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Japanese Yes, some do. Anglican churches have had communities of sisters under vows since 1845. Lutheran and Reformed Christians founded sisterhoods of their own, mostly in Germany and Switzerland, and many Protestant churches once had deaconess communities of unmarried women. Most Baptist, evangelical and other free churches have no nuns.
Which Protestant churches have nuns?
Anglicans have the most. Henry VIII dissolved the religious orders when he broke the Church of England from Rome. The first sisterhood restored within it was the Park Village Community, founded in Regent’s Park, London, on 26 March 1845. Others followed within a decade, among them the Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage and the Society of Saint Margaret at East Grinstead. In 1848 Priscilla Lydia Sellon answered an appeal from Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, for help among the poor of Devonport; from 1856 she led the Society of the Most Holy Trinity. In the United States, the Community of St. Mary, founded in New York in 1865 by Harriet Starr Cannon, is the oldest Episcopal order of American origin. Members of Anglican orders take vows that often include the traditional three of poverty, chastity and obedience.
Lutherans have a few. At the Reformation, six convents in the Duchy of Lüneburg, among them Lüne, Ebstorf, Wienhausen and Isenhagen, were not closed but kept as Protestant foundations for unmarried women of noble and leading town families; Isenhagen has housed Lutheran women ever since. Newer communities followed. The Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary, a Lutheran-based order, was founded in Darmstadt in 1947 by Klara Schlink and Erika Madauss, known as Mother Basilea and Mother Martyria. The Communität Casteller Ring in Bavaria follows the Rule of St Benedict at Schwanberg; in 2025 it had 38 sisters living under poverty, chastity and obedience. From 1996 to 2011 its sisters staffed the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt where Martin Luther had lived as a monk.
The Reformed churches of Switzerland have Grandchamp, a community of Protestant sisters near Neuchâtel. Geneviève Micheli led its first retreats in 1931, and in 1952 she and the first seven sisters made their profession; a year later they adopted the Rule of Taizé.
Protestants have monks as well. The Taizé Community in France was founded in 1940 by Brother Roger Schütz, a Reformed Protestant, and on Easter Sunday 1949 its first seven brothers committed themselves to a life of “simplicity, celibacy and community.” Its brothers now come from both Catholic and Protestant churches. Anglican orders for men began with the Society of St John the Evangelist, the “Cowley Fathers,” in 1866.
What is the difference between a nun, a sister and a deaconess?
Strictly, a nun belongs to an enclosed order and takes solemn vows, while a sister lives an active life under simple vows. In ordinary speech the two words are used for the same thing.
A deaconess is a woman in a church ministry of pastoral care and service. The modern Protestant office began in 1836, when Theodor Fliedner and his wife Friederike opened a deaconess motherhouse at Kaiserswerth on the Rhine. Its deaconesses nursed and taught, committing themselves to five years of service in return for board, a uniform and care for life. Florence Nightingale spent some months there in 1850 and 1851. The Church of England licensed its first deaconess, Elizabeth Ferard, in 1862. The title goes back to Phoebe, whom Paul calls “our sister Phoebe, a servant of the church at Cenchreae” (Romans 16:1); the English Standard Version notes that “servant” can also be translated “deaconess.”
Can Protestant nuns marry?
Not while they belong to a celibate order. Sisters in traditional Anglican communities and in the Casteller Ring take a vow of celibacy, as Catholic nuns do. Deaconesses were a looser case. In 1895 the Lutheran General Synod in the United States defined a deaconess as an “unmarried woman,” and within the deaconess movement it was disputed whether a lifelong vow barred a deaconess from marrying.
Paul commended single life without requiring it. He wrote, “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single, as I am,” while granting that “each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another” (1 Corinthians 7:7–8).
How do you become a Protestant nun?
In the Church of England, the Anglican Religious Life Project describes the stages. An enquirer contacts a community and may become a postulant, “a settling in time” in the religious house. The novitiate that follows “usually is 2-3 years, during which the novice wears the traditional habit.” First vows come next and, later, life profession. Each community sets its own conditions.
Why do most Protestant churches have no nuns?
The Reformation drew many nuns out of their convents. Katharina von Bora, a Cistercian nun at Nimbschen near Grimma, grew interested in the reform movement and asked Luther for help. On 4 April 1523 she and several other nuns escaped hidden among the fish barrels in the wagon of Leonhard Köppe, a merchant who delivered herring to the convent. On 13 June 1525 she married Martin Luther. Apart from a few Lutheran foundations such as those at Lüneburg, the Protestant communities of women that exist today were founded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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