Düsseldorf (dpa / lnw) - The Rhenish Evangelical Church saw a sharp increase in the number of people leaving in 2022. Last year the church lost around 45,300 people, as the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland (Ekir) announced in Düsseldorf on Tuesday. In 2021, 33,191 people had left the Church, in 2020 there were 22,283, and in 2019 there were 29,373 total departures. At the end of 2022, Ekir had 2.26 million members. In 2021, 2.33 million evangelical Christians were still organized in the church.
According to Ekir, the information is based on extrapolations after evaluating a large part of the reports from the communities. Reliable figures would be available from late summer or autumn. The Evangelical Church (EKD) in Germany presented its membership statistics for 2022 on Tuesday. The Ekir is one of the 20 member churches of the EKD. The territory of the Rhenish Church extends over parts of the federal states of North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland and Hesse.
The President of the Rhenish Protestants, Thorsten Latzel, assessed the high number of church leavers as a result of a loss of contact. "People are leaving who no longer feel at home with us," he said, according to the message. The Evangelical Church in the Rhineland takes the "frightening numbers" very seriously. "We will change the structures of our church so that we can turn to the people more," announced the President. The church must increasingly be thought of in terms of people "and not in terms of what we offer".
Latzel said on the importance of the abuse scandal for the decision to leave the church, sexualised violence and how it was dealt with had hurt and disappointed many people and severely shaken their trust in the church as an institution. The Ekir does everything possible to work through experiences of abuse and to prevent them as far as possible.
For 2022, the evangelical state church also reported 18,100 baptisms. That was a significant increase after 12,299 in 2021 and 8771 in the Corona year 2020. In addition, 2700 people were accepted into the Protestant community last year. The number of deaths was given as 44,900.
