Church Planting After the Fall (of the Berlin Wall)

Three generations after East Germany rejected Christianity, a small group of prayerful believers see an opportunity.

The contrast could not be clearer.

On one side of a thin yellow line marking the old East-West German border (1949-1990) is a striking black and gray mass that used to constitute former East Germany. On the other, West German, side of the map is a kaleidoscope of multi-hued blues and reds, with some grayish zones mixed in. The red represents degrees of adherence to Catholicism, the blue Protestantism, the blacks and grays, “None” or “Other.”

The map, produced by social media account Nerdy Maps and based on data from the Statistical Offices of German States in 2011, was tweeted out by Andrew Wilson, Teaching Pastor at King’s Church London and Christianity Today contributor, on October 4, 2022.  

“This is staggering,” he tweeted, “it shows a) the catechetical power of state ideology and b) the importance (and challenge!) of slow, patient, long haul church planting in eastern Germany.”

Multiple missionaries, pastors, and ministry leaders responded, echoing Wilson’s sentiments and sharing their own hopes to plant churches and “reach the lost” in eastern German cities like Leipzig, Chemnitz, and Berlin.

As the “dark side” on the map intimates, church planters and missionaries face an uphill battle in a post-church landscape where some people don’t even know that the Christmas holiday has Christian origins.

According to Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung), a 2018 survey found that 64.2% of Germans surveyed nationwide identified as Christian. The second largest group (27%), were atheists and agnostics. But it was the differences between western and eastern Germany that were truly remarkable: while only 16.6%  in western Germany described themselves as non-believers, in eastern Germany the figure was 68.3%.

Simon Tarry, originally from the United Kingdom and now a church planter with Newfrontiers, a network of evangelical, charismatic churches, near Frankfurt a.M. said, “the barriers to the Gospel are different across regions, but any assumption that Germany is a Christian nation is really flawed.

“The stats are sad enough, but the reality is even starker,” he said. “Germany is equivalent to an unreached people group. You might think of the 10/40 window, places in Asia or the Middle East. But a lot of places in Germany and Northern Europe as a whole are much more ‘unreached’ than elsewhere in the world,” said Tarry.

That’s especially true in the former East, where Tarry said the reality might even be bleaker than what the map shows. “The scales of measurement are membership where people pay their church tax for marriage and baptism purposes, but beyond the taxes, there’s no living faith.

“It’s incredibly hard work to plant a church in Germany. It’s incredibly discouraging at times. It feels like really really hard ground,” he said.

How migrants are changing Europe's churches

“Each apartment block has its own community, its own dynamics, its own culture,” Ute Paul said as she walked among the Plattenbau — formidable apartments built of prefabricated concrete slabs —  in Gotha West, a working-class suburb of the central German city, Gotha.

Originally constructed as a planned housing development (Neubaugebiet) during the waning years of the socialist East German Republic, the district is now home to migrants who have made their way from Ukraine and Eritrea, Afghanistan and Romania, Nigeria and Syria. Many of them are relocated to places like Gotha West, where they often end up grouped with their fellow countrymen and forming cliques based on shared language, religion, or background.

On Coburger Place, a centrally located square with shops and a small casino that serves as the neighborhood’s main hangout spot, there is a small storefront with the words, “from dark to light” written across its windows.

The shop is the principle gathering place for the Mustard Seed District Mission (senfkorn.STADTteil Mission). Since 2015, pastor Michael Weinmann and his wife Christiane have been leading Mustard Seed and “experimenting with new forms of community in Gotha-West,” said Paul, who joined the pair along with her husband, Frank, in 2021.

Focusing less on events and more on “relationships, ‘accidental’ encounters, and natural life in the district,” Paul said the mission has little to show in terms of deliverables or church attendance.

Instead, reflecting the challenges and opportunities of migrant mission in Europe, Paul said Mustard Seed has been able to “create a vibrant network of relationships between people of different backgrounds and origins from across the world.”

Along the way, Paul said the Mustard Seed team has had to unlearn a lot of what they thought they knew about mission and adapt to the everyday realities of those God has given them to serve.

Since the unprecedented migratory movements that shook Europe in 2015 and 2016, an increasing number of Christian organizations have had to reshape their institutions and rethink the identity of Christianity from below.

Mustard Seed is just one example of how the movement of asylum seekers, economic migrants, and internally displaced persons has created new commissions and institutions to meet changing facts on the ground across the continent.

Migration to Europe is not a recent phenomenon. But since 2013, some 17.2 million migrants from outside the European Union (EU) have come to Europe, finding their way to places like Germany and Spain, the UK and Italy. As they arrived, they have sparked public discourse around European culture, values, and religious identity.

Amid the debate, churches have played key roles in the process of integration. Beyond offering religious hospitality, a 2018 study from the Churches’ Commission for Migrants in Europe (CCME) found how congregations provide “symbolic resources for positive self-identification and opportunities for interaction with others as well as crucial services.”

The result has been a transformation of the churches themselves.

War in Ukraine: covering the conflict's religious contours

Religion often plays a role in violent conflicts. Entangled with ethno-national, economic and territorial issues, religious actors, leaders and institutions can exacerbate and ameliorate both the causes and course of a conflict. While some religious actors provide care and appeal for peace, others contribute to the brutality and provide faith-filled fuel to already tenacious confrontations.

The warfare currently engulfing Ukraine is no exception. Religion played a role as the specter of Russian invasion grew over the last several years. Now, after Russian forces began their aggressive assault on Feb. 24, 2022, religious communities within Ukraine, Russia and across the globe are responding.

“While the secular media tries to guess Vladimir Putin’s motives in Ukraine, one important aspect of the current situation has gone largely ignored: religion.”

— Diana Butler Bass, Religion News Service

The latest edition of ReligionLink gives you a rundown of all the headlines, experts, and background research on the religious contours of a war whose impacts will reverberate around the world.

How do you compare theologies...ethnographically?

‘I’ve seen you’, she said.

‘I’ve seen your work and I’ve got some things to say about it’.

This was how my interview with Khadija started in the back of a quiet café in downtown Newark, near Rutgers University. A local artist, Khadija is a Puerto Rican convert to Islam and the mother of a son killed by gang violence. In the café, she sits across from me with a mug clutched in her hands. She radiates energy and warmth, wrapped in layers of vibrant, colorful clothing. Setting her coffee cup down, she looks me directly in the eyes and said, ‘My husband said about you, “Oh, he’s probably just another crazy missionary trying to convert us”. And I said, “Ok, let’s see who this crazy person is”. And then we listened to your sermons for hours. I’m grateful that you’re here, to interview me, to talk to us, to help tell our story. That way, they can know we are just like anybody else, it just happens that we speak Spanish and we are Muslim’.

Khadija’s exchange with me– an ordained Lutheran pastor, theologian, and ethnographer – was marked by an array of intersecting identities and experiences. While our encounter was one where my work in the pulpit opened up a conversation, there was the latent possibility that my work could have harmed Khadija, stalled or stopped the conversation, or caused some other insurmountable issue in the midst of my research in the neighborhood where she lives, works, and prays. Over several years of ethnographic fieldwork, my relationship with Muslims, like Khadija, has not only brought insight in my academic research, but also influenced my theology and work in inter-religious engagement.

This, in turn, raised questions about the relation between ethnography and theology and what role ethnographic encounter might play in the dialogue and encounter between religions.

In this essay, I review and analyze three books:

1. Tastes of the Divine: Hindu and Christian Theologies of Emotion, by Michelle Voss Roberts

2. Untouchable Bodies, Resistance, and Liberation: a Comparative Theology of Divine Possessions, by Joshua Samuel

3. Theologising with the Sacred ‘Prostitutes’ of South India: Towards an Indecent Dalit Theology, by Eve Rebecca Parker

Each compares Christian and Hindu traditions in South Asian context. I examine them in order to address two interrelated questions:

• are we beginning to see an ethnographic turn in comparative theology?

• if so, what might that mean for both ethnographic theology and comparative theology?

The result, I hope, are some fresh reflections on ethnographic and comparative theology that will better serve a world increasingly marked by diversity, difference, and interreligious encounters. Encounters not unlike the one where Khadija ‘saw me’ and I, in turn, came to ‘see her’ and walk away marked, changed, and seeing my own theology and sociality in a new way through the process.

Thank you, to the editors at the journal Ecclesial Practices, especially Editor-in-Chief Henk de Roest. I appreciated their attention to detail through this process and the anonymous reviewers helpful feedback. I would also like to thank members of the “Ecclesial Practices Unit” at the American Academy of Religion, who encouraged me to pursue this project.

O For a Global Tongue to Sing: Why German Evangelicals Are Praising God in English

English is the first thing you notice at Hillsong Berlin. The church was meeting at the Kino in der Kulturbrauerei—a movie theater in a historic brewery, just one tram stop from the last standing section of the Berlin Wall—but on Sunday night the sign out front said, “Welcome Home.” A smiling cadre of young, fashionable, and diverse volunteers from around the world greeted people in accented English.

Inside, the entire service is in English, including the sermon and all the worship songs. Participants sing “Wake,” “What a Beautiful Name,” and “King of Kings.” Most international Hillsong churches translate their services from the local language into English. In Berlin, there is no translation. The service is just in English. That isn’t Hannah Fischer’s first language, but that’s part of why she comes to Hillsong Berlin.

“People from outside Germany can’t really understand how awkward it is to be Christian here,” she said. “I could never praise God like that in my language.”

Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther insisted that Christians needed to hear the gospel in their own language, in words they could understand. When the Reformation swept Germany, people abandoned Latin worship for German prayers and praise.

Today, however, German Christians like Fischer are turning from their own language to a more global tongue: English. They say the foreign language allows them to loosen their German identity, praise God in an uninhibited way, and connect with a global, cosmopolitan Christianity.

Five Facts You Need To Know about Iraq, its Religious Minorities, & ISIS

Making sense of Iraq, ISIS, Yazidis, beheadings, crucifixions and your social media feed

The headlines are currently filled with reports and claims of widespread persecution of religious minorities at the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS, also known as ISIL) rebels in Iraq and Syria. The word ‘genocide’ has even begun to appear. 

For the shrewd observer, there is much to discern and not every news source, social media feed, or blog can be trusted to convey a factual picture. The situation is particularly sensitive, and in need of astute investigation, due to the potential reality of widespread persecution, genocide, and slaughter of innocents. 

Well corroborated reports verify there is religious persecution of minorities occurring in Iraq. ISIS rebels, motivated by a confluence of religious, political, and cultural factors, are threatening, attacking, and murdering those who do not conform to their religious ideals -- including Yazidis, Christians, and Shi'a Muslims. But, the situation is not as simple as “Muslims are embarking on a genocide of Christians” and understanding a bit of Iraq’s religious demographics, history, and the story of minority religions can help paint a clearer picture. Here are five things you need to about Iraq, ISIS, & the region’s religious minorities:

1. IRAQ IS NOT A “MUSLIM” NATION

It’s easy to assume that Iraq is a “Muslim” nation given that an estimated 97% of its population is Muslim. ‘Nuff said…right? The reality is much more convoluted. 

The country’s Muslim population is divided between the Shi’a (60-65%) and Sunni (32-37%) faithful. The Shi’a (also known as Shiite) are a minority within the global Muslim population (11-12%, compared to Sunni’s 87-89%) and only claim a majority in Iraq, Iran, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan (some recent claims also say Lebanon). Shiism developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, when his followers split over who would lead Islam. The Shi’a branch favored Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law ‘Ali Ibn Abi Talib. Ali and the Shi’a were defeated by the Sunni and over time the political divide between the two groups broadened to include theological distinctions. Shi’as include Ithna Asharis (Twelvers), Ismailis, Zaydis, Alevis and Alawites.

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Photo: Healing Iraq

Tension between Sunnis and Shi’as proves a perennial source of conflict in the Middle East and formed a core part of the motivations behind the Iraq Civil War that occurred after the U.S. led invasion that toppled the secular Ba’ath regime of Saddam Hussein. ISIS rebels come from a particular school, and sub-sect, of Sunni Islam (more on this later) and are not part of the Shi’a majority of Iraq’s Muslims. 

Furthermore, there are many Muslims throughout the world who seek to distance themselves, not only from ISIS (more on this later), but from countries where Muslims seek to marry religion and politics. They instead hope that secular forces will continue to grow in the Middle East, and elsewhere, and that a progressive and modernized form of Islam will take hold (see Reza Aslan, No god but God). 

Iraq’s Constitution establishes Islam as its official religion and requires that no law contradict Islam. Yet, since Iraq is an attempt at a federal parliamentary Islamic democracy founded in the ideals of pluralism, religious freedom is also guaranteed. There are large numbers of Christians in Iraq and up to 6 million people make up the country’s religious minorities (including Yazidis, Ahl-e Haqq, Mandeans, Shabak, and Bahá’í). However, that does not mean that the Muslim majority does not wield disparate amounts of power, nor does it mean there is no persecution of religious minorities. The U.S State Department reported in 2013:

In Iraq, there were reports of societal abuses and discrimination based on religious affiliation, belief, or practice, although to a lesser extent in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR) than in other areas of the country. A combination of sectarian hiring practices, corruption, targeted attacks, and the uneven application of the law had a detrimental economic effect on minority non-Muslim communities, and contributed to the departure of non-Muslims from the country. 

While Islam is predominant, state-sanctioned, and a source of conflict in Iraq it is jejune to simply say Iraq is a “Muslim” nation and convey that there is some single, unified, Muslim bloc, or that there are not significant religious divides present in the country that play a role in the current conflict. 

2. IRAQ’S RELIGIOUS HISTORY IS DEEP AND DIVERSE

Iraq has not always been a predominately Muslim country and possesses a rich religious history. In fact, its deep and diverse religious past most certainly plays a part in the political, cultural, and geographical loyalties of its contemporary population. 

Modern Iraq is at the center of the Mesopotamian delta between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, also known as “the Fertile Crescent.” Not only was the land fertile in terms of agriculture and civilization, but religion as well. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh emerged out of Mesopotamia and the Sumerian’s cyclical, agricultural, and ritualistic religious environment that featured gods and goddesses such as Ishtar, Dumuzi, and Enki. The Sumerian metaphoric language and religion influenced Mesopotamian mythology and history for centuries and Hurrian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and even later religious groups and cultures were shaped by the cosmology of their Sumerian forebears. 

Following these indigenous religious expressions, “the Fertile Crescent” was dominated by the Persians from 323 B.C.E. During the Persian era of Iraq, the culture in the area was shaped by Hebrew and indigenous religious forces, but Zoroastrianism became the accepted religion of the Persian culture. Zoroastrianism — one of the world’s oldest surviving monotheistic religions — was founded by the Prophet Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) in ancient Iran circa 1500 B.C.E. Zoroastrian worship Ahura Mazda (Wise Lord), respect the pure elements (water, fire, earth, wind), and introduced a formalization of the concepts of monotheism, paradise, destiny, and free will to Mesopotamian religion. 

Assyrian Christianity was introduced in the 1st and 2nd-centuries C.E. and comprises some of the most ancient forms of Christianity in the world. It has since divided into various Christian sects including Nestorians, Chaldean Catholics, Syrian Catholics, Armenian Orthodox, and other Eastern Rite Christians (more on this later). 

When Islam took hold around 634 C.E., the people of Mesopotamia were predominately Christian and paid the “non-Muslim” tax. Slowly, through intermarriage and conversion (both genuine and coerced) Islam prevailed. Over a century after the initial invasion of Islam (762 C.E.) Baghdad became the official capital of the region and served as a key commercial, cultural, and educational hub, linking Asia to the Mediterranean countries. It was a cosmopolitan city that, for a time, produced phenomenal philosophical and technical works by both Arab and Persian thinkers.

In the Middle Ages (1200-1500s C.E.), Iraq traded hands between the Mongols (which included shamanistic, Buddhist, Manichean, Nestorian, and Muslim influences) and the Muslim Ottoman Turks. Following World War I, the Ottoman Empire was defeated and the British defined the territory of Iraq paying scant attention to natural boundaries and religious and ethnic divisions. No single religious or political force has been able to effectively bring order to Iraq for more than a few decades since. 

3. THE YAZIDIS ARE A UNIQUE AND FASCINATING RELIGIOUS MINORITY

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Photo: Getty Images

From this rich religious, political, economic, and cultural history several religious minorities emerged. One of those smaller religious populations is the Yazidis. The Yazidi are Kurds, but possess their own unique religion. Though largely isolated from their neighbors, their main habitations are around Mosul. Hence they have faced displacement when ISIS rebels took hold of this northern urban center and its environs. 

Thankfully, several news sources successfully explicated the religious and cultural distinctives of the Yazidis whose “faith is a fascinating mix of ancient religions.” 

Read the Washington Post’s coverage here...

4. THE CHRISTIAN POPULATION IN IRAQ IS A MIXED BAG 

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Photo: Safin Hamed | Getty Images

What about Christians in Iraq? Several misleading headlines have zeroed in on ISIS’ attacks against Christians, not only ignoring Yazidis and other religious minorities, but not fully elucidating the Christian story in Iraq and reducing their narrative to persecution alone. 

Iraqi Christians are some of the world’s oldest existent Christian populations. While not claiming a majority of the Iraqi population since the 7th-century, they constitute a significant and culturally influential minority. Before the Iraq War, Christians represented a little more than 5% of the population, claiming 1.5 - 2 million adherents. Due to rising persecution against Christians (abductions, torture, bombings, killings, forced conversion, and imposition of Sharia measures on Christian populations) their numbers plummeted to anywhere between 200,000-450,000  as of 2013 with many fleeing to surrounding countries such as Syria and Jordan (where, in the former location, they now face difficulties due to the Syrian Civil War). Those Christians that remain are concentrated in Baghdad, Basra, Arbil, Kirkuk and — significantly for the current context — in the Assyrian towns of the Nineveh Plains in the north and in Mosul.  

The Christians are a diverse group and include Nestorians, Chaldean Catholics, Syrian Catholics, Assyrian Rite Christians, and small numbers of Armenian Orthodox. The majority of Iraqi Christians are influenced directly, or contingently, by Nestorianism, a Christian sect condemned by the councils of Ephesus (431 C.E.) and Chalcedon (451 C.E.) for their assertion of the independence of the divine and human natures of Christ. Still today, the majority of the worlds Christians would consider Nestorians and their antecedents “heretics.” 

However, in most headlines they are being ambiguously labeled “Christian,” rather than as a “Christian sect.” There is certainly much debate about their place in Christian taxonomy, but it is interesting that in other contexts Nestorians and other Eastern Rite churches would be decried as perilously close to being “non-Christian” by the same Protestant and Roman Catholic groups now rallying to their cause. Theological disputes aside, they do not deserve discrimination, displacement, or death based on religious or cultural lines and any religious group that supports their right to existence should be lauded for their efforts. 

5. ISIS’S RELIGIOUS MOTIVATIONS ARE SECTARIAN AND DO NOT REPRESENT "ISLAM"

Several wayward headlines read akin to this one from The Christian Post: “Muslims Hack Off Christian Man's Head After Forcing Him to Deny Jesus Christ and Salute Mohammed as 'Messenger of God.’” Not only is this headline charged with sectarian sentiment, but it is misleading and oversimplified.

Is ISIS Muslim? If you ask Sohaib N. Sultan who wrote for TIME magazine that “ISIS is Ignoring Islam’s Teachings on Yazidis and Christians,” that claim is nebulous at best. Sultan wrote: 

I join the chorus of Muslims worldwide, Sunnis and Shi‘ites, who oppose al-Baghdadi and ISIS as a whole. The killing and oppression of innocent people and the destruction of land and property is completely antithetical to Islam’s normative teachings. It’s as pure and as simple as that.  

Sultan’s comments echo a deep rift that continues to divide global Islam, which Reza Aslan refers to as a civil war between traditionalists and reformists. Not only this, but Islam is a diverse religion with various sects and schools of thought. Not only are there Shi’as, Sufis, and Sunnis, but the Sunni are divided into various schools and theological traditions that incorporate proponents of various lines of jurisprudence including the Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki, and Shafi’i institutions. 

ISIS militants and their leaders are influenced by, and are an active part of, the Salafi movement in Islam. Salafis are fundamentalists who view their movement as a return to the roots of Islam (although this claim is contested by Sultan and others Muslims throughout the world). Their name is derived from the Arabic phrase, 'as-salaf as-saliheen', which refers to the first three generations of Muslims — the pious “predecessors” or “ancestors” of Islam.

The Salafi movement is a slippery one to pin down. Some scholars, and the Salafis themselves, claim they are a subset of Sunni Islam, deriving their teaching from the Hanbali school. Others lump Salafism with Wahhabism — the ultraconservative Islamic teaching of Adn al-Wahhab that was institutionalized by the Saudis before being radicalized by al-Qaeda and used against their nation and other Muslims. Wahhabis adhere to takfiri beliefs, which lead adherents to target non-Wahhabi Muslims — mainstream Muslims, Sunnis, Shi’as, Sufi, etc. Salafis assert they are a broader movement than Wahhabis, but certainly the two are parallel developments and share much in common in terms of radical doctrine and violent, extremist, practice. Salafis seek to purify Islam, which features a built-in brutality toward non-Muslims. 

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A perspectival graph of global Islam's schools and sects. 

ISIS and other Salafi movements would like to promote the narrative that their war is one between Muslims and Christians. However, as Aslan, Sultan, and others note, this is as much an inter-Muslim conflict as anything else. This does not make the atrocities committed against other religious minorities any less hideous, but it does note that this is more than a Muslim-Christian conflict. 

In the end, this current confrontation, and for that matter all Salafi inspired violence, should be framed as a juxtaposition between the world’s peace loving people — Muslim, Yazidi, Christian, Buddhist, non-religious, or otherwise — and those who seek to use religion as a means of power, oppression, and senseless violence. 

Hopefully, this blog (essay, really) helps to paint this picture and convey the historical, religious, and political nexus this present hostility is part of.