An Old Idea Is New Again in Europe: Spiritual Formation

How do you transform European hearts? 

It’s one thing to tell people about Jesus. It’s another to get them to change the way they live and help them develop the kind of daily practices that, as the late American philosopher Dallas Willard once wrote, “actually lead to the transformation of life.”

That thought drove Michael Stewart Robb, a Munich-based American theologian who wrote a book on Willard, to found the Sanctus Institute in 2017. He wanted something—an infrastructure, an organization—to teach Christians to foster the day-to-day disciplines and practices that shape people spiritually. Today the institute brings together ministers and ministries with an interest in spiritual formation from across the continent. 

Evangelicals in other parts of Europe have started exploring and rediscovering ways of connecting with God too. From Methodist band meetings in Bulgaria to urban monks in Paris and Berlin and spiritual retreats in Portugal, missionaries, pastors, and everyday Christians are looking for ways to not only pursue converts but also help people conform to the image of Christ. 

According to Willard, who died in 2013, American evangelicals started feeling a pressing need to emphasize discipleship after World War II. Many ministers and Christian leaders felt the Sunday sermon alone, or even the Sunday sermon plus a midweek Bible study, didn’t provide people enough sustenance to really live like Christians. Churches had put too much emphasis on head knowledge and belief, not enough on formation.

Today, ideas about the importance of discipleship are widespread in the United States, Robb said. Americans can easily find books—including titles by Willard and a range of writers including Richard Foster, Henri Nouwen, Richard Rohr, Elizabeth Oldfield, Ruth Haley Barton, Barbara Peacock, Diane Leclerc, James Wilhoit, John Mark Comer, and many others—as well as retreats and seminars on the topic. Many seminaries teach spiritual direction and offer specialization in spiritual formation. 

“You can’t run a seminary in North America unless you say you do spiritual formation. It’s part of the package,” Robb said. “In Europe, you don’t really see that.”

Berlin Like Jazz

It’s Saturday night and you’re looking for jazz in Germany’s capital. You could catch an after-midnight jam session at A-Trane in Charlottenburg, get cozy in the stylish, intimate ambience of the Zig Zag Club in Friedenau, or catch a solo saxophonist serenading the crowd at Berlin’s oldest jazz club, Quasimodo.

And there’s one more option: You could wait until morning and go to church in the Wedding district. 

One part church plant, one part jazz project, Kiez Church (Neighborhood Church) in the multiethnic district of Wedding is led by Ali and Rich Maegraith, Australian missionaries who say they want to bring the gospel to the cosmopolitan city’s art scene.

Berlin is a magnet for musicians—a place to connect and prove your chops. The German capital is a hub for many different European music scenes, from electronic dance to Afropop, classical to klezmer, and attracts creative people from all over.

The Maegraiths, who moved to Berlin in 2015, say that’s their in. The music provides them with evangelical opportunities. Rich, a professional jazz musician, and Ali, a vocalist and songwriter, moved to the city to serve with the European Christian Mission agency.

“We’ve met many people through jam sessions, performances or just busking on the streets,” Ali told CT. When they first arrived, Rich said he would go to jam sessions every night, all over the city. “In Berlin, the jazz scene is already a community, where people will play and hang out together until the early hours of the morning,” he said, “they even call it ‘jazz church.’”

Berlin’s nightlife is more readily associated with techno and punk, but it also has a long, historical relationship with jazz. The improvisational, syncopated music first came to the German capital at the end of World War I, when it was warmly received by the post-war population of the Weimar Republic.

When the American-born French singer and dancer Josephine Baker visited Berlin in 1925, she found the city dazzling with a vibrant jazz scene. Her performances were received with warm adulation. And popular acts like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington took the city by storm at a time when it was the third largest metropolitan area in the world by population.

Nazis put an end to jazz when they took control, but the music came back with the American victory in World War II. Soldiers stationed in the city brought the music of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Miles Davis with them. This time, jazz stuck.

Today, Berlin is one of the best places in Europe to hear a live jazz show. And one of the places you can do that is at Kiez Church Wedding.

Best In-Depth Reporting on Religion

I am beyond grateful to announce that I was named the third place winner of the Best In-Depth Reporting on Religion award from the American Academy of Religion.

I love writing on religion, and going in depth on stories of relevance and import. To be recognized by the world’s largest association of academics who research or teach topics related to religion and to place behind wonderful religion writers like Peter Manseau and Dawn Araujo-Hawkins is an immense honor.

The judges had this to say about my work:

[Ken’s] reporting includes a delightful and eye-opening history of a Muslim acrobat in Liverpool, an insightful and timely article on how sports play a role in combatting ignorance and Islamophobia, and interesting reports on Jewish music and spiritual seeking in modern-day Germany.

Here below are the three stories I submitted, just in case you missed them last year.

Thanks in advance, for taking a (second) look.

The Liverpool Effect

A hidden grave, Moroccan acrobats, and combatting Islamophobia in Liverpool through sport.

Berlin: The not-so-secular city

Is Berlin the atheist capital of Europe? Maybe so…but maybe not.

Klezmer’s modern European revival

Yiddish Music Is Resurging In The Weimar Square Hitler Frequented

Berlin's Transcultural Jam

“If Berlin and its music scene is something, it’s actually seeing people with their very diverse intersectional identities, and it’s celebrating that.”

— Jamila Al-Yousef

It’s a damp, cold October night in Berlin, but along Hauptstraße in the Friedenau district, inside the famed Zig Zag Jazz Club, the crowd waiting for Alaa Zouiten is lively, chattering and warm.

A fire-red glow reflects from the lights near the stage where the Morocco-born ‘ud player begins plucking a few of his instrument’s strings. Clinking glassware and the hum of conversation subsides into concentration.

“I love the transcultural approach in music, and that means there are no boundaries between music and cultures,” says Alaa Zouiten. Morocco-born and, since 2009, Berlin-based, the ‘ud virtuoso and music educator is among the more than 135,000 Arab-identifying residents of the city helping make Berlin one of the world’s hottest centers of creative arts. Zouiten cites the fusions in his own music as Moroccan, Amazigh, African, Jewish, North African and Andalusian. “Together it all sounds really organic,” he says, “In that moment, the listener says, ‘We’re all pretty close, and we have more similarities than differences.’”

Zouiten’s first song comes as a rapid-fire arrangement that at once showcases his virtuosity, flitting between styles he refers to as flamenco arabe and urban jazz. After that, his band joins him: a Spanish percussionist, a French bassist, a Canadian violinist and a pianist from Lebanon. Midway through their opener, Zouiten pauses to let his audience know it’s about to hear something new.

“We are trying a mix of different styles of music up here,” he says. “I hope it’s OK.” 

Cheers erupt. One woman near the front calls out, “It’s more than OK. It’s geil!”—a German slang compliment that falls between “cool” and “sick.” 

Reflecting on the audience’s enthusiasm, Zouiten elaborates as he strums and talks, strums and talks.

“I am neither a purist Arab ‘ud player, nor a jazz composer, nor a traditional flamenco artist,” he says, continuing to pad his thoughts with notes that will lead into the next song. “Just the fact that I’m from a country like Morocco, with its Arabic, Amazigh, Islamic, African, Jewish and Andalusian influences, makes the answer more difficult.” 

Like his band, his music and the city he now calls home, Zouiten is surrounded by a comingling of cultures and the resulting exchange of geographic collateral.

“While I was looking for a label for my music, some called my music Oriental Jazz. Others called it Arabic Andalusian fusion,” he says. “I was constantly dissatisfied with all these names, until finally I came to the right term. My music is about a plaisir transculturel, or transcultural enjoyment.” 

Music has never been about just one thing, he says. Throughout the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean, music has always been rich with both tradition and the eclecticism that comes with movements of peoples. In Morocco, for example, where French and Arabic are spoken both independently and fused into a dialect, there’s a complex soldering and even reconciling of identities that often presents in music. Moroccans, like people elsewhere, understand nuanced cultural representations, which in their region light up a spectrum of Arab, Italian, French, Amazigh and Andalusian influences that have all at different times borrowed from and given to other styles. 

Today, through artists like Zouiten, Arab music continues evolving through a nuanced cultural dialogue in one of its newest nerve centers: Berlin. Arab-influenced, Arab-produced, and performed by a mix of Arabs, Germans, and others who have come together in this global fulcrum of connections, people, tones, rhythms, ideas, and instruments from the Arab world are converging with others in Berlin, creating new combinations that not only resonate with the city itself, but radiate outward across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond.

Visiting Every. Church. In. Berlin.

When Berliners Piet and Ulrike Jonas travel abroad, they head into local churches to gawk at stained glass windows, ponder over ornate altar pieces, and discern the meaning of devotional art.

“It is a way for us to get to know the place,” said Piet, “to begin to understand its history and the people who lived there.”

With church visits featuring so prominently in their vacations, Piet and Ulrike wondered if they might start doing the same in their home city.

And so, one-by-one, they began to look in on Berlin’s churches. What started as a hobby quickly turned into a goal-oriented project: to visit every church in Berlin.

Alle Kirchen Berlins was born.

According to their website, their project is simple. “We want to see all the churches in Berlin from the inside,” they wrote. According to their count, that means visiting some 450 locations. As of January 2022, they were at number 381.

The project, however, is not explicitly religious in nature. Nor is it specifically historical, architectural, or social. Instead, Piet and Ulrike said it’s about getting to know Berlin.

Along the way, they are encountering the city’s diversity and development, it’s eclecticism and surprising spiritual effervescence.

“One would not think that Berlin is an especially religious city,” said Ulrike, “and yet we are finding out just how important religion has been and still is.

More than showcasing some of the most remarkable, interesting, or site-seeable places of worship, Alle Kirchen Berlins provides insight into how we understand and negotiate what counts as religion. Moreover, the project highlights how our encounter with religion is part of the way in which contemporary societies — and cities — organize and understand themselves.

Specifically, Piet and Ulrike’s project highlights how city dwellers determine what counts as sacred and secular, how immigration has long been a part of shaping urban religious expressions, and how the notion of religion and the notion of a city are entangled with one another, the one shaping the other and vice versa.

Finding spiritual solace in Berlin, the not-so-secular city

Both before and during the pandemic — and perhaps for years to come — religion remains a potent force in Germany’s not-so-secular city, Berlin.

When Harvard theologian Harvey Cox served as an ecumenical worker in Berlin in the 1960s, he watched the city and its people wrestle with their identity , surmising that they were taking steps toward a more secular future in the aftermath of conflict and chaos. 

It was in Berlin that the seeds of an idea — later called the “secularization thesis” — began to germinate in his mind. In his 1965 book, “The Secular City,” Cox proposed that as societies develop, the need for religion diminishes, and as a result, religion itself declines. 

And yet, as cosmopolitan as ever, Berliners — its people, not its pastries — still turn to a diverse array of religious sources to meet multiple needs: from social contact to providing a semblance of order in a tumultuous world. 

After 1,700 years of complicated history, Germany's Jews look to the future

Just a few steps down from Erfurt’s famous Krämerbrücke and its boutique shops, bespoke ice cream, and local charm, you’ll a mikveh (bath used for ritual purification) that dates back to the 13th-century. It’s a testament to the rich, and long, history of Jews and Jewish life in the central German city.

As I was standing in Erfurt’s mikveh a few weeks ago, I took a silent moment to reflect on the immensity of 900 years of Jewish history in the city.

Staring at the steps, I imagined the women who would descend them to bathe in the Gera river’s waters and wondered what their lives were like, what stories they could tell, what histories were embedded in the dusty sandstone and murky water of the memorial right in the midst of Erfurt’s old town.

I was humbled by the immensity of that history, the honor of standing in such a space and being given the opportunity to share such stories.

Mühlhausen citizens Nancy Krug, Pastor Teja Begrich, and Dr. Antje Schloms, pictured here in the town’s 19th-century synagogue, are part of honoring the history of Jewish life in the city. PHOTO: Ken Chitwood.

Thankfully, there are plenty of opportunities to learn about Jewish history in Germany — from well-known museums and monuments in Frankfurt and Berlin to lesser-known, but equally valuable, synagogues in places like Mühlhausen and Berkach.

But for this piece, I wanted to learn about more than history. And so, I spoke to Jewish leaders, researchers, historians, and other experts to learn what their history can tell us today and what Jewish life looks like in Germany now and in the near future.

The result is my latest piece with Religion News Service: “Germany celebrates a historic milestone of Jewish culture — while looking forward.” 

*Many thanks go to the various people I spoke to for this piece. I am working on a couple of other articles related to this research, but for now I wanted to mention all the people who contributed background, provided coordination, or otherwise assisted with this piece: Kristin Luther with the city of Erfurt; Dr. Maria Stürzebecher, also with the city of Erfurt; Carolina von Stojentin with Thüringer Tourismus; Gundela Bach in the village of Berkach; Nancy Krug of the city of Mühlhausen; Pastor Teja Begrich of Mühlhausen; Dr. Antje Schloms of the Mühlhausen city archives, Prof. Dr. Annegret Schüle of Erinnerungsort Topf & Söhne; Prof. Dr. Carsten Schapkow of the University of Oklahoma; Alan Bern with Yiddish Summer Weimar; Helene Shani Braun in Berlin; Rabbi Alexander Nachama of the  Jüdische Landesgemeinde Thüringen; Manfred Levy, education director at Jüdischen Museum Frankfurt; Alexandra Husemeyer of the Tora ist Leben project; and Martin Kranz of the Achava Festspiele Thüringen.

For the House of One in Berlin, It's Complicated...

It sounds like a riddle: how do you fit the world’s religions into a single building?

For the team behind Berlin’s House of One, it’s not a riddle. It’s real life.

It’s also an immense challenge and a unique opportunity.

Dubbed “the world’s first churmosqagogue” by one Reddit user, the House of One — “the world’s first hybrid church-mosque-synagogue” — will break ground in Berlin on May 27, 2021.

By then, it will have been a project 12 years in the making, at an expected cost of at least 47.2 million euro ($57.2).

Its designers and leaders hope it will be used by Jewish, Christian and Muslim members as a place to pray, worship, gather and, perhaps above all, host a dialogue among their respective religions and with society at large.

Over the last few months, I had the distinct pleasure of getting to know the leaders behind the House of One and some of their partners around the globe.

I also got to speak with some practitioners of interreligious and intercultural dialogue here in Berlin, some of whom are skeptical about the concept and its eventual roll-out.

The result is my latest story with Religion News Service.

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.