Church Disability Representatives Head to Rastatt for Three-Day Training Forum
Published on 09/28/2026 at 02:41 | Editorial boerse-global.de
Representatives who speak for employees with disabilities across the Protestant church and its welfare arm in Baden are gathering in Rastatt this week, with the GA Baden umbrella body opening its annual specialist conference on Monday.
The event runs from 28 to 30 September 2026 at the Bildungshaus St. Bernhard, a conference and education centre in the town. Its programme is built around the particular questions and fields of action that confront bodies representing staff who have disabilities or other impairments in church and diaconal service.
An official invitation and a detailed agenda were circulated in advance, allowing delegates to register for the sessions. For those who attend, the three days are designed to combine professional development with the chance to compare notes with counterparts from other institutions.
A fixture in the committee's calendar
For GA Baden, the format is a standing item in its wider programme of committee and education work, which also takes in meetings in Bad Herrenalb and an information newsletter published roughly every two months.
There is little breathing room afterwards. On 13 and 14 October 2026, the body reconvenes for a delegates' assembly in Pforzheim-Hohenwart.
Forty thousand workers, and a long-running argument over labour law
The employee representation committees (Mitarbeitervertretungen, or MAV) of the Protestant Church and Diakonie in Baden cover some 40,000 employees. Labour-law questions and co-determination rights have traditionally sat at the centre of the umbrella committee's work.
In June 2025 the committee held its summer delegates' assembly at the Haus der Kirche in Bad Herrenalb under the heading "Good Working Conditions". Earlier still, at an autumn delegates' assembly in Bad Herrenalb in October 2023, the association passed a resolution on church labour law addressed to the governing parties SPD, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen and FDP.
That text pointed out that churches and welfare associations enjoy statutory special provisions and privileges in employment law, arrangements that affect roughly 1.8 million employees nationwide.
For the Baden regional church and its Diakonie in particular, the resolution recorded that collective agreements such as the TVöD, the public-sector pay deal, and the TV-L, its counterpart for the federal states, apply throughout the constituted church but in only about 50 percent of diaconal institutions.
What the 2023 resolution demanded
Among the core calls at the time were the introduction of the Betriebsverfassungsgesetz — Germany's Works Constitution Act — and of corporate co-determination in the church sector as well.
The representation also sought the removal of church exemptions from the Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz (AGG), Germany's general equal-treatment law; an end to treating church employment contract guidelines as equivalent to conventional collective agreements; and genuine collective bargaining partnership in place of the so-called "Third Way".
Set against that labour-law backdrop, specialised gatherings such as the current one in Rastatt take on central importance for the work of employee and disability representatives alike.
