Capernaum Church

Capernaum Church (German: Kapernaum-Kirche) is one of the two places of worship of the Lutheran Capernaum Congregation, a member of the Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia, an umbrella comprising Lutheran, Calvinist (Reformed) and united Protestant congregations. The church is located on Seestraße No. 34 in the locality of Wedding, in Berlin's borough of Mitte. The church was named after Capernaum, today Kfar Nachum (literally "Nachum's village"; transliteration in Greek: K and in Latin: Capernaum) in today's Israel. Christians revere the town of Capernaum, since on Sabbaths Jesus of Nazareth used to teach in the local synagogue (cf. Gospel of Luke 4:31–44). The synagogue where Jesus possibly taught is a handsome, standing ruin open to visitors. Therefore, it is likely that the town has been the home of Jesus (cf. Gospel of Matthew 4:13), at least for some time. In Capernaum also, Jesus allegedly healed a man, and a fever in Simon Peter's mother-in-law.

The area belonged previously to the Nazareth Congregation, the oldest in Wedding. Due to the high number of new parishioners moving in at the end of the 19th century the Nazareth Church grew too small. Count Eduard Karl von Oppersdorf, who purchased many grounds along Seestraße in order to develop them as building land, offered to donate a site for a new church and a considerable sum of money to build it. He considered a prestigious site on a square to be developed in Antwerpener Straße, but Berlin's planning and zoning board refused to approve that. Thus he offered the site on the crossroads of Seestraße #34/35 with Antwerpener Straße No. 50 on the condition of starting the constructions until a certain date, otherwise the tendered money would be forfeited. Oppersdorf speculated for a rise of land prices by the establishment of a church in the area.

Thus in 1896 the presbytery (German: Gemeindekirchenrat) of Nazareth Congregation, presided by Pastor Ludwig Diestelkamp, commissioned the architect Baurat. Carl Siebold from Bethel (a part of today's Bielefeld), then leading the construction department of the Bethel Institution, to build an additional church in the undeveloped area. Diestelkamp knew Siebold through his friend Friedrich von Bodelschwingh. On 30 September 1897 the cornerstone was hastily laid. Effective constructions were only started in 1900. Siebold, who built almost 80 churches, many of them in Westphalia, recycled his design for Christ Church in Hagen-Eilpe, which he adapted to the site on Seestraße. On 22 July 1902 the church was finished. The Evangelical Association for the Construction of Churches (German: Evangelischer Kirchenbauverein), a charitable organisation then headed by the Prussian Queen Augusta Victoria, co-financed the constructions. On 26 August the same year she, her son Crown Prince Frederick William and her husband King William II attended the inauguration of Capernaum Church, the latter in his then function as summus episcopus (Supreme Governor of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces).

In the following year the Capernaum Congregation was constituted as independent legal entity, within the then Protestant umbrella Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces. The new congregation took over the northwestern part of the parish of the Nazareth Congregation, which is the northwestern part of the locality of Wedding, including the African Quarter (German: Afrikanisches Viertel) north of the church building and the Schillerhöhe northeast of the church building.

Church data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).