Dorpskerk
Biggekerke, NL
The church of Biggekerke is known to have been founded before 1247 as a daughter church of the Westmonster church in Middelburg. Until 1453, there were even two pastors' positions attached to it. During the Reformation, it also caused quite a stir here. The pastor at the time, Bernard Donder, was a convinced Calvinist and renounced the Roman Catholic church in 1566. Since then, he has also preached the Reformation in Biggekerke, something for which he had to pay with imprisonment. After being released and imprisoned several times, he fled to England or Germany. After this, a period began in which people could only meet secretly and in small numbers, in someone's house. But then, when Middelburg declared itself loyal to Orange, the Reformation could develop. At that time, there was still the problem that there were too few pastors, but in 1583, the classis of Walcheren assigned the first pastor to Biggekerke, the Rev. J. van Aecken.