passing the baptismal font, the visitor now enters the wide and high nave opposite the corridor, which is supposed to express the breadth and brightness of life in God's spirit. It is illuminated by seven large glass windows designed by Dagmar Rohs-Schulze and Alfried Rohs , each depicting a “I am” word and a miracle of Christ from the Gospel of John : “The I-am-word interprets the miracle, the miracle lets the I-am-word become historical ”(after Werner Ullrich).
The altar side is the highlight of the overall concept. On the age are seven candles (for the seven hamlets) and a crucifix by Emil Homolka with the exalted blessing Christ according to the presentation of the Gospel of John ( Jn 19, 18-30). Behind it, the wall is taken up by a large sgraffito that shows John sitting in a boat and being shown a vision of Christ as the ruler of the world by an angel. This vision is shown in an arched window as a glowing glass picture. The design for the sgraffito and window comes from Rudolf Yelin the Elder. J .; however, the sgraffito was damaged during a renovation of the church in 1999.
When leaving the church, the visitor passes a tower window that is supposed to bless him with the last sentence of the Bible (“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen”, Revelation 22, 21).
View from the entrance to the church
View from the nave to the altar
View from the font back to the entrance
View from the baptismal font into the nave
The three windows in the corridor
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literature
Werner Ullrich: A “divine picture book”. Origin and importance of the Johanneskirche in Beilstein-Billensbach. For the 60th anniversary in 2016 published by the Evangelical Church Community of Beilstein-Billensbach. ISBN 978-3-00-055047-8 .
Web links
Coordinates: 49 ° 3 '39.4 " N , 9 ° 21' 48" E