The Coerper family with Liebenzell Mission employees Heinrich Coerper with his family: wife Ruth and the children Elisabeth, Ruth and Johannes 7 Heinrich Coerper commissions men and women (sisters) for work in Germany for the first time. With sisterhood garb and bonnets O For the first time, the Liebenzell Sisters working in Germany begin to wear the traditional gowns of the sisterhood . 1919 1920 1922 Heinrich Coerper married Ruth Robert (1875–1952) on 18 September 1894. His wife came from Biel (Switzerland). The couple had four children, although Samuel died at the age of two. After his wedding, Heinrich Coer- per held a pastorate in Essen until 1897. He was then head of the deaconess house in Strasbourg until 1899. In 1899, at the request of Johannes Röschmann, Heinrich Coerper took over the “German branch of the English China Inland Mission” in Hamburg-Uhlenhorst, which was in a crisis, and re-established it. On 1 January 1900, he published the first German edition of the mission magazine “China’s Millions”, which was published with up to 25,000 copies and was one of the largest Christian magazines in Germany at the time. On 5 April 1902, the mission family moved to Liebenzell in the Black Forest as they had been given notice to leave their house in Hamburg. The fact that the work moved from the harbour and cosmopolitan city to the idyllic Swabian countryside can be traced back to Sister Lina Stahl (1842–1924). In 1900, Heinrich Coerper began training missionaries and mission sisters, later also for work in Germany. This training continues to this day at the Liebenzell International University of Applied Sciences and the Intercultural Theological Academy. In 1903, the first missionaries who had been trained in-house travelled to China. In 1906, work began in the South Seas (Chuuk, the Mortlock Islands, Palau, Ponape and Yap), in 1914 on Manus (Papua New Guinea) and in 1927 in Japan. For health reasons, Heinrich Coerper was unable to visit any of the mission countries. Heinrich Coerper founded the “South German CE Association (Christian Endeavour)” in 1904 and was also its chairman until 1933, today’s “Southwest German CE Youth Association” (SWD-EC). Furthermore, he was co-founder and chairman in 1910. (Later this association was called the “Southwest German CE Association”). In 1933, Heinrich Coerper founded the “Liebenzell Fellowship Association”, partly because he refused to incur debts for the construction of church buildings. Heinrich Coerper also founded a sisterhood. He had to defend his mission work time and again, as it was completely unusual at the time to send out so many female missionaries. In his striving for faith and sanctification, he was deeply influenced by the Anglo-Saxon revival, the international sanctification, healing and evangelism movement. The First World War and its consequences brought temporarily buried patriotism, nationalism and anti-Judaism back to the surface. This also had an impact on Heinrich Coerper in the later years after 1918. In the debate with the emerging Pentecostal movement, which culminated in the Berlin Declaration in 1909, in which people sharply distanced themselves from this movement, he was considered a “neutral” because he did not sign the declaration. Until 1930, Heinrich Coerper still had contacts with Pentecostal circles. Heinrich Coerper suffered his first stroke in December 1933, followed by a long period of illness. He died in Lahr-Dinglingen on 8 July 1936. He was buried on the cemetery in Bad Liebenzell. His work was continued from January 1934 by Pastor Ernst Buddeberg, the son-in-law of his brother Fritz Coerper. Since April 2002, the street around the Mission and Training Centre on the Mission Mountain has been named after him. The “Klein-Wildbad-Quelle” of the town of Bad Liebenzell was renamed “Heinrich-Coerper-Quelle” in July 2005. Claudius Schillinger Liebenzell Fellowship O Heinrich Coerper founds the fellowship in Bad Liebenzell.
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