How war and displacement transformed this Polish church

The city of Opole is 275 miles from Poland’s eastern border. But Ukraine never feels that far away.

And at Ostoja Church, a Pentecostal congregation that has served the city of 130,000 since 1952, that presence is palpable, particularly during Sunday-morning prayers.

The church’s pastor, Mariusz Muszczyński, said that every Sunday since the beginning of the war, the church has prayed for peace in Ukraine—in Ukrainian and Polish.

“We never skip it,” he said, “it’s become part of who we are.”

It’s not only the church’s prayers that have changed since the war began. The people have as well.

“From one day to the next, our church transformed from a middle-class Polish-descent church into a messy, missional, giving, caring, international community,” Muszczyński told CT. “It revolutionized our church overnight. Three years down the road, we are in a totally different place than we used to be.”

Even before 2022, there were more 8,000 economic migrants from Ukraine living in Opole, the capital of Upper Silesia in Poland’s southwest. But in February of that year, when Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine, hundreds—and later thousands—arrived seeking shelter and safety. In the first 18 months after the invasion, the Polish government granted temporary protected status to 22,000 people in Opole.

Muszczyński’s church was on the frontlines of dramatic change.

Despite criticism, Sweden church continues to advocate evangelism of Muslims

Joakim Lundqvist never thought he would be pastor to hundreds of people named Muhammad. 

And yet, in the wake of Europe’s influx of asylum seekers from conflict zones in Muslim-majority countries including Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, he and his church, Livets Ord (Word of Life) in Uppsala, Sweden, saw their own dramatic increase in newcomers—many of them Muslim.

In the last ten years, Lundqvist said Word of Life has seen more than 900 Muslims convert to Christianity and 450 graduate from the charismatic megachurch’s Bible school.

Founded in 1983 by Ulf Ekman, the church has grown into a significant force within the charismatic movement, with thousands of members in Uppsala and international centers around Europe and in Russia, the Middle East, and Asia. 

As debates around immigration in Europe have resurged in recent days, rhetoric remains emotionally charged across the continent. Populist voices continue to frame migrants—particularly Muslims—as a threat to European identity. Mainstream political leaders urge more nuanced dialogue with an appreciation for multiculturalism and respect for the tradition of human rights.

Afghan Christian Arrested in Berlin Amidst Church Asylum Furor

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.

Christians in Europe Building their War Chests

The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) is calling it the “war chest.”

The evangelistic association headed by Franklin Graham started a legal fund with the damages it won in lawsuits against seven venues in the United Kingdom that cancelled BGEA events in 2020. That fund has now grown to $1.25 million, partly due to an influx of cash from Samaritan’s Purse, the humanitarian organization also run by Franklin Graham. The money will go to help conservative Christians in Europe going to court in freedom of speech and freedom of religion cases.

“Considering what is happening in wider Europe,” BGEA general counsel Jonathan Arnot told Christianity Today, “it seemed appropriate to make this assistance available to Christians across the continent.”

Without a war chest and a smart legal strategy, Arnot said Christians are in danger of losing the right to share the gospel in Europe. The BGEA and other conservative groups are afraid that widespread cultural opposition, especially on issues of sexuality and ethics, and new regulation on speech deemed hateful, harmful, or misleading, will erode people’s ability to condemn sin and preach Scripture.

To date, Christians have won a remarkable series of legal victories in Europe.

Young Evangelicals Are on "Fire" for Europe

Doing her best Billy Graham impersonation—hand raised, mouth open as if in mid-proclamation of the gospel—a 20-something woman posed at an Instagram-ready podium tucked away in a side vestibule at the European Congress on Evangelism. Her friend snapped photos that made it look as if she were addressing the massive crowd at one of Graham’s historic meetings.

But Ophélie Prisca-Diane, who is currently serving with Youth With A Mission in Paris, told Christianity Today she doesn’t think evangelism is just a thing of the past. In fact, she sees it as a thing of the future. She expects Christians her age to do big, big things.

“There is a fire among us,” Prisca-Diane said. “Our generation is very open to the gospel, more than generations before.”

She wasn’t the only one at the gathering of evangelical leaders with great expectations for Gen Z, the group of people currently between the ages of 13 and 28. Amid talk of secularization and potential persecution, Christian leaders repeatedly expressed confidence that young people would usher in the re-Christianization of the continent.

There is some data that suggests a generational renewal of Christian faith has already begun.  A recent report from the Bible Society indicates that young people, particularly men, are attending church in increasing numbers in England and Wales. And a 2023 survey from Ipsos showed growing interest in prayer and church attendance among people born after 1997 in Great Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Hungary.

But while there may be a relative uptick of religious interest, that doesn’t really change the overall picture of demographic decline. About one in ten young people in Europe attend church on a weekly basis—a stark contrast to older generations. There has been asteady, if not strictly linear, decline in religious practice for decades.

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.”

World Evangelical Alliance Seeks New Leader Who Can Bring Unity

Peirong Lin, a deputy secretary at the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), likes to joke that evangelical is the most polarizing word in the world. 

“Yet that is exactly what we are trying to unite around,” she told Christianity Today, “the euangelion, the Good News, the gospel, and what it looks like in different countries and contexts.” 

Now the global organization of national and regional alliances representing 600 million evangelicals is looking for one person to help bring everybody together. The international council that oversees the WEA is stressing the need for unity as the search for a new secretary general gets underway. 

“The Good News expresses itself in different ways around the world … and our responsibility as the WEA is to take a ‘world’ understanding to the gospel, not just a particular context,” Lin said. “The question for us going forward is how we can best represent everyone and work together.”

The search began 11 months after the resignation of secretary general Thomas Schirrmacher, who stepped down for health reasons amid ongoing controversies about the WEA’s participation in interfaith dialogue with Catholics. A plan for a quick search for a new replacement—one press release promised new leadership in six months—was scuttled. WEA leadership said it needed more time to review its organizational structure and consult more evangelical leaders about the strengths, weaknesses, and long-term direction of the alliance.

Goodwill Shana, the interim head of the WEA, said in an email that the appointment of a new leader will be a “very significant step for the WEA” and everyone wants to find “the person of God’s choice to lead us into the future.”

The WEA hopes to announce the name of the new secretary general at the upcoming General Assembly in October.

Immigrant churches standing in sacred resistance against Trump’s “shock and awe” immigration policies

“WE ARE FULL of fear, but we are not helpless,” said Giselle, a 40-year-old living in a mixed-status immigrant family in Chicago. “We have the power of God, the power of the church, and the power of the Holy Spirit on our side,” she said.

Giselle is the mother of two children who are U.S. citizens. She is long settled in Chicago, having arrived two decades ago from Michoacán, Mexico. She lives in a three-bedroom apartment in Chicago’s Little Village — known as the “Mexico of the Midwest” or “La Villita” by locals — and works as a bookkeeper and worships at a local Pentecostal church where, she told Sojourners, there are other immigrants without permanent legal status singing next to her on Sundays. She volunteers and donates to local charities and generally tries to be a good neighbor — offering her time, talent, and treasure to others in her little corner of Chicago. Giselle said she has built her life in the U.S. and that her adolescent children know nothing else. “We are proud to be Mexican American, to live life here and be part of this community,” she said.

Like thousands of others across the U.S., Giselle and her family do not know how the Trump administration’s stated mass deportation policies will play out. But as policies are put in place and enforcement efforts ramp up, questions keep running through Giselle’s mind: How will I protect my family? What will happen to my immigration status? How will I be able to seek safety in the U.S.? “These are just some of the questions that handicap my ability to live,” she said.

As the Trump administration continues to implement its mass deportation plans, a swirling vortex of pain, fear, and uncertainty dominates the conversation among immigrants and faith communities across the nation. People of faith are responding with hope, resilience, and a steady resolve to be the best neighbors they can be to immigrants in need.

Outlook Apocalyptic for UK Theology Schools

When the Association of Bible College Principals in the United Kingdom (UK) convened in the summer of 2024, administrators came away with some pretty dire predictions.

Anthony Royle, head of the Kings Evangelical Divinity School in southeast England, told his colleagues that “it seems like 50 per cent of Christian Bible Colleges in the UK will close in the next year or two.”

There are only 30 Bible colleges across the UK, alongside the Church of England’s 23 theological educational institutions. But these are the schools that train ministers for the 16,000 Anglican congregations in England and the dozens of free church denominations. The apocalyptic outlook about the future of British theological education has some worried.

“I don’t know a theological college that does not have financial problems, enrollment issues, or some kind of existential challenge right now,” cultural commentator Krish Kandiah told Christianity Today. “It’s as bad as people are saying.”

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.

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. 

"Christ crucified on the streets of Los Angeles"

It’s an overcast Saturday morning on Gladys Avenue in Skid Row — a 54-block area in downtown Los Angeles, home to one of the country’s most stable populations of people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity. 

Andrew Jiang, of Alhambra, a city in western Los Angeles county, is there with a group of around 15 other volunteers with the Friars and Sisters Poor of Jesus Christ to serve chicken, rice, and vegetables to some 150 people living on Skid Row. On other days, a team of friars, nuns, and volunteers will walk block to block, distributing up to 400 sandwiches to more than 200 people. 

Jiang, who has volunteered on Skid Row since 2018, said, “You get to know some of the people, develop a relationship. We try to do more than just hand out food, but talk and get to know their stories.” 

Sister Goretti and others serve migrant families on Skid Row (PHOTO: Courtesy Sisters Poor of Jesus Christ Los Angeles)

In recent months, Jiang said he has noticed, among the usual crowd queuing in line, an upswing in the number of new faces, many of them from Central and South America. “Immigrants,” Jiang said. “In the last five years, I hadn’t met a single one down here, but now we meet at least a few every week.” 

Skid Row is seen by many as the epicenter of the U.S.’s unhoused epidemic; it’s now home to an increasing number of migrant families from Colombia and Venezuela, being bused in by Republican governors in border states like Texas or making their way here to seek asylum. 

According to The Los Angeles Times, “there are more than 100 families living there now, with more than 200 children,” many of whom are recent migrants. While the majority stay at privately funded mission shelters that accept families, a smaller number of these families now reside “in an array of large tents, pup tents and tarp shelters” along Towne Avenue, near Fourth Street, in what the Times called a “last resort for families that have run out of options.” 

But Giovanni, a Skid Row resident originally from Mexico, said more families are running out of options. “Whole families from South America are coming here, with their kids and everything,” he said. “They say the numbers are low, but I’ve seen them increasing.”

And as more migrants end up on Skid Row, a Catholic order is stepping in to meet their needs.

This is their story.

Their church basement used to host quinceañeras. Now it houses Mauritanian Muslims

“They call me Mom,” said Maria Elena Montalvo, pastor of Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bell, Calif., as she worked with Dioulde and Jallo, two asylum seekers from Mauritania, to mop the floors of the church basement where they have been staying since September 2023.

Dioulde and Jallo are two of 20 Mauritanians living in a space that used to be rented out for quinceañeras in the largely working-class area of southeast Los Angeles, where the population is 89.1 percent Latino. Now, in a space that families used to celebrate their daughters’ 15th birthdays under the sprinkling lights of a chandelier, there are rows of futon-style beds lined up against the walls, with folded Muslim prayer rugs, gallon-sized water bottles, and plastic sandals neatly stacked alongside. (Sojourners is withholding the full names of migrants in this story, at their request, due to the sensitivities of immigration status.)

Showing Dioulde how to work the mop bucket and telling Jallo to get the chicken out of the freezer so it can thaw for dinner that night, Montalvo cuts the figure of a mom giving her kids directions on their chores.

But her daughter, Jennifer Coria, 24, who works at the church, said with a wry smile, “She’s nicer to them than she is to us at home.”

For more than six years, Montalvo’s church has made space available to migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers arriving in Bell from countries in Central and South America and Mexico. But over the last nine months, Mauritanians like Dioulde and Jallo have come to call the 100-year-old church their home as well.

They arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border last summer…

Piano, piano: In Europe, evangelicals are divided over the right relationship with Rome.

Leonardo De Chirico is in an ongoing argument with the Italian government about the “intrinsic characteristics” of religious buildings.

The evangelical pastor insists that Breccia di Roma (Breach of Rome), which is located in a simple storefront about a kilometer from the Colosseum, is a church. Christians meet there regularly to pray, praise God, and listen to the preaching of the Word. The national tax authority has noted, though, that the multifunctional space, which also houses a theological library and a missions training center, does not have the vaulted ceilings, stained glass, raised altar, candles, or saint statues commonly associated with churches in the majority-Catholic country and therefore doesn’t qualify for religious tax exemptions.

“The arguments are silly and poor,” De Chirico told CT. “The pictures they showed were of impressive buildings, but we showed that Muslim prayer rooms are simple and some Catholic churches meet in shops. Synagogues look like our space. They are all tax-exempt. We are not asking for privilege. We are not asking for something that others don’t have.”

This conflict has been going on since 2016. A lower court sided with the Reformed Baptist church, but the tax authority filed an appeal. The case is now going to Italy’s Supreme Court.

But tax-exempt status is not the most serious disagreement De Chirico has with Italians about what a church is. In 2014, he wrote a pamphlet critiquing the papacy. In 2021, the Reformed pastor and theology chair of the Italian Evangelical Alliance wrote a book arguing that the “theological framework of Roman Catholicism is not faithful to the biblical gospel.”

So it frustrated him, to say the least, when Thomas Schirrmacher, the head of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), joined an ecumenical prayer vigil in St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City, in September. It seemed to him that the secretary general of the global evangelical association was embracing the spiritual leadership of Pope Francis and endorsing a vision of unity not grounded in the gospel.

“When you pray with someone in public, you are saying that the differences between our theologies are mere footnotes,” De Chirico said. “Dialogue is welcome, but there are core differences we cannot forget or ignore.”

In my latest for Christianity Today, I take a look at how European evangelicals approach church planting, ecumenical dialogue and other issues in contexts where Catholicism remains predominant.

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.

Christian Politician Awaits Finnish Court’s Verdict on Hate Speech Charges—Again

The facts are the same. The arguments, the same. But for two days in an appeals court in Helsinki, prosecution and defense rehashed the arguments that previously cleared Finnish politician Päivi Räsänen and Evangelical Lutheran Mission bishop Juhana Pohjola of charges of criminal incitement against a minority group.

State prosecutors argued there was a mistake last March. They say the district court weighed the evidence incorrectly, setting the threshold for “incitement” too high. According to them, a pamphlet the former minister of the interior published with a conservative Lutheran press in 2004, and comments she made about homosexuality on Twitter and on a national radio show in 2019, should be judged as hate speech.

State prosecutor Anu Mantila says Räsänen’s comments are not only disagreeable and offensive, but harmful.

“Offensive speech has a damaging effect on people,” she said.

Holy divestments: Evangelicals rejoice at Church of England’s fossil fuel divestment

Sometimes, late at night, when her two boys have gone to bed and Eleanor Getson is doing the dishes at the end of the day, she is hit with an almost crippling fear.

“During the day, I can’t stop scrolling through stories about climate change,” said Getson, a 40-year-old evangelical living in Bradford with her husband and two kids, “glaciers melting, islands of plastic in the Pacific ocean, forest fires wiping out millennia of history.”

Sometimes, Getson says, the concern consumes her, “it’s too much to think about and I get this anxiety about what my children will suffer because of us.”

That’s why Getson was delighted to hear the news that the Anglican church she grew up in made the momentous decision to divest from fossil fuels last month. On June 22, the Church of England’s Church Commissioners and Pensions Board announced their divestments from all oil and gas companies.

Pressure on the Church of England to divest from fossil fuel companies has been building for several years as an increasing number of clergy, bishops, and dioceses have made divestment commitments and called for fossil-free pension schemes.

Among them have been evangelicals bringing their own distinctive arguments and motivations to the campaign.

Belarusian Evangelicals Fear Growing Isolation

Pastor Vitaly Chichmarev doesn’t hesitate to use the word persecution.

“Yes,” he told CT, “the Belarusian church is persecuted.”

Chichmarev, who leads Light of Hope, a Baptist congregation in Minsk, recently spent seven months in prison. He was arrested in front of his teenage daughter in early 2022 for his participation in the massive 2020 protests against the controversial reelection of Belarus’s authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko.

He is back serving his congregation in the nation’s capital now. He’s happy to return to church work, be at home with his family, and release an EP of some new music with his rock band AntiVirus. But he hasn’t forgotten the big picture in his country, Belarus. He believes the situation for Christians there is dire.

“We are not able to rent rooms for meetings,” he said. “New churches are not allowed to register. Catholics have had buildings taken away from them. Among the Protestant pastors, some, like me, have been in jail.”

The Norway-based human rights organization Forum 18 agrees. The group has documented a tightening web of restrictions on the free exercise of religion in Belarus. Secret police surveil evangelicals and other religious groups, raid their churches, contrive evictions, and detain religious leaders. Authorities require extensive bureaucratic paperwork to approve church buildings, to allow any meetings outside of church buildings, or to permit foreign visitors, who are frequently denied entry into the country.

These restrictions have grown more serious as Lukashenko has cracked down on every part of civil society that might challenge his control. He has been in power since 1994 and is frequently called a dictator by international observers.

The US government is also “concerned about the constraints on religious freedom in Belarus, as part of the whole-of-society human rights repressions committed by the Lukashenko regime,” according to a spokesperson at the Department of State. US officials, including embassy representative Ruben Harutunian, have met with Belarusian authorities to advocate for more freedom. In particular, the US urged the regime to ease state pressure on clergy for participating in political life in Belarus.

The challenges have deepened because of the international situation. Belarus is sandwiched between Russia, Ukraine, and European Union member states Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. It has become a close ally of Russia and supports its eastern neighbor in the war with Ukraine. Because of the conflict, Belarusian churches have found themselves cut off from global partners.

This has taken a toll on churches like Chichmarev’s. Light of Hope had around 100 members in 2020. About 45 remain, with more than half of the congregation fleeing to Poland, Georgia, and other countries to avoid military mobilization and escape the ongoing repression.

Article 31 of the Belarusian constitution provides accommodations for church gatherings and the public profession of faith. According to the government, there are 3,563 registered religious institutions in Belarus, representing 174 religious organizations.

Evangelicals, however, account for less than 2 percent of the population. And they are treated as second-class citizens under the law, according to Leonid Mikhovich, president of the Baptist Union in Belarus and rector at Minsk Theological Seminary. Even so, Mikhovich is ambivalent about using the word persecution.

Protect and Accompany: European Evangelicals Organize Against Abuse

When Fabian Beck volunteered to help with the children’s ministry at his small, evangelical church on the outskirts of Hanover, the largest city in the German state of Lower Saxony, he imagined he’d be singing songs, telling Bible stories or doing puppet shows.

He did not expect to be talking about sex.

But, as he prepared to join the team, he came across resources provided by the Federation of Free Evangelical Churches (BFeG) on the subject of violence against children and adolescents in the context of Christian communities like his own.

“Believers have to face the fact that our congregations are not safe just because they are full of Christians,” Beck said, “safe places for kids don’t come naturally and too often, we don’t know what we don’t know.”

Andreas Schlueter, the BFeG’s Federal Secretary for the Young Generation, said the program Beck discovered — known as “Protect and Accompany” — is part a much larger trend among free evangelical churches organizing against abuse, developing programs to face the reality of violence against children and adolescents, and seeking to prevent it from happening in the future.

“On the one hand, free evangelical congregations should be, or become, safe places for children and young people,” he said, but on the other hand, churches have to make intentional choices to make them safe.

In recent years, child sex abuse cases have been extensively reported across multiple Roman Catholic dioceses in Europe. Spurred by these revelations, Catholic initiatives in France and Portugal, Germany and Italy, have aimed at preventing and addressing abuse, with Pope Francis removing the applicability of pontifical secrecy in cases involving the mistreatment of minors or other vulnerable persons in December 2019.

Myriam Letzel, coordinator for the French organization Stop Abus, said that the Catholic Church in France’s groundbreaking investigations (the so-called “Sauvé report”) into clerical abuse not only highlighted the systemic nature of sexual violence, but put evangelicals on notice about dynamics in their churches that might also lead to inappropriate and illegal behavior. Not only that, but broader cultural conversations around #ChurchToo and revelations of widespread abuse among Southern Baptists in the U.S. have led European evangelicals to reckon with the fact their churches are not immune.

“We have to question ourselves on the theological bases which have, in the past, favored inappropriate sexual behavior: A misunderstanding of the relationship between men and women and a distorted relationship to sexuality.”

That is why, in September 2022, the National Council of Evangelicals of France (CNEF) started a listening service called Stop Abus to help its members remain vigilant in the fight against sexual violence. The service includes a commission of ten experts in the fields of social work, psychology, medicine, law, and pastoral care. There is also a team of 35 “listeners,” Letzel said, spread across France who connect with people who call their service. In its first six months, Stop Abus received 15 disclosures that are now being processed.

Letzel said this is just the first step. “What was happening elsewhere served as a warning: We could not pretend that such things did not exist in evangelical protestant churches, and above all we did not want to pretend that they did not exist,” she said, “on the contrary, the mission entrusted to us by Christ obliges us: as Christians we have a duty to be exemplary in our conduct and in our way of caring for the most vulnerable.”

Other evangelical groups in Europe have launched their own efforts too.

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.