St. Mariä Heimsuchung Church, Alfter-Impekoven

The present church is Impekoven's third. A neo-Gothic chapel stood on the same site; built in 1884, it was enlarged in 1926 and demolished in 1967, having become too small for a fast-growing congregation, and enlarging it while renovating it could not be justified economically.

In 1962 Heinz Schütte, then an assistant priest of the parish, put forward the Cologne architect Gottfried Böhm to the Archdiocese of Cologne, led by Cardinal Josef Frings. The cardinal approved the plans on condition that the Impekoven community pay for the whole interior fit-out, and a building association, the Kirchenbauverein, was formed to carry the project. The shell was already finished when the foundation stone was laid on 14 July 1968, and the first Mass in the new building was the Christmas midnight Mass of 1969.

In 2018, on the recommendation of the Landschaftsverband Rheinland, the church was entered on the municipality of Alfter's list of monuments.

Gottfried Böhm conceived the church as a "crystal-clear monolith", a body made in one piece and comparable to a rock crystal; many churchgoers also see in it a "fortress of God" or the "tent of God".

The plan is polygonal. To the south, a round tower under a conical roof leads into the interior, and a folded roof covers the whole and stretches over the nave like a tent. The concrete is left visible on the walls, and lamps mounted on black steel masts help shape the room.

After the Second Vatican Council the space was designed as an assembly hall in which the priest celebrates the Eucharist facing the congregation. To stress the life of the community against the stillness of the concrete, strong colours were chosen: red pews that match the stone tiles, and green doors. The trapezoidal chancel is raised by one step. The altar and the tabernacle are of red Würzburg sandstone, made by the firm of Albert Wirths of Geroldshausen; in 2006 an ambo in the same sandstone, by the sculptor Hermann Büchel, joined them. Opposite the altar, the font sits in an apse-like niche surrounded by a semicircular bench; it is of Belgian granite, and Büchel designed it in 1987 as a "tree of new life". The organ gallery is above the entrance. The only furnishing carried over from the earlier church is the corpus of the crucifix in the chancel.

The church is a filial church of the parish of Our Lady's Assumption at Oedekoven, to which the congregation has belonged since 1986 (it was previously attached to Witterschlick), within the Alfter pastoral community of the Archdiocese of Cologne. Over the decades the building association has worked on the upkeep and modernisation of the building.

The church, which is in use, stands in the Engelsgasse in Impekoven, in the municipality of Alfter. It can be visited at service times.