Werner Heukelbach

Werner Heukelbach (born May 8, 1898 in Wiedenest , † February 5, 1968 in Gummersbach ) was a German evangelist .

Life

Werner Heukelbach, son of a haulage owner, initially embarked on a career as a railway official. During the First World War , he served as a soldier in France , Russia and Galicia before he was admitted to the hospital for malaria and cardiac insufficiency. In 1919 he returned to his homeland and started working for the railroad again. He married a Catholic, with whom he had four daughters and a son.

In 1928, Heukelbach, who had seen himself as an atheist at least since the war , found his way to the Christian faith through an evangelism event . Soon afterwards he began to do missionary work himself , initially through personal conversations and the distribution of scriptures, later also through house and hall evangelizations. Because of his heart disease, he was retired in 1933 at the age of 35, so that from now on he could devote himself entirely to evangelistic work. From 1937 he did missionary work in his own tent , and in 1938 he published his first writings. In community terms he was part of the Brethren Movement , which had been organized as the “Bund Free Church Christians” (BfC) since 1937 and had a Bible school in Wiedenest since 1919 ; in the summer of 1939 the BfC took over Heukelbach's tent.

During the Second World War , Heukelbach was one of the first evangelists to be subject to speaking restrictions and, later, a complete ban on speaking. So until the end of the war he worked as a pastor in the deaconess mother house in Wehrda .

In 1946/47, Heukelbach in Wiedenest began to build up the Werner Heukelbach missionary organization named after him , which in the following 20 years endeavored to spread the Christian faith with millions of small letters and newspaper supplements, later also with radio broadcasts and telephone messages. In the mid-1960s it was the largest scriptural ministry in Europe.

After the death of his first wife, Heukelbach married Ilse Knabe from Bergneustadt in 1962. This marriage remained childless.

Fonts (selection)

• From denial of God to evangelist . Wiedenest 1945.
• Hand to work . Stuttgart 1948.
• God has abundance . Wiedenest 1954.
• The happiness of being safe . Wiedenest 1955.
• Rest in God's hands . Wiedenest 1955.
• The decisive step . Wiedenest 1955.
• He who prays wins! Wiedenest 1955.
• God is looking for tools . Wiedenest 1956.
• Even difficult paths are paths of blessing . Wiedenest 1959.
• The triumph of the world redeemer . Wiedenest 1960.
• Calculate more with God . Wiedenest 1962.
• A look into the hereafter . Wiedenest 1964.
• Guided by God's hand . Wiedenest around 1968.

literature

• Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz :  Heukelbach, Werner. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 2, Bautz, Hamm 1990, ISBN 3-88309-032-8 , Sp. 796-799.
• Hugo Hartnack: Obituary . In: Die Wegweisung , 8 (1968), p. 26.
• Josef Kausemann: Werner Heukelbach . In: Arno Pagel (ed.): They pointed to Jesus . Verlag der Francke-Buchhandlung, Marburg 1975. pp. 144–151.
• Holm-Dieter Roch: Naive piety of the present. A critical examination of Werner Heukelbach's writings. Elwert, Marburg 1969; 2nd edition Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 1972.

Web links

• Literature by and about Werner Heukelbach in the catalog of the German National Library
• Evangelists: Breathe In Letters , in Der Spiegel, September 23, 1959
• Missionary work Werner Heukelbach

Individual evidence

1. ↑ DM 5 (1965), issue 42, p. 22.