Is a far-right party gaining ground among German evangelicals?

Elections in Germany are typically pretty quiet, according to Assemblies of God pastor Timothy Carentz.

Germans are wary of extremism, concerned about propriety, and committed to a principle of political privacy or “electoral secrecy,” which is enshrined in the German constitution. They don’t often put signs up in their yards or get into heated arguments about candidates at the pub.

But this year, following the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's three-party coalition in November, things have been more heated.

“We’ve noticed people getting more and more vocal,” said Carentz, an American who runs Rhema Café, a coffee shop and ministry center in Kaiserslautern, in southwestern Germany. 

There are debates about the economy, which is floundering, and rise of rightwing nationalists in Germany and around the world. People are arguing about immigration and asylum policies, the war in Ukraine, high energy prices, and which politicians (if any) can be trusted to do something to help.

The conversations seem more divisive than usual.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen Germans so active, engaged and opinionated about it all,” Carentz said. “This year, people are putting up banners outside their apartment windows, leaving stickers around town, wanting to hand out brochures and pamphlets.”

Amidst it all, evangelical leaders told Christianity Today, they are focusing on God’s love for all people and the value of every human life—unborn and migrant, in Ukraine, the Middle East, and at home in Germany. And they are praying for Germany’s democracy.

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.

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.