Search results

Beloved ecumenical leader and indefatigable peacemaker Dr Agnes Abuom has died at the age of 73 in her native Kenya, following a short illness.

A special locomotive bearing the motto of the 2019 Kirchentag, Germany’s biggest regular Protestant festival, will travel the length and breadth of the country as a “rolling ambassador” for the event that takes place this year in June in the western German city of Dortmund.

Funeral services are scheduled for Thursday, 13 September, for Loïs Meyhoffer, longtime staff member of the World Council of Churches, who died this week at nearly 100 years. A Geneva native, Meyhoffer joined the fledgling organization’s refugee assistance efforts in 1949 and moved to Germany to oversee its efforts there, returning to Geneva in 1955 and working on staff until her retirement.

Amsterdam Concert Hall, 23 August 1948, 10:00. Sunday worship leads to Monday work. So, as you enter the Concert Hall, don’t let your aesthetic imagination be captured by the bust of the sublime Johann Sebastian Bach.

The Reformation was a defining moment 500 years ago but can also serve as an inspiration for the next five centuries, South African Anglican Archbishop Thabo Makgoba has told tens of thousands of people at the German Protestant Kirchentag.

Berlin. Former United States president Barack Obama joined German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in front of tens of thousands of people on 25 May, the first full day of Germany’s biggest Protestant gathering, the Kirchentag, or “church festival”.

Open debates, prayers in many languages and music of all styles: these are the trademark ingredients of the biannual festival of the Kirchentag. Founded in 1949 by Protestant lay people to strengthen democratic culture after the Nazi dictatorship and the Second World War, it has gained European and global reach over the decades.

Eastern Germany is the heartland of the Protestant Reformation of Martin Luther, but today is one of the most secularized parts of the world, says German sociologist Monika Wohlrab-Sahr. “East Germans tend to be stubborn secularists,” she said in a presentation at a recent international consultation on “Reformation – Education – Transformation” in Halle, about 110 miles (175 kilometres) southwest of Berlin, that took place from 18 to 22 May.

More than 120 people from throughout the world have gathered in the eastern German city of Halle to reflect on how insights from the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago can contribute to transforming the world today.

Germany’s biggest Protestant convention, the Kirchentag, ended in Stuttgart with an open-air service and an invitation to the next gathering in 2017, a year that marks 500 years since the Reformation unleashed by Martin Luther.

Tens of thousands of people from Germany and beyond have converged on the city of Stuttgart for a five-day festival of faith, debates, music, worship and culture. Open-air services in different parts of the city marked the start of the German Protestant Kirchentag, or church convention, which began on 3 June and continues until 7 June.