The Christian Community
religious denomination
The Christian Community is an esoterically-oriented Christian denomination established in Germany in 1922 by Lutheran ministers influenced by Anthroposophy. As of 2023, it claims approximately 35,000 members in approximately 200 congregations.
History
During the early growth of the Anthroposophical Society, some Lutheran pastors in Germany appealed to Rudolf Steiner for a system of worship oriented towards his concept of Jesus Christ as the first fully initiated human in history, possessing absolute consciousness of the spiritual realm. According to a founding member of the Christian Community, Friedrich Rittelmeyer, he and the other founders were inspired by Steiner.
In 1939 in London, Evelyn Capel became the first English woman priest of The Christian Community to celebrate the sacraments. After World War II, she helped reestablish Christian Community congregations in Germany, as well as expand its foothold to South Africa.
In Nazi Germany, The Christian Community came under state surveillance, however, Reichsminister of Church Affairs Hanns Kerrl opposed an outright ban on the group. Despite Reinhard Heydrich's misgivings about the church, police reports consistently found nothing objectionable about its activities or practices and new congregations were established in Cologne and Stuttgart between 1938 and 1939. Nonetheless, following the departure of Rudolf Hess for Britain in 1941, a national purge against perceived occult tendencies was initiated, the Christian Community banned, and its leader Emil Bock imprisoned due to the community's alleged "Masonic activities".
The first Christian Community congregation in the United States was established in New York in 1948.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Christian Community” is religious denomination. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Christian, Community and religious, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q666614. VIAF identifies the subject as 147221023. The Library of Congress control number is n87931461. Authority coordinates are 52.512, 13.450. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1922, 2023, 1939 and 1938.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Christian Community” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.