Pomeranian Evangelical Church - History

History

Protestantism had been the major Christian denomination in the Duchy of Pomerania since its Common Diet in Treptow an der Rega voted in favour of the introduction of Lutheranism in 1534. The first Kirchenordnung (church constitution) was designed by the famous Pomeranian Reformator Johannes Bugenhagen, also called Doctor Pomeranus. Today's Pomeranian Evangelical Church emerged on June 2, 1950, when the territorial rest of the Pomeranian ecclesiastical province within the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union (est. 1817) assumed its independence as church body of its own. The Pomeranian ecclesiastical province had comprised all Evangelical parishes in the former Prussian Province of Pomerania in its borders of 1937. After WWII most of this territory was transferred to Poland according to the Potsdam agreement and all church property there, parochial and provincial alike, was expropriated without compensation, with the church buildings mostly taken over by the Roman Catholic Church, and most Protestant cemeteries desecrated and devastated. Many parishioners fled until the end of the World War II, most of the remaining were expelled by Poland in the post-war period of expulsion of Germans from Poland in 1945-1948. The provincial church institutions were built up anew in Greifswald, after Stettin, the former seat, was handed over to Poland in July 1945.

Following the second constitution of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), enacted on April 9, 1968 and accounting for its de facto transformation into a communist dictatorship, the church bodies were deprived their status as statutory bodies (German: Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts) and the church tax, automatically collecting parishioners' contributions as a surcharge on the income tax, was abolished. Now parishioners had to fix the level of their contributions and to transfer them again and again on their own. This together with ongoing discrimination of church members, which let many secede from the church, effectively eroded the adherence of parishioners and the financial situation of the Pomeranian Evangelical Church. Degraded to mere civic associations in 1968 the GDR government forced the Pomeranian Evangelical Church to remove the term Pomerania from its name. The church body thus chose the new name Evangelical Church in Greifswald, but returned to its original name in 1990 after the end of GDR dictatorship.