Four hundred years ago today, Mar. 30, 2000, was a memorable day–the start of a nearly 200 year long tradition.
For on this day at the age of seventeen Hermann Mercker was appointed to lead the church services at the ***curacy*** of St. Stephanie.
Mercker came from an old Hattingen family which is almost as old as our city itself. The family name M"arker or Mercker is found in documents of our city as early as around 1490. It is a family which was closely connected to the history of our city in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
Hermann's grandfather, Johann Mercker, was a city councilman in Hattingen. His father was the city revenue administrator and mayor and from 1583 a judge in the city of Witten and later in Herbede. His mother was a daughter of Rev. Wischmann. So it was certainly quite understandable that Hermann, as oldest son, studied theology.
Hermann Merker lived from 1583 to 1630 in Hattingen and was buried Jan. 23, 1630. If one trusts the entry in the old church registers, he was only 47 years old at that time. As already mentioned, as a youth he conducted the church services in the curacy of St. Stephanie.
At this time, the church in Hattingen apparently had ten curacies, one of which was the curacy of St. Stephanie which had been established by the Wischmann (originally "op der Wysch") family. This was found within St. George's Church.
Mercker studied both in Marburg and in Wittenberg and was ordained in May 1604. In 1605 he then became an associate minister at the nearby community of Herbede. Here he preached the Gospel. At the general ministers' conference held in 1612 in Unna he subscribed to the Lutheran faith.
In 1613 Mercker was installed as the deputy pastor and city chaplain in
Hattingen. Merker preached at a time when the Lutheran movement had already
taken root in our region. After the death of the first minister in 1619,
serious power struggles clearly marked the process of appointing someone
to this vacant office. According to the old historical documents, the Archbishop
of Cologne of that time demanded that this vacant position be given to a
Catholic. This led to Mercker's conducting funeral services and church services
outside of the church and in the church courtyard because
the church was closed to him and his followers. In the meantime, after the
electoral government also had intervened, the office was finally given to
a Catholic priest in 1619 who was obliged to immediately transfer it to Hermann
Mercker as his deputy assistant.
Mercker himself reports:
Dec. 15, 1619 A.D., 3rd Sunday of Advent, I Hermann Mercker,
deputy minister here have been rung in as minister after the previous
one Jacobi was gotten rid of after much trouble, expense, and trials and
tribulations and was given 15 Reichsthalers in indemnification after negotiations
....
[?among the Archbishop of Cologne, the head of the Benedictine seminary, Abbot
Tuitiens?] [Translated from the Latin]
But what remains to be emphasized is that at this time while Roman Catholic priests were in fact appointed pastors of the communities, they had to name Lutheran ministers as their representatives and they themselves could not perform their ministerial duties.
Mercker was a minister at the time of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), at a time when Hattingen itself was besieged and occupied. This led many inhabitants to migrate so that the population in this century was quite small from today's point of view.Only a couple of hundred inhabitants lived in the city at this time–something which today is hard to imagine. The small number of inhabitants promoted a lot of intermarrying, so that inevitably many Hattingen families became related to one another.