Saarbrücken Union

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The Saarbrücker Union is the name given to the merger of Lutheran and Reformed parishes in Saarland in 1815 to form a common church.

After the Congress of Vienna , the different rulers that make up the Saarland today fell to Prussia and Bavaria . This introduced a new church structure in Saarland. The Lutheran consistories were combined into a synod . The two Reformed communities Ludweiler and Saarbrücken , which had existed since the 17th (Ludweiler) and 18th century (Saarbrücken) with a special permission from the Count within the Lutheran State Church of the County of Nassau-Saarbrücken , were not noticed by the Prussian government .

As early as 1801, the Lutheran and Reformed communities in the region asked the French government to establish a regional administrative union (see Unionism ). However, further steps by the denominational community were neither considered nor implemented under Napoleon's rule.

Since 1815, the communities in the southern Saarland therefore took steps towards an independent union, which they finally decided two months later, on October 24th. With that, the Saarbrücken Union came to the cabinet order of Friedrich Wilhelm III. from November 7, 1817 earlier. It is therefore not a union ordered from above, but a conscious decision for church fellowship from below. Accordingly, the royal decree only confirmed an already created state. The defensive reactions against the Union, as they took place in some parts of the remaining Rhenish church province of the Evangelical Church in Prussia , failed here.

The Union deed explains the aim of the Saarbrücken Union as follows: The pastors should "do everything they can to tie the bond of the union ever tighter." This meant the pulpit and the communion in equal measure.

literature

  • Joachim Conrad: »To tie the bond of the association ever tighter« . In: Ders., Stefan Flesch, Nicole Kuropka, Thomas Martin Schneider (Hrsg.): Evangelisch am Rhein. Becoming and essence of a regional church ; Writings of the archive of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland, vol. 35; Düsseldorf 2007, pp. 178-181. ISBN 978-3-930250-48-6
  • Johann Friedrich Gerhard Goeters : The introduction of the union in the area of ​​the old district synod Saarbrücken . In: Helmut Franz; Hans Walter Herrmann: The Evgl. Church on the Saar yesterday and today . Saarbrücken 1975.