She does not say “dear siblings”, not “honored high synod”: The President of the EKD Synod begins her speech with a laconic “Sooo”. “The first time here at the lectern.” And then Anna-Nicole Heinrich grins as if she couldn’t believe it herself. For the first time Heinrich leads the conference of the highest Protestant church parliament. The 25-year-old brings an unusual sound to this sometimes boring event. “I think it’s pretty tight if we don’t spam the chat,” she says when introducing the digital voting tool.
Her followers on Instagram had asked her beforehand: “Do you have any questions about Synodenshizzle? Then get out of here!” How many high church councils googled the word “Shizzle” after that? (Translated very freely and in a somewhat more diplomatic way, it means something like “Synod stuff”.) When the outgoing Council Chairman Heinrich Bedford-Strohm was saying goodbye, she said: “I took the liberty of refraining from the EKD’s flower arrangement” and instead gave him the obligatory bouquets a pair of penguin socks. (“Because penguins have thick fur and live upright.”)
Having grown up without a denomination, she was only baptized as a student
What an incredulous enthusiasm, mixed with a good portion of skepticism, when the EKD Synod elected Anna-Nicole Heinrich as its boss in May, into the most important evangelical honorary office. The student succeeded the 79-year-old former Federal Minister Irmgard Schwaetzer. Heinrich is currently doing a master’s degree in “Digital Humanities” at the University of Regensburg and is working with half a position at the Faculty of Catholic Theology.
Her family comes from Thuringia, she grew up without a denomination. It was not until she was a student that she was baptized as a Protestant together with her mother in the Protestant diaspora in the Upper Palatinate. The Protestant religious instruction had brought her closer to the faith. Later she immersed herself deeply in the work of the Protestant association, Heinrich is the vice-chairman of the Protestant youth and was part of the so-called “future team” of the council chairman Bedford-Strohm.
However, youthful freshness alone does not necessarily qualify for such a challenging position. The times, also for the Protestant Church, are anything but easy. Resigning from the church, lack of money, restructuring processes, the issue of abuse, all of this affects Protestants as well as Catholics.
“What is our mission in the here and now?”
But at the conference of the EKD Synod, Anna-Nicole Heinrich showed that she not only fills the office with cool slogans, but also with competence and content. She steers the conference confidently, calmly and with great precision – even though it only had to be completely rescheduled hours in advance. There had been a breakthrough in vaccination and the face-to-face meeting was moved to the Internet. Heinrich, who has a lot of experience with hackathons and digital conferences, couldn’t be frightened.
The twelve guiding principles for the future of the church, in which Heinrich was involved, are headed “Out into the wide” – she called it “out of the bubble” herself. In the summer she had traveled across the country with a rucksack on the “Preses Tour” for 30 days. Your central observation: It is important to meet people in their everyday life and not always only in the church context. “Many who for us are supposedly unrelated to the church or faith are much more open than we think they are,” says Heinrich. “Especially people with a great distance to the church are interested in topics between heaven and earth, God and the world.”
With this knowledge in the background, the church must also get out into the open, demands Heinrich: “It cannot be a question of preserving the status quo at any price, but rather we have to keep asking ourselves the question: What are we Evangelical Church for, what is our mission, in the here and now? “