Tersteegen Kirche, Protestant church in Golzheim district, Düsseldorf, Germany
Tersteegen Church is a Protestant steel-reinforced concrete skeleton building on an irregular octagonal plan at Tersteegenplatz 1 in Düsseldorf-Golzheim. Its high gabled roof has a ridge line set crosswise to the central axis and shifted to one side, producing two roof surfaces of different sizes. The side walls are formed of glazed precast concrete windows set in accordion-like offsets and divided by a broad closed concrete band; the other outer walls carry a natural stone facing.
The church was built 1957–1958 to plans by architect Erich Neumann-Rundstedt, with the foundation stone laid on Oculi Sunday, 24 March 1957, and consecration on 29 June 1958. It replaced a 1933 community house on Uerdinger Straße, destroyed in an air raid on 2 November 1944. The congregation had grown rapidly in Golzheim and Stockum after 1950 around the Predigerseminar, which is why it took Gerhard Tersteegen's name.
The church is named after Gerhard Tersteegen, the Pietist preacher, pastor and hymn writer. The name was chosen because the community's history was tied to the Preachers' Seminary of the Evangelical Church of the old Prussian Union, dedicated in 1930, and the streets leading to it were named Jung-Stilling-Straße and Tersteegenstraße. A 1966 copper relief by sculptor Herbert Kühn beside the church shows people walking together and quotes Tersteegen's hymn "Kommt Kinder, lasst uns gehen".
The church stands at Tersteegenplatz 1 in Golzheim, with the copper relief by Herbert Kühn from 1966 mounted beside the building. Services and concerts still fill the space, and the three-manual Schuke organ, installed in early summer 1959 and dedicated on 18 October 1959, is heard at both.
The free-standing gallery was possible only because the heavy roof of the connecting structure served as a counterweight. The pulpit's curved sounding board was shaped and placed by an expert's calculations so the preacher's voice carries in the tall, wide room.
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