Dear Editor,
Please forgive a note to clarify some potentially damaging confusion in recommending churches for people moving abroad.
In December you had a piece ‘Evangelicalism on rise and fall in Europe’, and pointed to joyous growth in Spain (the rise), but, for the fall, Germany, where you said ‘The Evangelical Church of Germany (EKD) recently sold or demolished 444 buildings, primarily due to a fall in membership’. This misses the point; the EKD, which stands for Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, is the state church and, not surprisingly, highly diverse doctrinally. My impression is that evangelicals within it have less force than in our state church. So a much more appropriate translation of evangelische is our ‘Protestant’, and in fact EKD’s website uses ‘Protestant Church in Germany’. It is a bit confusing since a genuinely evangelical denomination like the FEG uses evangelische, as does the German EA. One has to check in any specific case what is meant. In recent decades some German evangelicals have tended to use evangelikal to describe themselves.
Similar care needs to be taken in translating or seeking partnerships in other European Lutheran countries. So, for example, the fact that the Finnish state church is called the Suomen Evankelis-luterilainen Kirkko certainly does not mean it is an evangelical denomination in our sense, rather, it is theologically diverse. With Denmark, still more so. So to translate these terms as if they meant evangelical in English can lead to problems!
With the term ‘reformed’, again it’s necessary to check what is meant in any given instance, particularly in France, Switzerland, and Holland.
Thanks for all you do!
Yours sincerely,
Pete Lowman, By email
