History
When the Protestant Reformation swept through Northern Germany, Bremen's first Protestant prayer took place in one of its churches on 9 November 1522. Since that year Bremen was a prevailingly Protestant city. St Peter's Cathedral then belonged to the cathedral immunity district (German: Domfreiheit), an extraterritorial enclave of the neighbouring Prince-Archbishopric of Bremen. The then still Catholic cathedral chapter closed St Peter's in 1532, after a mob of Bremen's burghers forcefully interrupted the Catholic mass and prompted Jacob Probst, the pastor of the nearby Our Lady Church, to preach a Lutheran sermon.
Roman Catholic Church was condemned as a symbol of the abuses of a long Catholic past by most local burghers. In 1547 the chapter, meanwhile prevailingly Lutheran, appointed the Dutch Albert Rizaeus, called Hardenberg, as the first Cathedral preacher of Protestant affiliation. Rizaeus turned out to be a partisan of the rather Zwinglian understanding of the Lord's Supper, which was rejected by the then Lutheran majority of burghers, city council, and chapter. So in 1561 - after tremendous quarrels - Rizaeus was dismissed and banned from the city and the cathedral shut again its doors.
However, as a consequence of that controversy the majority of Bremen's burghers and city council adopted Calvinism until the 1590s, while the chapter, being simultaneously the body of secular government in the neighbouring Prince-Archbishopric, clung to Lutheranism. This antagonism between a Calvinistic majority and a Lutheran minority, though of a powerful position in its immunity district (belonging since 1648 to Bremen-Verden and annexed to the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen in 1803), remained determinant until in 1873 the Calvinist and Lutheran congregations in Bremen reconciled and founded a united administrative umbrella, the still existing Bremian Evangelical Church, comprising the bulk of Bremen's burghers.
Read more about this topic: Evangelical Church Of Bremen
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