The theological foundations of the so-called Wiesbaden Program for Protestant church building were developed by the Wiesbaden pastor Emil Veesenmeyer and published in the Evangelisches Gemeindeblatt (Dillenburg) in 1890. The central points of the Wiesbaden program were

"1. the church ... should bear the imprint of a meeting house of the ... congregation, not that of a house of God in the Catholic sense.

2. the unity of the congregation and the principle of universal priesthood should be expressed through the unity of the space. The latter may not be divided into several naves, nor may the nave and chancel be separated.

3. the celebration of Holy Communion should not take place in a separate room, but in the midst of the congregation. The altar, which is to be surrounded, must therefore be given a corresponding position, at least symbolically. All lines of sight should lead to it.

(4) The pulpit, as the place where Christ is offered to the congregation as spiritual food, is to be treated at least as equivalent to the altar. It should be given its place behind the latter and be organically connected to the organ and singing platform to be arranged in front of the congregation." (Quote from Fritsch)

The Wiesbaden program was directed against the so-called Eisenach Regulations on Protestant Church Construction passed in 1861, according to which all church authorities were instructed to adhere to the Romanesque or Gothic style in new buildings. This meant that Protestant building concepts followed a Roman Catholic understanding of the mass for three decades.

When a third Protestant church was to be built in Wiesbaden after the Marktkirche and the Bergkirche, Veesenmeyer pushed his concept through with the decision-makers. The Berlin architect Johannes Otzen, who had been involved in the planning since 1889, was entrusted with the new building and created the first architectural implementation of the Wiesbaden program with the Ringkirche.

Veesenmeyer's ideas of what a Protestant church should look like were less concerned with style than with the actual building function. In this respect, the Wiesbaden program already followed the principle of modernism, which the American architect Louis Henry Sullivan (1856-1924) put into the formula "form follows function" in 1904, ten years after the completion of the Ringkirche. The influence of the Wiesbaden program was not only felt in numerous churches influenced by Art Nouveau, but also well into the 1920s and beyond the First World War.

A direct consequence of the Wiesbaden program was the first congress for Protestant church building in Berlin in 1894, where Veesenmeyer presented the program.