Pfeffelbach is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Kusel district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Kusel-Altenglan, whose seat is in Kusel. Pfeffelbach was as early on as the Middle Ages already a parish hub. Bearing witness to this is the church building with its spolia from Roman times that was mentioned in the 1124 document, but which is nonetheless likely much older and might not be Pfeffelbach's very first church building. According to the 1124 document, Pfeffelbach was, along with Konken and Altenglan, one of three chapels of ease of the Church of Kusel, and was said to be held by the Abbey of Saint-Remi but belonged with regard to ecclesiastical organization to the Archbishopric of Mainz. After several conversions, only the churchtower was still preserved. Beyond that, little is known about the Church of Pfeffelbach in Middle Ages. In 1534, the Dukes of Zweibrücken introduced the Reformation. The last Catholic priest was Nikolaus Becker. The first Lutheran pastor was said to be Johannes Gelanus, while towards the end of the century, Pastor Heinrich Gossenberger was working in the village, but was generally held to be a drunkard, becoming so well known for this that tales are told about him in Pfeffelbach to this day. Beginning in 1588, Count Palatine Johannes I forced all his subjects to convert to Reformed belief as espoused by John Calvin. In the Saxe-Cobourg Principality of Lichtenberg and later on, in the Prussian Rhine Province, the Protestant church establishment in Pfeffelbach found its way into today's Evangelical Church in the Rhineland (a full member of the Evangelical Church in Germany). The Duke of Saxe-Cobourg decreed the merger of the two Protestant denominations in 1818, and the decision handed down by a synod in Baumholder in 1820 instituted the "complete union" of the two denominations, Lutheranism and Calvinism. The now united Evangelical Church of the Principality of Lichtenberg belonged in Prussian times after 1834 within the Rhenish Provincial Church to the church district of Sankt Wendel. Fundamentally, this organizational structure remains in place even today. The village's Roman Catholic Christians belong, in line with their historical development, to the deaconry of Kusel, and they also attend services in Kusel. During the 18th century, the church in Pfeffelbach could also be used simultaneously. In earlier ... More information...
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