Top leader of German Protestant Church resigns abruptly

The head of the Evangelical Church Germany (EKD), the country’s mainline Protestant Church, has announced her inmediate resignation.

In a press conference on 20 November, Annette Kurschus, acknowledged that recent reports saying she was aware of a sexual abuse case in the 1990s which she did no report, had pushed her to resign.

“In this matter I am at ease with myself”, said the head of the mainline Protestant Church, according to German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. “At every moment I acted to the best of my knowledge and my conscience”, she added.

“But public trust in my person has taken damage”, she went on to say, and she therefore had come to the conclusion that she could no longer help the church’s work dealing with historical cases of sexual abuse. 

Annette Kurschuss was elected as head of the Evangelical Church Germany in 2021, for a 6-year-long term. She was the second woman to access to the top post.

In recent years, the EKD started a process to look into sexual abuse cases happening in their churches.

In 2022 alone, the largest Protestant Church in Germany lost almost 3% of its members, over 380,000 people.