1 - 2000

Mission in Germany

Speaking Clearly About God

How the church plans to attract new members

by Götz Planer-Friedrich

The churches in Germany are currently engaged in intensive discussion about how they can speak to people and win them over to faith in God. Home mission has become a topic for synod and church board meetings. In this issue of Ecumenical Dialogue we will examine this debate. The point of departure for some articles was a Synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany in November 1999 on this theme.

Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder had trouble pronouncing the word "Evangelisation" in his welcoming speech to the Synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) in Leipzig. No wonder - this word, borrowed back from American English, is not always easy even for seasoned Synod members to pronounce in German. This allows for deductions about the subject itself which occupied the EKD Synod at its meeting in November 1999.

The Synod had chosen as its main topic the fundamental concern of the church, that is, to open people up to the Christian faith and win them over to it. Two terms were being used for this: evangelisation and mission. Most people either have no acquaintance with these terms or associate them with historical baggage. Most Synod members seemed aware of this, but they were among themselves and everyone knew what it was they were talking about.

The Synod Presidium had been able to bring in Professor of Theology Eberhard Jüngel from Tübingen as a speaker Ð not a bad choice, but a tough assignment for a university scholar, as he himself acknowledged in his introduction. "Evangelisation and mission", he said, represent a "basic constitutive structure of the Christian church".

But this "simplest of all things" is also "extremely complex". The speaker developed his theory in impressive formulations, for which the Synod rewarded him with sustained applause. JYngel succeeded in creating a good-feeling sense of "we", at an elevated intellectual and linguistic level, among the Synod members. Do we Christians not have a priceless treasure "which shall be to all people", enriching for everyone? But he did not explain why so many people spurn this sort of riches and would rather seek their salvation as consumers. Perhaps it is impossible to explain, for a Christian person who has accepted the Protestant message of justification and internalised it as a maxim for his life.

But if he is really honest with himself, the speaker continued, he has to admit that, in both professional and private life, he succumbs to the achievement-oriented competitive society. In everyday life the Christian's freedom is all too frequently submerged by the real-life compulsions of ruthless competition. And does not even an honest Christian sometimes find him or herself pondering, how do I show that the message of the Gospel is important in my life?

So the way the topic was treated contributed more to the Protestant church's checking up on itself than to looking outwards towards those who are far away from the church. Certainly the first is not without meaning for the second. In a few generations, Christianity in Germany has mutated from a state religion to territorial churches to a private affair altogether.

The change from being church members by custom to having to decide, to having to participate actively in order to have a church, has demanded a change of attitudes from people for which the church never prepared them. "Nothing is more deadly for a great, living truth than getting used to it", Eberhard Jüngel said.

That is probably true. Certainly we are beyond that stage now. It has now become unusual for someone to confess his or her Christian faith in public. Some people still noticed that several members of the government, when taking the oath of office before the Federal Parliament, did not use the religious wording. But we will become accustomed to this too, when there are even fewer Christians in the German population. So the church is concerned to win over new members, or to get them back again.

This was not said in so many words, though there is as little reason to be ashamed of it as of confessing one's personal faith. Still, many registered church members now leave it to the evangelicals to proclaim their faith voluntarily to their secularised neighbours. Thus Bishop Axel Noack of the regional church of Saxony said it was "not a good division of labour when church professionals are ashamed to speak out clearly as witnesses to the Gospel, and on the other hand those committed to mission are ashamed to invite people to such a church."

The Synod not only regretted this division of labour, it also dealt with it. Representatives of both the liberal and evangelical groups in the Synod admitted that there had been reciprocal wounding in the past. While the majority churches had to admit that their missionary impulses had been rather weak, they also had to acknowledge with gratitude the way in which the small mission-oriented groups had filled the gap. The latter thus felt that their concerns were being understood by the Synod as never before.

Many Protestants agree on what needs to be done, their thoughts about methods looked pretty inept. Jüngel urged them to have the "courage to experiment" and sensitivity in using language. But in the latter area, Jüngel believed that those who now felt encouraged to missionary activity should not take him as their example. In speaking to the Synod, of course, he could count on its members to understand church language.

But since Synod meetings are open to the public, they were not really just among themselves. In particular there was a fair amount of interest from the media. After Jüngel's lecture, however, one radio producer decided to cancel the broadcast time her radio station had reserved for reporting on it. She found herself unable to translate the sagacious sentences of the lecture into a language that the general public could understand.

Those who want to tell the world about God must use a language which everyone can understand. But it is only on trying it that one discovers how full of tongue-twisters and insider-talk the language of the church is.

This article was published in the monthly magazine Evangelische Kommentare (12/99), of which the author is editor-in-chief. Translated for publication in Ecumenical Dialogue 1/2000.