That Europe May Know

The goal is audacious. But as far as James Davis, founder of the Global Church Network, is concerned, Christians need deadlines. Otherwise, they will never do what they need to do to fulfill the Great Commission.

His group gathered in Zurich, Switzerland, last September with 400 ministry leaders from across Europe who committed to raising up and equipping more than 100,000 new pastors in the next decade. The network plans to establish 39 hubs in Europe, with a goal of 442 more in the years to come, for training church planters, evangelists, and pastors to proclaim the gospel.

“A vision becomes a goal when it has a deadline,” Davis said at the event.

“So many Christian leaders today doubt their beliefs and believe their doubts. It is time for us to doubt our doubts and believe our beliefs. We will claim, climb, and conquer our Mount Everest, the Great Commission.”

Davis has a number of very motivated partners in this project, including the Assemblies of God, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), and the International Pentecostal Holiness Church. The network also counts The Wesleyan Church, the Church of the Nazarene, the Foursquare Church, the Church of God in Christ, and OMF International (formerly Overseas Missionary Fellowship) as members of a broader coalition working to complete the Great Commission in the near future. If it turns out their European goal is a bit beyond reach, they will still undoubtedly do a lot between now and their deadline.

And the Global Church Network is not alone. In Germany, the Bund Freikirchlicher Pfingstgemeinden (Association of Free Church Pentecostals) has announced plans to plant 500 new churches by 2033. The group, celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2024, told CT it is currently planting new congregations at a rate of about seven per year. Raising up new pastors is key to its growth strategy. 

And the Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden in Deutschland (Association of Free Evangelical Churches in Germany) has planted 200 churches in the past decade. It has grown to about 500 congregations with 42,000 members. The Free Evangelicals also have plans to launch 70 new churches by 2030, at a rate of 15 per year, and then start another 200 by 2040. 

“Goal setting is a bit of a thing in Europe,” said Stefan Paas, the J. H. Bavinck Chair for Missiology and Intercultural Theology at the Free University of Amsterdam and the author of Church Planting in the Secular West.

He’s not convinced it’s a good thing for Christian missions, though. In fact, he doesn’t think ambition, verve, and goal setting actually work.

Paas’s research shows that supply-side approaches—the idea that if you plant it, they will come—seem promising and often demonstrate early success, but the results mostly evaporate. While it is widely believed that planting new churches causes growth, he said, that’s not what the evidence shows.

“Yes, newer churches tend to draw in more people and more converts, but they also lose more,” Paas told CT. “There’s a backdoor dynamic where people come into newer churches but then leave.”

He examined the Free Evangelicals’ membership statistics from 2003 to 2017 and found that church plants often correlated with quick growth but then slow decline. 

“It’s one thing to draw people, and another thing to keep them,” he said. 

A critical look at Luther Country

It’s pretty boujee, but I have two stained glass windows in my office.

I know, I know.

But one of them is pretty much tailor made for a religion nerd like me. It’s a bright and beautiful, stained-glass representation of the Wartburg Castle.

Perched at a height of some 400m above delightful countryside and rich central German forest, south of the city of Eisenach in Thuringia, the Wartburg is “a magnet for memory, tradition, and pilgrimage,” a “monument to the cultural history of Germany, Europe, and beyond.” Christians the world over also know the castle as where Martin Luther made his momentous translation of the Bible over the course of eleven weeks in the winter of 1520-21.

Since moving to Eisenach, I’ve watched out my windows — the non-stained ones — as busloads of tourists from places like South Korea, the U.S., and Brazil arrive on the square outside my apartment, where a prominent statue of Luther awaits them. They are here, in Luther Country, to walk in the Reformer’s footsteps and learn from his life in towns like Wittenberg and locales like the Wartburg.

A lot of these tours lavish praise on Luther, lauding the 16th-century rebel monk and cantankerous theologian for birthing the Reformation, and shaping Germany and the wider world’s theological, linguistic, historical, psychological and political self-image in the process.

And rightly so. Luther’s legacy is long and important to understand. But I can’t help but wonder what these tours would look like if they were a bit more critical of the man and his consequence. What, I often muse, would a more critical Luther tour look like?

Who said anything about an apple tree?

As the annual Reformation Day approaches (October 31) and I get ready to host a group of college students in Eisenach here to learn about Luther and his impact, I’ve been thinking about how our vision of Luther can be skewed by the superficial stereotypes that are typically trotted out for people on the usual tours.

It’s not that I blame the tourists, travelers, and pilgrims themselves. It’s hard to see past the Luther-inspired gin, “Here I Stand” socks, and cute Playmobil toys to disrupt the narrative around the Reformator.

The well-known statue of Martin Luther in Lutherstadt-Wittenberg, in central Germany. Some commentators suggest it shows — with the word “END” written so prominently under the words “Old Testament” — a questionable view of the Bible “in a political and social context in which anti-Jewish views are again on the rise.” (PHOTO: Ken Chitwood)

But the resources are there, if we care to see them, to startle and awaken our appreciation for who Luther was in critical fashion – to move beyond the myths we know we are making to (re)evaluate Luther and the ways in which we’ve made him into a caricature for our own purposes.

We all make claims about ourselves and others, doing so from within practical, historical, and social contexts. Stories around Luther are no different. When we talk about Luther, it is less about the man, his thought, and his supposed authority over theology and history itself. Instead, it is much more about the ongoing process by which we humans ascribe certain things to people like him: certain acts, certain status, certain deference.

Many of the stories and claims about Luther have calcified over time, produced and reproduced in books and movies, within theological writings and on tours in central Germany.

The good news is, they have also been contested, undermined, and — in some instances — replaced.

Some of these have been relatively simple things, like the fact that Luther was no simple monk, but a trained philosopher and theologian. Or, that he never nailed ninety-five theses to a church door in Wittenberg or said, “Here I stand!” or anything about planting an apple tree. These are, as Dutch church historian Herman Selderhuis wrote, fine sentiments and sayings, but just not true or attributable to Luther himself.

Luther: Wart(burg)s and all

There are also darker and more difficult subjects in need of revisiting in our retellings of Luther’s life — issues that bear relevance to contemporary conversations around race and class, diversity and difference.

As PRI reported, appreciating who Luther was also means coming to terms with how he “wrote and preached some vicious things about Jews.” In his infamous 1543 diatribe “Against the Jews and Their Lies," Luther called for the burning of Jewish synagogues, the confiscation of Jewish prayer books and Talmudic writings, and their expulsion from cities. It is possible that these directives were immediately applied, as evidence suggests that Jews were expelled from the town of his birth, Eisleben, after he preached a sermon on the “obdurate Jews” just three days before his death at age 62.

Luther’s death mask in Halle, Germany (PHOTO: Ken Chitwood)

Dr. Christopher Probst, author of Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany, said that while Luther’s “sociopolitical suggestions were largely ignored by political leaders of his day,” during the Third Reich “a large number of Protestant pastors, bishops, and theologians of varying theological persuasions utilized Luther’s writings about Jews and Judaism with great effectiveness to reinforce the antisemitism already present in substantial degrees.”

Probst said that one theologian in particular, Jena theologian Wolf Meyer-Erlach, “explicitly regarded National Socialism as the ‘fulfillment’ of Luther’s designs against Jewry.”

Today, far-right parties continue to use Luther’s image and ascribed sayings to prop up their own political positions.

Beyond his tirades against Jewish people and their sordid use in German history, we might also take a critical look at the class dynamics at work in Luther’s life. Historically, his family were peasant farmers. However, his father Hans met success as a miner, ore smelter and mine owner allowing the Luthers to move to the town of Mansfeld and send Martin to law school before his dramatic turn to the study of theology. How might that have shaped the young Luther and later, his response to the Peasants War in 1524-25? How might it influence our understanding of who he was and what he wrote?

There are also critical gems to be found in his writings on Islam and Muslims, his encounters with Ethiopian clergyman Abba Mika’el or the shifting gender dynamics at work in his relationship with Katharina von Bora, a former nun who married Luther in 1525.

Reimagining Luther Country

Thankfully, I am far from the first person to point these things out. Museum exhibits, books, and documentaries have covered these topics in detail, doing a much more thorough job than I have above.

The problem is that gleanings from these resources can struggle to trickle down to the common tour or typical Luther pilgrimage. Or, they’re ignored in favor of just-so stories.

In Learning from the Germans, Susan Neiman wrote about the power of a country coming to terms with its past. In her exploration of how Germans faced their historical crimes, Neiman urges readers to consider recognizing the darker aspects of historical narratives and personages, so that we can bring those learnings to bear on contemporary cultural and political debates.

We might consider doing the same as we take a tour of Luther Country — whether in person or from afar. By injecting a bit of restlessness into our explorations, stirring constantly to break up the stereotypes, being critical and curious and exploring outside the safe confines of the familiar, we might discover more than we bargained for. But that, I suggest, would be a very good thing.

By telling different stories about Luther — and by demanding that we be told about them — I believe we might better know ourselves. How might we relate to a Luther who is not only the champion of the Reformation, but a disagreeable man made into a hero for political and theological purposes? How might that Luther speak to our times and the matters of faith and politics, society and common life, today?

As we come up on Reformation Day — and I welcome that group of students to my hometown and all its Luther-themed fanfare — I hope we might lean into such conversations and recognize how a critical take on Luther might prove a pressing priority for our time.

Barely Anyone Reads the Bible in Germany. So Why Are Luther Bibles Selling So Well?

From “better an end with horror than a horror without end” to expressions like bloodhound, baptism of fire, and heart’s content, the German language is peppered with idioms from a source that’s more than 500 years old: the Luther Bible.

A translation by the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, the Bible continues to be a touchpoint for German culture, politics, and language. And in 2022 — over 500 years after its initial publication — it was a bestseller yet again.

According to the German Bible Society (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft) in Stuttgart, they circulated 130,000 copies of the Luther Bible in 2022, accounting for almost half of their total distributions that year.

“After five centuries, it remains the most popular Bible translation in Germany,” said the German Bible Society’s General Secretary Christian Roesel (Rösel), “it is and will remain a classic.”

While the Luther Bible may remain a definitive example of German literature and hold a special place in its national psyche, ordinary Germans often know its catch phrases better than its contents. According to a 2017 opinion poll conducted by Insa-Consulare (Erfurt) and the German Christian magazine “Idea,” only four percent of German adults read the Bible every day. 70 percent say they have never read it once.

That begs the question, at a time when Bible sales are generally falling — related to a decline in Christianity’s share of the overall German population — why do so many Germans keep buying it?

Your own personal tour through LutherCountry

In 2018, when I had the opportunity to go on a personal tour through LutherCountry, I decided to travel with my dad. 

That decision was inspired. 

The bratwursts on the market square in Weimar, the early morning mist settling around the base of the Wartburg Castle in Eisenach, the reverberating sound of the church bells from the Castle Church in Lutherstadt-Wittenberg — all of it was richer watching my father enjoy the tastes, sights, and sounds of LutherCountry for the first time. 

At the end our journey, saying our goodbyes at Berlin’s Tegel airport, we tearfully said to one another, “we may never get the chance to do something like this together again.” 

Little did we know that two years later, we would be feeling the weight of those words all the more. Since that trip, we’d been planning for both my parents to come in May 2020. The hotels were booked, the itinerary set, and the flights confirmed. You could almost smell the bratwurst that we were going to be chowing down on together. 

Then, COVID-19 happened. 

Your Personal Tour Through LutherCountry

In lieu of detailed itineraries, the plan for this trip is pretty straightforward:

September 10, 2020

1:00 PM EST // 10:00 AM PST

Register in advance for the meeting HERE. 

The webinar will be held via Zoom. Participants need a working internet connection, the volumed turned on, and a comfortable chair to sit back in and experience LutherCountry virtually.

All-in-all the webinar will last around one hour, depending on the Q&A session.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Having planned for months to welcome my parents to our new home in Germany, we were devastated when we had to cancel everything. And I know, we are far from alone. 

Many of you also canceled, postponed, or gave up on long-hoped-for trips to dream destinations. Many of you told me that you were planning to come to Germany this summer or were hoping to come to the Christmas markets this year. 

COVID-19 upended those plans. 

Feeling our pain, the two German states that make-up “LutherCountry” — Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt — are coming to the rescue and bringing LutherCountry to our homes with, “Your personal tour through LutherCountry” on Thursday, September 10th.

The “Your personal tour through LutherCountry” webinar will be hosted by LutherCountry expert Mike Adams, CEO of TourComm Germany, who will guide participants to stops along the way, including Wittenberg, Eisleben, Erfurt, and the Wartburg. 

Each city played a special role in Martin Luther’s life and the story of the Reformation. 

That story will come alive with the help of tour guides such as Katerina von Bora in Wittenberg, my friend, and Texan-turned-German, Rev. Dr. Robert G. Moore, Rev. Scott Moore at the Augustinian Monastery in Erfurt, and special guests from the Wartburg and Eisleben.

My dad appreciating the historical significance in Martin Luther’s room at the Wartburg, Eisenach. (PHOTO: Ken Chitwood)

For those who have lost loved ones, whose livelihoods have been threatened, or whose lives are at risk on the frontlines, travel can be pretty far down on the priority list in the midst of the pandemic. In the end, traveling is a privilege. 

And yet, people are starting to travel again — camping, taking road trips, or small weekend getaways with loved ones — and planning for dream-trips in the future when restrictions are lifted and life returns to a bit of normalcy. 

“For many of us, travel is a vibrant part of life. It is part of what makes life worth ‘living.’”

As we all slowly come to the realization that the virus will be with us for quite some time and that we will have to adjust our lives accordingly, he role that travel plays in our lives will have to change too. 

Planned trips may be delayed awhile. When we are finally able to travel again, those trips might look very different than before the pandemic. 

With that in mind, LutherCountry is not only going to take you on a “personal tour,” but invite you to share your own questions and concerns. At the end of the webinar, participants will be invited by Mike Adams to ask anything they like about Luther and his homeland and how they might be able to plan their next trip to LutherCountry, whenever that may be. 

The famous Martin Luther statue in Lutherstadt-Wittenberg (PHOTO: Ken Chitwood)

Maybe it will be to see the Oberammergau Passion Play, scheduled for May 2020 only to be postponed until May 2022, the same year as the 500th anniversary of Luther’s translation of the Bible. Or, perhaps it will be to celebrate the 500th wedding anniversary of Katherina von Bora and Martin Luther in Lutherstadt-Wittenberg in 2025. 

Whatever your dreams, the “personal tour through LutherCountry” webinar might be the perfect place to start your planning.