Silesian Evangelical Church AB
The Silesian Evangelical Church AB in the Czech Republic (Czech: Slezská církev evangelická augsburského vyznání ) is a Protestant church located in the part of Silesia that remained Habsburg when the province passed to Prussia in 1742. The roots of the church go back to the Reformation, when Duke Wenceslaus III. Adam von Teschen introduced the evangelical doctrine in his principality , probably in 1545 at the earliest. The small synodally organized church today has 16,000 members in 21 parishes with 35 clergymen; In 2010 there were still 15,572 members of the church. A large part of the church members speak Polish. The church is jointly governed by a bishop and the church council. According to its pietistic tradition, Bible study and common prayer are at the center of the spiritual life of the Silesian Church.
organization
The Silesian Church in the Czech Republic consists of 21 parishes, all of which are located in an area around 100 km long and 40 km wide in the northeast of the country. This region includes what is now the Czech part of the former crown land Austrian Silesia with the city of Teschen as its center (see Olsa region ). A Polish-speaking minority lives in this area (see Cieszyn Wallachians ), some of which are Protestant (historically around 60%). The languages of worship are therefore Polish and Czech.
The highest body of the Church is the Synod, whose members are elected by the faithful. Between the synods, the church council, consisting of four clergy and five lay people, directs the affairs of the church. At the top are the bishop and the church curator. The curator is responsible for financial and administrative matters, while the bishop is responsible for spiritual direction. Jan Waclawek was bishop for many years . On May 21, 2017, his successor Tomáš Tyrlík was introduced as the eighth bishop of the SEKAB in Český Těšín .
The parishes are assigned to five senior districts.
The church maintains a diaconal work with a total of 34 facilities in the areas of child care, elderly and sick care, poor relief, psycho-social care and prison chaplaincy.
Most of the clergy in the Church received their training in the Protestant faculties of the Universities of Prague and Bratislava and at the Christian Academy in Warsaw. Religious teachers are trained at the educational faculty in Moravian-Ostrava .
Teaching
The central confession of the Silesian Church is the Confessio Augustana . On this basis it agrees in theology and teaching with the other Evangelical Lutheran Churches in the world. In addition, it is one of the member churches of the Leuenberg Agreement ; thus there is pulpit and communion fellowship with many United , Presbyterian and Methodist churches as well as the Czechoslovak Hussite Church .
history
16th Century
Duke Casimir II of Teschen († 1528) did not promote the Reformation; but since he did not hinder them either, evangelical preachers could work unhindered in his country. A large part of the subjects and the nobles, such as B. the Pelchrzim von Trzankowitz, soon turned to Protestant teaching. The Utraquists living in the Teschen area converted almost unanimously to Protestantism.
Duke Wenzel Adam († 1574), grandson and successor of Kasimir, professed Lutheranism when he took office between 1545 and 1560. He first gave the evangelicals the churches of the abandoned monasteries before the parish churches of the towns and villages were gradually occupied by evangelical clergy or, where this was not possible, new churches were built by the evangelicals. In 1568 Wenzel Adam issued an evangelical church order. At that time there were about 50 churches with Protestant worship in the Duchy of Teschen. In the 16th century, preaching was done in German and in Czech. Duke Adam Wenzel († 1617), who grew up at the strictly Lutheran court of the Elector of Saxony, was more intolerant than his father when it came to religious questions. In the 1590s he granted the cities of the Teschener Land several privileges, in which the Augsburg denomination was designated as the only permitted one.
17th century
In 1609, Emperor Rudolf II's letter of majesty granted all of Silesia the freedom to practice their religion. In practice, however, the lords of the individual Silesian sub-principalities determined the denomination of their subjects. This had a negative effect on the Evangelicals in Teschen as early as 1610, when the formerly strict Protestant Adam Wenzel converted to Catholicism . He drove the evangelical clergy out of Teschen and some other cities, handed over the German evangelical city church to Dominicans who had been summoned from Poland and allowed Lutheran worship only outside the cities on the estates of the landed gentry. However, the nobility and most of the subjects adhered to the Lutheran doctrine. For years there was a dispute between the Protestant population and the Catholic-minded ducal government, which was the guardian of the underage Duke Friedrich Wilhelm until 1619.
The forced recatholicization began under the last Piast Duchess Elisabeth Lucretia (1625–1653). In 1629 the Council of Teschen converted to Catholicism. Conversion was ordered to the nobility in 1633 . The Evangelical Church was thus robbed of its most important political pillars and only existed underground. Protestant clergymen and teachers were no longer tolerated anywhere and had to leave the duchy. In order to curb the emigration of numerous Protestants, the Duchess was ready after the end of the Thirty Years' War to support petitions from the evangelical citizens of Teschen to the emperor to grant them a church and limited religious freedom. These requests were rejected several times. The second half of the 17th century was marked by continued efforts by the government and the religious orders to recatholicize.
18th century
The Altranstädt Convention averted in 1707 the situation of the oppressed Protestants of Silesia in many ways for the better. In some parts of the country they got churches back and were allowed to practice their religion publicly, but not so in the Duchy of Teschen, whose princes had converted to Catholicism long before the Peace of Westphalia. At least the Teschen Protestants were able to use the right of petition granted by the convention. They asked the emperor to build their own church, which they were allowed to do in January 1709 through the Executions Recess, which regulated the implementation of the Altranstadt agreements for all of Silesia. In May of the same year a building site was purchased at the gates of Teschen, where the immediately employed preacher again celebrated the first public evangelical service after more than 50 years. One of the six Silesian grace churches , the Jesus Church , was built in Teschen . This church and its community were supported by the evangelical aristocracy (44 families), the city council of Bielitz and the lords of Pless , Oderberg and Bielitz . The construction of the large church, which was to serve as a place of worship for all Protestants in Upper Silesia, began in 1710 and lasted over 20 years. The tower was completed in 1749. In addition to the church, a Protestant school was established in 1710. The construction as well as the maintenance of teachers and boarding school students was largely financed with donations from Württemberg, Saxony and the Lausitz region.
In the first decade of its existence, the 60,000-member congregation had only one preacher, as the emperor did not allow clergy to be appointed from outside Silesia and there were not enough trained candidates available in the country. Then four or five preachers served in Teschen from the 1720s. Both German and Polish sermons were given every Sunday. Although the existence of the Teschen community was politically secured, there were often disputes with the Catholic clergy in the region in the 18th century, which mainly concerned mixed denominational marriages and the religious upbringing of the children who emerged from it. Conversion to the Protestant Church was still forbidden for Catholic subjects and was punished by expulsion from the country by the authorities.
Some of the clergymen in Teschen were strongly influenced by Pietism and were in contact with August Hermann Francke or had even completed part of his training in Halle. Francke, on the other hand, saw in the Teschen Church a possible starting point for the Evangelical-Pietist mission in Eastern Central Europe - a function that the Silesian Church was actually supposed to assume at the end of the 18th century when it became the mother church of numerous Protestant communities in the Habsburg Empire. In the 1730s, however, there were serious internal rifts between the pietistically minded parts of the community and the Orthodox Lutherans among the clergy. The latter, with the help of the government, had some pietistic preachers expelled.
After the largest part of Silesia fell to Prussia in 1742 and the Protestants there gained freedom to practice their religion, the Teschen Church lost a large part of its district. It remained limited to Austrian Silesia and was no longer subordinate to the consistory in Brieg . As an alternative, the imperial government formed a consistory in Opava in 1749, which was partly made up of Catholic state officials and partly of representatives of the Protestant estates.
The Teschen Protestants also gained religious freedom through the tolerance patent issued by Emperor Joseph II for the entire Habsburg Monarchy . Conversion to the Protestant church was now permitted, as was the establishment of new congregations and the construction of their own churches, which, however, were not allowed to have bell towers. With the exception of a Catholic president, the Troppau consistory could only be filled with evangelical councilors. In 1784 the rebuilt consistory was transferred to Vienna by imperial decree; henceforth it was responsible for the Protestants of all Bohemian countries. In the same year the pastor of the Teschen Jesus Church was appointed superintendent of all Protestant parishes in Moravia, Silesia and Galicia by the emperor. The responsibility of the Superintendent of Moravia and Silesia for the Silesian-Moravian territories remained permanent, while Galicia had its own Superintendent of Galicia in 1804 . In the first few years after the Tolerance Patent was issued, several thousand crypto Protestants openly converted to the Protestant Church. In the city of Bielitz and a dozen other places, new communities were founded in the 1780s, which gradually gained their independence from the Teschen mother church.
19./20. century
Between 1816 and 1849 the access to the Teschen church council was changed several times. From then on, in addition to the class nobility, citizens and peasants also had their deputies, which ensured adequate representation in particular for the Polish-speaking majority in the community. As a result of the revolution of 1848 the final civil equality of the Protestants in the Habsburg monarchy took place. In order to make it easier for young Protestant Silesians to gain access to universities, the Jesus School in Teschen was converted into an imperial and royal high school in 1849. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the proportion of Czech Protestants had become so large that after almost 300 years, Czech preaching was also being used again.
When the Habsburg Monarchy disintegrated in 1918, Austrian Silesia was divided into the successor states of Poland and Czechoslovakia. This also led to the division of the Silesian Evangelical Church. After the Czechoslovakian annexation of the formerly German Hultschiner Ländchen from the church province of Silesia, the Protestant parish in Hultschin broke away from the United Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union and joined the Silesian Evangelical Church.
During the German occupation in 1940–1945, the small church lost its independence and was subordinate to the Old Prussian Church Province of Silesia with its center in Wroclaw. During this time, a large part of the Polish and Czech church members were expelled from the region, and a fifth of the clergy were murdered in German concentration camps. While the Protestant Czechs and Poles returned in 1945, the German Protestants were now expelled from the Teschen region.
In 1948 the Silesian Evangelical Church was able to gain renewed recognition as an independent religious community by the Czechoslovak authorities, although the free practice of religion by its members was severely restricted in the following decades of communist rule.
present
The Silesian Church has been a member of the Lutheran World Federation since 1956 . In May 2009 the anniversary celebrations for the 300th anniversary of the founding of the Jesus Church in Teschen took place, which were jointly organized by the Silesian Evangelical Church AB in the Czech Republic and the Evangelical Augsburg Church in Poland .
The partnership with the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod, which began in 2006, was ended in 2009 due to the position of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) on the subject of homosexuality .
The Silesian Evangelical Church AB works with the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations (AFLC) and the Missouri Synod (LCMS).
Bishops (selection)
- 2006–2011 Stanisław Piętak
- 2011–2017 Jan Wacławek
- 2017– Tomáš Tyrlík
See also
literature
- Gottlieb Biermann: History of Protestantism in Austrian Silesia. Prague 1897.
- Peter Chmiel, Jan Drabina (Ed.): The denominational conditions in Cieszyn Silesia from the Middle Ages to the present . Conference series of the Haus Oberschlesien Foundation, 9th Ratingen 2000, ISBN 83-908802-3-7 .
- Herbert Patzelt: Protestantism in Teschen Silesia in the past and present and its significance for the Protestant Church in Austria. In: Yearbook of the Society for the History of Protestantism in Austria 88 (1972).
- Oskar Wagner : The Protestant Church in Teschen-Bielitzer Silesia 1545–1918 / 20 . In: Lutherische Kirche in der Welt 28 (1981), pp. 87-107.
Web links
- Website of the Silesian Evangelical Church AB (German)
- Evangelical Churches in the Czech Republic Website of the Lutheran World Federation (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ The "AB" in the name stands for the Augsburg Confession .
- ↑ Silesian Evangelical AB Church in the Czech Republic . Special edition Lutheran Service , Volume 52, 2016, Issue 2.
- ↑ 2010 World Lutheran Membership Details . ( Memento of September 26, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Overview on the website of the Lutheran World Federation (pdf; 137 kB).
- ↑ Lutheran Service , Volume 52, Issue 3, p. 19.
- ↑ Andrzej Wantula: The first church order in Cieszyn Silesia . In: Yearbook of the Society for the History of Protestantism in Austria 77 (1961), pp. 119–127.
- ↑ The part located in Poland today forms the diocese of Cieszyn of the Evangelical-Augsburg Church in Poland .