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.

Let there be nuclear light?

Christians wrestle with questions about radioactive accidents, technology, and replacing fossil fuels

By the end of 2022, Germany is set to decommission the last of its three nuclear reactors. But for local Christians, debates around nuclear energy will continue to have their own half-life. 

By December, Germany is pulling the plug on its last three nuclear power plants — Isar 2, Emsland, and Neckarwestheim II — as part of the country’s Atomausstieg, or “nuclear power phase out.”

Amidst the shutdown, evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic are wrestling with the potential risks, rewards, and responsibilities of nuclear power. Discerning whether there is a Christian case for nuclear energy is not as simple as turning on the lights. At issue are questions about nuclear power’s potential to destroy life and poison the earth through toxic waste. 

Robert Kaita, 69, who worked for the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory for 40 years, said, “as human beings created in God’s image, we have tremendous power to create and destroy, to give life and to take it. 

“Nuclear energy isn’t inherently evil,” he said, “but we have to go beyond technical problems and consider the moral ramifications of what we are doing.” 

Indeed, as Germany shuts down its nuclear energy program, it is perhaps ironic that nuclear energy was invented in its capital, Berlin. In what is now the Hahn-Meitner building on the campus of Freie Universität Berlin (FU Berlin), chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Straßmann utilized Lise Meitner’s theories to discover nuclear fission on December 17, 1938. The splitting of nuclear atoms (fission) not only came to provide the basis for usable energy, but also the explosive force of the atomic bomb. 

Following World War II and the monumental, if monstrous, demonstration of fission’s power, Germany’s nuclear energy program kicked off in the 1950s. Its first power plants followed in the 1960s. Already, German anti-nuclear movements organized resistance to nuclear power’s proliferation. 

Local accidents and international disasters further propelled the anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s and 80s. Between 1975 and 1987 small scale incidents in Germany led to local contamination, radiation emission, and worrisome fires. Then, the Chernobyl accident occurred in 1986 and fears of nuclear fallout became mainstream.  

Located in what is now Ukraine, Chernobyl lies around 775 miles from Germany’s eastern border. When the reactor was destroyed, radioactive waste spewed across swathes of Europe, including Germany. It not only threatened lives, but water and food supplies. Wild mushroom samples in German forests still show signs of Chernobyl’s radioactive contamination signature to this day. 

For Markus Baum, 59, Chernobyl was a decisive crossroads.