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Two regional German Protestant churches situated among many of the historic sites associated with the 16th-century reformer Martin Luther have merged to form the Evangelical Church in Central Germany.
The move unites the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Thuringia and the Evangelical Church of the Church Province of Saxony.
"The witness of the Church will gain in appeal if we do together the things that we can do better together," said Bishop Wolfgang Huber, who heads the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), the country’s main Protestant grouping, about the 1 January church union.
Slightly fewer than 25 million of Germany’s 82-million people belong to the now 22 regional Protestant churches that make up the EKD.
The new regional church largely covers the states of Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt and has more than 3300 congregations with 910 000 members, the German Protestant news agency epd reported.
Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt are located in the former communist East Germany, where far fewer people belong to the Church than in the former West Germany.
The merger was celebrated with a service on 1 January in Erfurt, the capital of the state of Thuringia, which houses the Augustinian monastery where Luther had trained as a monk.
As well as Erfurt, the territory of the new church includes Eisleben, where Luther was born and died; Wittenberg, where he is reputed to have nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the castle church, thereby setting in train the Lutheran Reformation; and Eisenach, where Luther translated the Bible into German while confined to the Wartburg castle.
In recent years the EKD has sought to strengthen the profile of Protestantism following predictions that by 2030 it will have lost a third of its members if no action is taken to stem the decline.
A July 2006 document suggested cutting the number of regional churches grouped under the EKD umbrella to a maximum of 12.
The union of the two churches in central Germany follows a 2004 merger between the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg and a smaller regional church based around the eastern German city of Görlitz. Three regional churches in northern Germany are also considering proposals to merge.
(c) Ecumenical News International
Photo : World News
