North Rhine-Westphalia: Evangelical churches in NRW continue to lose members

Düsseldorf (dpa / lnw) – The Protestant churches in North Rhine-Westphalia continue to lose members. Last year there were around 45,300 people at the regional church in the Rhineland (Ekir), as announced on Tuesday in Düsseldorf. In Westphalia, around 32,000 Protestant Christians left the church in 2022.

In 2021, 33,191 people had left the church in the Rhineland, in 2020 there were 22,283, and in 2019 there were a total of 29,373 people who left. At the end of 2022, it now had 2.26 million members. In 2021, 2.33 million evangelical Christians were still organized in this church.

The Evangelical Church of Westphalia (EKvW) still had just over 2 million members at the end of the year. That is a minus of 2.7 percent, as announced by the church leadership in Bielefeld.

The information is based on extrapolations after evaluating a large part of the reports from the municipalities. Reliable figures would be available from late summer or autumn.

The Evangelical Church (EKD) in Germany presented its membership statistics for 2022 on Tuesday. Ekir and EKvW are two 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 Evangelical Church of Westphalia covers the Westphalian part of the country. Lippe has its own church.

The President of the Rhenish Protestants, Thorsten Latzel, said the high number of people leaving the church was the 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 Church in the Rhineland 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.

In Westphalia, too, there was a significant increase in baptisms (36 percent) at 15,700. 1760 new people entered. According to the EKvW, demographic change is one of the factors behind the decline in membership numbers, with 37,000 dying in 2022, more than in the previous year.