Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Zurich

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The Evangelical Reformed Church of Canton Zurich (in the communicative appearance Reformed Church Canton Zurich ) is the by Huldrych Zwingli founded the world's oldest Protestant church and by the Reformed Churches of Bern-Jura-Solothurn the second largest Reformed church in Switzerland. Their area is identical to that of the Canton of Zurich .

Members

On December 31, 2010, the Zurich Regional Church had 472,970 members and comprised 34.5% of the residents of the Canton of Zurich. In 2011 the church lost 5617 members (2010 around 3800).

Legal bases

The Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Zurich is one of the five religious bodies that are established on the basis of Art. 130 et seq. of the cantonal constitution of 2005 are recognized as independent bodies under public law. It is therefore also subject to supervision by the canton.

The cantonal church law passed in 2007 regulates the main features of their organization, the authority to levy taxes, the state benefits to the regional church and the responsibility and procedure for the election of pastors and their term of office. The execution of the church law, insofar as it affects the state aspects of the church law, is carried out through the cantonal ordinance on the church law and the law on recognized Jewish communities of 2009.

The system adopted by the Church Synod Church Order of 2009 regulates the internal structure of the national church and lays the foundations for the ecclesial life.

structure

The national church is a synodal (Presbyterian) church.

The legislature is the synod elected by the reformed active citizens with 120 members. There are four factions (parties) in the Synod:

  • the Protestant-church faction, which is close to the Evangelical Alliance
  • the liberal faction, which theologically has its roots in liberalism and is the oldest faction
  • the religious-social group that advocates political commitment, minorities and ecumenism
  • the synodal association in the tradition of positive theology

The executive is the seven-member church council elected by the synod. At the head of the executive is the Church Council President, since 2011 Michel Müller .

Until the recent past, the regional church comprised 176 parishes. The current merger process has since greatly reduced the number (2019: 135 parishes and three parishes for the French, Italian and Spanish-speaking members). The parishes are headed by church clergy who are elected by the Reformed active citizens and who are accountable to the parish assembly and, since 2019, in the parish of Zurich to the church parliament.

In addition, the area of ​​the regional church is divided into twelve districts, the area of ​​which more or less corresponds to that of the state districts of the canton of Zurich . At this level, the district church administration elected by the church members act as the supervisory authority of the parishes and pastors as well as the deans , the latter usually one of the pastors of the parishes in the district.

history

The Reformation in Zurich took place independently of the Reformation of Martin Luther . In 1519, the humanistically educated people priest Ulrich Zwingli broke with the prescribed Sunday readings and continuously interpreted the Gospel of Matthew. Through the plague epidemic of the same year he came to the realization that only the grace of God in and through Jesus Christ can redeem man. Based on the biblical text, he began to preach against image worship, relics, saints, celibacy and the Eucharist.

The official break with Rome is the sausage meal at the Zurich citizen Christoph Froschauer , a printer's owner, on Invokavit 1522 ( March 9th ), i.e. the first Sunday of the pre-Easter Lent . Zwingli is said not to have participated in the sausage dinner, but to have been present. As a priest, he defended the breaking of the fast: the law of fasting is a human law and therefore not necessarily valid. Man only has to obey divine laws. Zwingli finds the divine laws in the Bible.

Zwingli was banned from the pulpit by the Pope. The Zurich Council gave rise to the First Disputation at which Zwingli's theologically justified reforms were debated. The council decided to declare Zwingli's theses to be in accordance with the Scriptures and enforced Zwingli's reformatory innovations. After the second disputation in 1525, the council decided to abolish the mass. There were purely word services and only four times a year the Lord's Supper with bread and wine for all participants. The Reformation in Zurich was decided by the city council (based on Zwingli's argument).

From 1525 onwards, the Zurich Reformation spread to Switzerland, but at the same time there were also armed conflicts with the cantons that did not join the Reformation. In 1531 Zwingli fell in the battle of Kappel.

His successor was the twenty-seven-year-old Heinrich Bullinger , who headed the Zurich Church as Antistes for forty-four years and had a decisive influence on the Zurich and Swiss Reformed Church during this time, including through the two Helvetic Confessions of 1536 and 1566 and the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549, the merged the Zurich Reformation by Zwingli and the Geneva Reformation by Calvin. Bullinger also achieved decisive things for the independence of the proclamation: he only accepted the election when the council had expressly assured him that he could keep his proclamation "free, unbound and without restriction", even if criticism of the authorities was necessary.

A church independent of the state did not emerge in Zurich until the Helvetic Republic in 1803. The internal church independence was continuously expanded in the 19th and 20th centuries, and with the cantonal church law of 2007, the last state regulations regarding church organization as well as church electoral, personnel and salary law repealed and its regulation transferred to the regional church. Accordingly, a new church order of the regional church was issued in 2009, which came into force in 2010. However, the collection of church taxes by the state remains intact.

In October 1918, the first women in Switzerland were ordained as pastors in Zurich . However, despite the support of the church council , the church synod and the Neumünster parish, the Zurich government council and finally the federal court refused them to take up a proper pastor's position, as women were not eligible for election at the time due to the lack of women's voting rights. Only a revision of the cantonal constitution and the subsequent new church law of 1963 gave them this opportunity.

The regional church is the publisher of the Zurich Bible .

Ecumenism

The Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Zurich belongs to the Evangelical Reformed Church in Switzerland .

Through the Church Federation she is in the Working Group of Christian Churches in Switzerland , in the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe in the Reformed World Federation and in the World Council of Churches .

The Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Zurich also operates the Theologische Verlag Zurich , which also has a Catholic line in its program.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "Fewer and fewer Reformed, more and more Catholics" (accessed on: June 7, 2012).
  2. ↑ Church law of 9th 2007 (PDF; 178 kB) ZH-Lex.
  3. ↑ Ordinance on the Church Law and the Law on Recognized Jewish Communities of July 8, 2009 ZH-Lex.
  4. ↑ Church regulations of the Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Zurich of March 17, 2009 (PDF; 694 kB) ZH-Lex.
  5. ↑ The most famous sausages in church history . zwingli.ch. Archived from the original on February 18, 2006. Retrieved April 2, 2019.
  6. ↑ From "Fräulein Pfarrer" to Reformed pastor. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, October 27, 2018, accessed on October 29, 2018.