Church offices managing the federation are located in Herrenhausen, Hanover, Lower Saxony.

The postwar church council issued the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt on 19 October 1945, confessing guilt and declaring remorse for indifference and inaction of German Protestants in the face of atrocities committed by Hitler's regime.

Boundaries of EKD churches within Germany partially resemble those of the states of the Holy Roman Empire and successor forms of German statehood (to the most part 1815 borders), due to the historically close relationship between individual German states and churches.

Etymologically, the German word evangelisch means "of the Gospel", denoting a Reformation emphasis on sola scriptura, "by scripture alone".

This changed somewhat with growing religious freedom in the 19th century, especially in the republican states of Bremen, Frankfurt (1857), Lübeck, and Hamburg (1860).

[7] It was realised that one mainstream Protestant church for all of Germany was impossible and that any union would need a federal model.

They had much influence over the decisions of the first National Synod, via their unambiguous partisanship in successfully backing Ludwig Müller for the office of Reich bishop.

In 1969, the regional Protestant churches in East Germany and East Berlin[8] broke away from the EKD and formed the League of Evangelical Churches in the German Democratic Republic (German: Bund der Evangelischen Kirchen in der DDR, BEK), in 1970 also joined by the Moravian Herrnhut District.

While the members are no longer state churches, they enjoy constitutional protection as statutory corporations, and they are still called Landeskirchen, and some have this term in their official names.

Since also the regional Protestant churches in East Germany had signed the Leuenberg Agreement, thus the then ten members of the Federation of Protestant Churches in the German Democratic Republic practised full communion with the EKD members too.

A 2019 study estimated that there were 114,000 unreported victims of sexual abuse in the EKD and the Catholic Church in Germany combined.

Putting this figure into context, the coordinator of the study clarified that this number of cases was only the tip of the iceberg.

While the majority of Christians in Southern Germany are Catholic, some areas in Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria are predominantly Protestant, e.g. Middle Franconia and the government region of Stuttgart.

[19] The regional Protestant church bodies accept each other as equals, despite denominational differences.

Thus, for example, a Lutheran moving from a place where their parish belongs to a Lutheran member church, would be accepted in their new place of domicile by the locally competent congregation within another member church, even if this church and its local parish are Reformed or of united Protestant confession, with Lutheran being exchangeable with the two other respective Protestant confessions within the EKD.

Members of congregations within the member churches – like those of parishes within Catholic dioceses and those enrolled in Jewish congregations also enjoying statutory corporation status – are required to pay a church tax, a surcharge on their normal income tax collected by the states of Germany and passed on to the respective religious body.

For the execution of these tasks, the Church has the following governing bodies, all organised and elected on democratic lines: The Synod is the legislature of the EKD.

The EKD Council is the representative and governing body of the Protestant Church in Germany.

The Council of the EKD has 15 members jointly elected by the Synod and Church Conference who serve terms of six years.

The Gustav-Adolf-Werk (GAW) (Gustaphus Adolphus Union formerly) was founded 1832 in Leipzig as the first and eldest such organization and is responsible to aid feeble sister churches, especially in Roman Catholic countries and the Protestant diaspora.

The Moravian Church ("Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine") and the Federation of Evangelical Reformed Congregations are associate members.