Kirche Rablinghausen

Kirche Rablinghausen is an evangelical-reformed parish church in Bremen’s Woltmershausen district, standing on raised ground beside the dike. Its brick transverse hall has six window axes, a hipped roof, and a delicate octagonal copper-covered roof turret with a clock and weather vane.

The church was decided on in 1746 and inaugurated in 1750, serving residents of Ober- and Niedervieland who had previously belonged to Martinikirche in Bremen’s old town. Johann Hinrich Grütter designed the building, while Hermann Ficke crafted the roof turret, whose baroque form reflects Dutch church architecture. Incendiary bombs destroyed the church in 1944, leaving only the walls, and reconstruction restored its original form in 1950 and 1951.

Inside, four colourful mayors’ coats of arms face the pulpit, while a baptismal font made from an approximately 1100 Romanesque cloister column from Bremen Cathedral preserves an older story. Eighteenth-century altar candlesticks accompany an organ built by Alfred Führer in 1965, with two manuals and fifteen registers. Locals affectionately call the church Use Kark an’ Diek, “Our Church by the Dike.”