Rotter Church
The Rotter Church is a Protestant church in the district of Rott in Wuppertal - Barmen and together with the Unterbarmer main church and the Pauluskirche preaching site of the United Evangelical Church Congregation Unterbarmen.
history
Rotter club house
The history of church life on the Rott goes back to the late 19th century. In order to counter the revival movement , which was also gaining a foothold in Barmen , the chairman's council of the Barmen City Mission Association decided in 1897 to set up a club house on Rödiger Strasse in the north of Barmen. At that time, Rott, which was still completely undeveloped and only sparsely developed by the church, was in a phase of extreme expansion, which was also reflected in the successful missionary work. The building, which was ceremoniously opened on November 27, 1898 as the Rotter Club House , was originally designed only as a meeting place similar to a classic parish hall , but quickly developed into a well-attended place of worship. The preachers presented the parish Unterbarmen from the Unterbarmer main church. The then completely new concept of a clubhouse for religious work in the valley of the Wupper was later taken up by other parishes, for example in 1904 with the Katernberg clubhouse in Elberfeld .
After the First World War , the Evangelical Church Community Unterbarmen took over the Rotterdam clubhouse as the official preaching site in the community's possession. In 1937 a church service hall was added to the south of the building, which was still known as the club house , which has since earned the complex the name Kirchsaal Rott . The clubhouse survived the Second World War completely unscathed and, due to the destruction of all other places of worship in the Unterbarmer Osten, in particular the Christ Church on Oberdörnen from 1943 as the last intact worship place in the eastern Unterbarmen. This state of affairs persisted in spite of the rededication of the provisionally restored Unterbarmer main church until the inauguration of the new community center on Oberdörnen in 1953.
Expansion to the Rotter Church
In 1962, after more than sixty years, the community decided to finally expand the Rott community center into a full-fledged church due to the continued cramped conditions. The new church should get a new, sufficiently large church hall and a church tower, the old community rooms in the club house should be completely redesigned. The Wuppertal architect Werner Schmoll was commissioned to carry out the expansion work . The new church was finally handed over to its use on November 15, 1964 by senior church councilor Heinz Stöver, who worked as pastor in the community until 1958.
The community after 1964
With the inauguration of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Church in the district of Clausen in 1960 as the seventh place of worship in the community, major restructuring measures were necessary. In 1964 the parish districts Pauluskirche / Hesselnberg (new parish Unterbarmen West), Hauptkirche / Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Kirche (new parish Unterbarmen Mitte), Rotter Church / Christ Church (now parish Unterbarmen Ost) and Lichtenplatzer Kapelle (now parish Unterbarmen Süd) were divided into four divided into independent parishes. Due to the decreasing number of members, the congregations Unterbarmen West, Mitte and Ost were reunited to the congregation Unterbarmen in 2006 and the Christ Church was given up as a preaching site. With the strong thinning of the range of services in the Pauluskirche from 2006 and the closure of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Church in 2010, the Rotter Church is today, next to the Unterbarmer main church, the last regularly used worship place of the parish.
In 2008, evening outdoor lighting was installed at the church, which, like the outdoor lighting of the Unterbarmer main church, is a foundation. This makes the Rotter Church the only secondary church in the whole of Wuppertal that is illuminated at night, which underlines its social importance for the social climate in the Rott district. The first renovation work on the exterior of the church began at Christmas 2010 after several chunks of cement fell from the roof in autumn . In the course of this work, the ailing sound hatches in the bell tower were replaced by new oak hatches, the roof was re-covered and the roof tiles were replaced with galvanized sheets. The work was completed in the summer of 2011, the costs amounted to around 50,000 euros.
Building description
The entire church building can be divided into different elements based on its building history, all of which can be assigned to different architectural styles. On the north side of the building on the corner of Rödiger Straße / Thorner Straße is the old two-story clubhouse, which today houses a kitchen and toilets in the basement and several community rooms on the upper floor. This merges to the west into the city block with which it is just ending. The club house is a simple, originally brightly plastered building in a contemporary, simple architectural style with a simple pitched roof. On the south side is the roughly twenty-five meter long church hall, of which around fifteen meters were built flush at the southern end as part of the expansion of the parish hall to the church in 1964. The church hall and the altar face south so that the entrance area and the community rooms in the clubhouse are opposite. At fifteen meters long, the church hall widens from the width of the club house to just under fifteen meters, so that a deep window front opens to the east towards Rödiger Straße. On the east side there is also a deep window front, which reveals a view of a small church garden, which is used for confirmation work and where community festivals are held.
The square church tower that characterizes the Rott district is located on the east side of the church, at the point of transition from the old club house to the new church hall. To the north of it is a small entrance area with stairs. A barrier-free access to the church is ensured via a ramp from the south end of the small park east of the parish hall. At the southern end of the church there is the flat building complex of the Evangelical Kindergarten Annabergstraße, which is looked after by the community. The church and kindergarten thus enclose a small green area to the north and west, which is bordered to the south by Annabergstrasse and east by Rödiger Strasse and on which the rectory at Rödiger Strasse 109 was built in 1908.
Kestrel project
Since 1991 the Rotter Church, together with many other churches in Wuppertal, including the Luther Church in Barmen and the Unterbarmer Hauptkirche, has been the location of a project of the German Nature Conservation Union in Wuppertal for the controlled preservation of the kestrel population in Wuppertal. In 2016, two adult kestrels with three juveniles lived in the incubator on the tower of the Rotter Church.
literature
- Sigrid Lekebusch, Florian Speer (eds.): Churches and places of worship in Barmen , Wuppertal 2008, ISBN 978-3-87707-721-4
- Peter Herkenrath: 140 Years of History of the Unified Evangelical Congregation Unterbarmen 1822-1962 , Wuppertal 1963, published on behalf of the presbytery
- Sigrid Lekebusch: Unterbarmer Gemeindegeschichte 1964-1997 , published by the four United Evangelical Congregations in Unterbarmen for the 175th anniversary, Wuppertal 1997, ISBN 3-00-001429-2
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Rott in Gold - Fifty Years of the Rotter Church, Wuppertal Church District, notification from November 13, 2014
- ^ Evangelical parish Unterbarmen in the parish of Wuppertal
- ↑ Rotter Church: The bell tower gets hatches made of oak Westdeutsche Zeitung from 23 August 2011
- ↑ result of observation of Falk boxes 2010-2016 , PDF file
Coordinates: 51 ° 16 ′ 31 ″ N , 7 ° 11 ′ 6 ″ E