Evangelical Church in Germany

Evangelical Church in Germany
Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland
Classification	Protestant
Orientation	United (Prussian Union) Lutheran Reformed
Polity	Episcopal Presbyterian Congregationalist
Chair of the Council	Kirsten Fehrs[1]
Associations	World Council of Churches Conference of European Churches Community of Protestant Churches in Europe
Region	Germany
Origin	1948; 76 years ago (1948)[2]
Members	2023 EKD data: 18.6 million [3]
Official website	www.ekd.de

The Evangelical Church in Germany (German: Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, EKD), also known as the Protestant Church in Germany, is a federation of twenty Lutheran, Reformed, and United Protestant regional Churches in Germany, collectively encompassing the vast majority of the country's Protestants.^[4] In 2022, the EKD had a membership of 19,153,000 members, or 22.7% of the German population.^[5] It constitutes one of the largest Protestant bodies in the world. Church offices managing the federation are located in Herrenhausen, Hanover, Lower Saxony. Many of its members consider themselves Lutherans.

Historically, the first formal attempt to unify German Protestantism occurred during the Weimar Republic era in the form of the German Protestant Church Confederation, which existed from 1922 until 1933. Earlier, there had been successful royal efforts at unity in various German states, beginning with Prussia and several minor German states (e.g. Duchy of Nassau) in 1817. These unions resulted in the first united and uniting churches, a new development within Protestantism which later spread to other parts of the world. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, his administration tried to reorganize the old confederation into a unified German Evangelical Church as Hitler wanted to use a single Protestant church to further his own ambitions. However, a division emerged between the Reichskirche, led by the pro-government German Christians, and the Confessing Church, which opposed state control of the church. Other Protestant churches aligned themselves with one of these groups, or stayed neutral in this church strife. The postwar church council issued the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt on 19 October 1945, confessing guilt and declaring remorse for indifference and inaction of German Protestants in the face of atrocities committed by Hitler's regime. In 1948, the Protestant Church in Germany was organized in the aftermath of World War II to function as a new umbrella organization for German Protestant churches. As a result of tensions between West and East Germany, the regional churches in East Germany broke away from the EKD in 1969. In 1991, following German reunification, the East German churches re-joined the EKD.

The member churches (Gliedkirchen), while being independent and having their own theological and formal organisation, share full altar and pulpit fellowship, and are united in the EKD synod, but they act as individual members of the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe (CPCE). Boundaries of EKD churches within Germany partially resemble those of the states of the Holy Roman Empire and successor forms of German statehood (to the most part 1815 borders), due to the historically close relationship between individual German states and churches. As for church governance, the Lutheran churches typically practise an episcopal polity, while the Reformed and the United ones a mixture of presbyterian and congregationalist polities. Most member churches are led by a (state) bishop. Only one member church, the Evangelical Reformed Church in Germany, is not restricted to a certain territory. In some ways, the other member churches resemble dioceses of the Catholic and Anglican churches, from an organisational point of view.