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"Christianity came with the Romans, some of whom were Christians, to the Rhine in Cologne. One of the oldest churches in Cologne is the Severinskirche. From this so-called collegiate church, the missionization of the Oberberg region took place. Other churches in Bonn and Cologne also devoted themselves to others to the east mission areas located on the Rhine, which were, for example, north or south of the Oberbergisches. One of the original parishes in the Oberbergisch founded from Cologne is today's Protestant church of Gummersbach (first mentioned in 1109 AD), from where the spread of the Christian faith then began in ours Breiten continued and from which St. Jakobus Ründeroth separated in order to become independent and the believers no longer had to travel such long distances to Gummersbach for church services. Apparently the number of believers had grown to such an extent that a new parish could be created. In The town of Ründeroth was first mentioned in a document in 1174. The Protestant pastor Meyer-Hermann wrote in his book 'Ründeroth in old and new times' in 1910: “A consequence of the separation of the Ründeroth chapel from Gummersbach and the simultaneous elevation of it to a parish church was the construction of a new church. There is no information about what the old chapel was like, exactly where it stood and when it was built. Like the church built later, the first chapel probably also has the name of St. had the apostle James the Elder as his patron.” This name remained throughout the Reformation and was later transferred to this new church when the Catholic church was built in 1866. The apostle James the Elder found his grave in Spain, in Santiago de Compostela. He was always highly revered and it is said that many pilgrimages from Germany to Spain in the early Middle Ages went to the grave of St. St. James's pilgrimage, traveled along the mountain roads here and stopped at the St. James's churches. ..."