Johann Wilhelm Ernst Sommer
German Methodist missionary (1881–1952)
Johann Wilhelm Ernst Sommer (31 March 1881 – 15 October 1952) was a bishop of the Methodist Church, elected in 1946 for service in Germany.
Birth and family
Johann was born 31 March 1881 in Stuttgart, Germany, of German and English ancestry. He was the eldest son of The Reverend Johann Jakob Sommer (1850-1925), a Methodist preacher who was arrested and reprimanded for persistent preaching in public places, and Zillah Elizabeth Barratt (1848-1935).
He was educated in Germany, at Kingswood School, Bath, and Caius College, Cambridge, in England, and in Switzerland. From 1906 until 1912 he was a Methodist missionary in the Ottoman Empire. He also attended Methodist Conferences in Lausanne (1927) and in Edinburgh (1937). He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Free Church Council of Germany. During World War II, his family lived in the basement of their looted home, and eight times he was called before the Gestapo for questioning.
Episcopal ministry
Johann was elected to the episcopacy by the Germany Central Conference of the Methodist Church, and consecrated by Bishop R.J. Wade, assisted by Bishops P.N. Garber and Theodor Arvidson. Bishop Sommer was assigned to the Frankfort-on-Main Episcopal Area (which included the Central, Northeast, Northwest, South and Southwest Germany Annual Conferences).
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q108338. VIAF identifies the subject as 62003876. The Library of Congress control number is no99028272. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1881, 1952, 1946 and 1850.
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This entry incorporates text from “Johann Wilhelm Ernst Sommer” 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.