Along the quiet, tree-lined streets and avenues of Berlin’s middle-class Steglitz district, police in plain clothes were staking out a church on Monday.
Their target: an Afghan man living in the basement of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church.
The man didn’t know it, though, and “dared to go a few steps outside of the church on the sidewalk,” pastor Gottfried Martens told CT. The man was immediately arrested.
According to Martens, the man is a Christian convert who will face “immediate danger to life and limb” if he is deported back to Afghanistan.
The congregation, which is part of the Selbständige Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche (Independent Evangelical-Lutheran Church), a small denomination connected to Missouri Synod Lutherans in the United States, has welcomed hundreds of Farsi- and Dari-speaking refugees since 2011. According to Martens, many of them have become Christians, and the church is “committed to protecting converted Christians from deportation to their deaths.”
In recent days, that has become a contentious position in Germany.