The Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) once again recorded a significant decline in membership.

As the EKD announced on Wednesday, around 280,000 people left the Protestant church in 2021.

In 2020 the number of exits was still estimated at 220,000, in 2019 at 270,000.

The number of members fell to around 19.724 million people.

That is around 2.5 percent or around 512,000 fewer members than in 2021, when the EKD put the number of Protestant church members at 20.236 million people.

Reinhard Bingener

Political correspondent for Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Bremen based in Hanover.

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This even larger decrease compared to the resignations can be explained by the fact that the number of deceased members far exceeds the number of baptisms: In 2021 the EKD recorded around 360,000 deaths, but only 115,000 baptisms.

"Resolute countermeasures"

The EKD comments that the number of deaths has increased due to the corona pandemic.

In addition, the number of baptisms was higher than in the first lockdown year 2020, but was nowhere near the level before the pandemic.

The EKD puts the number of re-entries and transfers at 18,000, which is also below the value of previous years.

The EKD Council Chairwoman Annette Kurschus said that the declining membership numbers and the persistently high number of resignations "will not be accepted as God-given, but decisive countermeasures will be taken wherever possible".

As an example, Kurschus named special offers for families who want to catch up on baptisms.

According to a representative study by the Social Science Institute of the EKD, people leaving the church are the result of a long process that often begins with a lack of religious socialization.

The elimination of church tax also plays an important role.

Only 24 percent of former Protestants and 37 percent of former Catholics name a specific reason.

Sexualised violence or the waste of financial means are then often given as concrete reasons, and in the case of the Catholic Church also the rejection of homosexuality.

Some of the EKD figures are extrapolations, as more precise figures from the parishes and state churches are only available several years later.

So far, the EKD has always published its membership figures together with the German Bishops' Conference (DBK) in the summer.

The EKD is now publishing its figures earlier and not at the same time as the Catholic Church, which has been particularly criticized for its handling of sexualized violence.

Since there have been reports of extremely high exit numbers from the ranks of the Catholic dioceses for months, the publication of the DBK numbers in the summer is likely to fall below a symbolic threshold: In the past year 2021, for the first time in the history of the Federal Republic, there was a high probability of fewer than that Half of the population is a member of one of the two major churches.

For the year 2020, the proportion of the total population was still estimated at 51 percent.