The Atlantic has a profile of Muslim converts in Germany, with special emphasis on the congregations they are attending. The focus is on Trinity Lutheran Church in Berlin, a SELK congregation in fellowship with the LCMS. The pastor, Gottfried Martens, studied at Concordia Theological Seminary in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.
They have around 1,000 baptized members who are ex-Muslims, with 300 on a waiting list, apparently being catechized. (The Atlantic reporter doesn’t quite understand Lutheranism. It’s kind of amusing to see how she describes catechism and her confusion about crossing herself. But kudos to her and also to her publication for significantly ramping up its religion coverage.) The story describes Germans and ex-Muslims (who outnumber the former) having tea after service, their children playing together, all taking part in the normal workings of a congregation.
From Laura Kasinof, The Christian Refugees of Germany – The Atlantic:
When I first met Mattias in July at a refugee shelter just north of Berlin, he went by the name Mohammed. He had arrived in Germany from Iran the previous fall, along with thousands of other asylum-seekers—sometimes up to 10,000 arrived in a single day. After the German government assigned him to this shelter, he converted to Christianity. “I wouldn’t say I was a Muslim” before, he told me. “I didn’t go to a mosque for an entire year. Now I am going to church every week.” He expects it will take about three weeks to get off his church’s waiting list to be baptized. Perhaps once he’s more settled in Germany, he’ll be able to change his name legally to Mattias, his chosen Christian name.
We sat together in a sparse dormitory room at the shelter with three other Iranians who had converted from Islam to Christianity. They attend a Protestant church together, but asked that I not provide the exact location nor give their full names. Two of them said they became Christian while living in Iran. Another, like Mattias, had converted after arriving in Germany as an asylum-seeker.
Throughout Germany, the pews of churches like theirs are filled increasingly by asylum-seekers. Though two umbrella church organizations told me that they couldn’t provide exact statistics or comment on the nationality of the asylum-seekers attending church, Christoph Heil, a spokesman for the Protestant Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia—which includes 1,300 parishes—confirmed the pattern. “Normally we don’t count the number of asylum-seekers who are baptized because we don’t differentiate between who is an asylum-seeker and who isn’t, but [asylum-seekers asking to be baptized] appears to be a new trend,” he said.
[Keep reading. . .]
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