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Getting Ready to Receive? German Churches and the “New Mission” from the South

By Claudia Währisch-Oblau

In 1998, the German region of the United Evangelical Mission (UEM) asked me to start a ministry with migrant Christians. At the time, there were few concrete ideas: it was only clear that Christian migrants might be in need of fellowship and a place to worship. (The aim of the project was not to evangelize—the evangelical churches in Germany see their role toward migrants more in diaconal and advocacy terms. Evangelical Free churches, on the other hand, have long seen Muslim and atheist migrants coming to Germany as an evangelistic opportunity; these Christians hope to convert people who would move back to their home countries as Christian leaders and missionaries.) The plan of UEM was to start one or more international congregations, gathering migrants from different cultural and possibly denominational backgrounds.

 
Instead of coming across individual migrant Christians in need of pastoral care and a Christian community, I was met with organized churches. Within two years, more than six hundred such churches were identified in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia alone. They are Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal. A surprisingly large number of such congregations describe themselves as non-denominational; however, they are clearly charismatic in character.

Orthodox Christians tend to come from Eastern Europe, the Near East, and Ethiopia. Catholics come from all over the world, although Eastern and Southern Europeans dominate those churches. Protestants are usually European or East Asian, while Pentecostals and non-denominational charismatic groups are overwhelmingly African (although there are also sizeable numbers of Asian and Latin American churches). In major cities like Dusseldorf or Cologne, likely as many migrant Christians attend a “migrant church” on any given Sunday as Germans attend a German church.

It soon became clear that a ministry with migrants should not consist of starting new churches; rather, it should concentrate on supporting existing congregations and efforts toward closer cooperation between indigenous and migrant churches.

Reverse Mission Movement
As the years went on, I learned that new Pentecostal and charismatic migrant churches were constantly forming. Some of them split from existing churches, but others were consciously planted as missionary endeavors. Talking to founders and pastors of such churches, I learned that while outwardly they have come to Germany as refugees or economic migrants, they really see themselves as missionaries brought here by the Holy Spirit.

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Claudia Währisch-Oblau is a pastor of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland in Germany. From 1998-2006, she coordinated the “Program for Cooperation between German and Foreign Language Churches” of the United Evangelical Mission (UEM). Since 2007, she has been serving as UEM’s executive secretary for evangelism. She is also a member of the German Lausanne Committee.