EKD Council Chairman Kurschus: Only the power of the word

The Protestant Church has lost a lot of time in the fight against sexual violence. The new council chairman Kurschus now wants to make the issue a top priority. But can she succeed?

“A renewal is pending in our church, the radical nature of which we are only hesitant to anticipate.” Annette Kurschus presented herself with this sentence on the Sunday before the Synod. As someone who knows the seriousness of the situation, but does not have the one magic recipe. Modest but not naive.

The new chairman of the EKD Council can build on in many places what her predecessor Heinrich Bedford-Strohm has already started. She will, she has to set new accents and might do some things differently than the Bavarian regional bishop.

Bedford-Strohm has already started the “radical renewal”. With concepts for a church of the future, in which everything no longer revolves around the church tower or the local congregation. Church ties are rapidly decreasing; the Protestant church has to adapt to this and reach people in other places. Also on the net. Even with digital formats. The former council chairman Bedford-Strohm was a pioneer.

Establish compensation

His successor, Kurschus, must now succeed in creating a balance between the digital avant-garde and the regular clientele. The core congregation is still made up of people for whom the Sunday service is important, who do not want to do without the senior group in the afternoon and who rely on the church at crucial points in their lives: baptism, marriage, burial.

Bringing the new network community and the classic church community together, that is the challenge facing the EKD and Kurschus. A Herculean task. Every year the churches lose members and thus also funds. This is accompanied by a loss of social significance. Christians are becoming a minority, they have to get louder so that their voices can be heard.

More shy, more reserved

For Bedford-Strohm, who was very well versed in the media, this was not a problem. He sought the public and the public sought him. Kurschus seems a bit more shy and reserved. That doesn’t have to be bad; Infrequent, but well-placed requests to speak can have a big impact. But a council chairwoman is not allowed to go underground, she is – to put it badly – the class representative of the Evangelical Church in Germany. And the EKD council chairwoman is not allowed to rule in the individual regional churches. She only has the power of the word.

That is why the announcement by Kurschus to make dealing with abuse in Protestant institutions and communities a top priority sounds very ambitious. One of the basic problems in clearing up the evangelical history of abuse is precisely this Protestant federalism, in which each regional church decides for itself how to approach a topic. The new council chairman can, however, drive her church in front of her.

Lost a lot of time

The EKD has already lost too much time fighting sexual violence within its own ranks. Those affected who find the courage to report to a regional church can always sing a sad song about this. They feel that they are not being treated on an equal footing and have to fight for recognition. Reliable figures such as those presented by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference in a comprehensive study do not yet exist in the Protestant Church.

And so for a long time the EKD gave the impression that it was only a matter of individual cases, as if one had ducked away in the slipstream of the Catholic abuse scandal. The new President-in-Office of the Council contradicted this impression at her first appearance. Coming to terms with violence and abuse in the church is not just coming to terms with the past, but one of the central issues for the future of the Protestant church.