GERMANY: With Mass-goers in sharp decline, missionary zeal is going local, writes Derek Scally in Berlin
Last winter, a friend visiting Berlin had a religious experience near the Brandenburg Gate.
He had spent half an hour waiting for a bus, unaware that the bus drivers were on strike, when it began to rain. As he wondered what to do next, a tiny Smart car pulled up and the driver asked if he wanted a lift. Thinking nothing of it, he got in.
As they pulled into traffic, he began to say where he wanted to go but the driver interrupted him, asking: "Do you believe in Jesus?"
In the few silent, awkward seconds that followed, he noticed the Bible on the dashboard and the sticker on the window reading: "The World's Smallest Chapel." He had blundered into Germany's first mobile missionary campaign when the Lutheran church sent 10 orange Smart cars zipping around the country spreading the good news and winning souls.
There are 26.5 million Catholics and 26.3 million Protestants in Germany today, but Mass attendances are in freefall, with up to 300,000 people leaving the Christian churches each year.
Now church leaders hope to counter that trend by deploying missionaries for the first time on their home turf, in particular to the former East Germany, where some 90 per cent of people are atheist.
That rises to 98 per cent in Marzahn, an East German tower block satellite neighbourhood in eastern Berlin. Rev Hartwig Neigenfind arrived with his wife to set up a mission in a former kindergarten six years ago and he has now built up a small but loyal congregation of a few dozen people.
"My mission is to reach the people who never go into church, who have nothing to do with God. We don't coerce people, just try to show them that we have something we would like to share," says Rev Neigenfind, a baker-turned-minister and father of five children. Approaching people on the street or in their homes tends to elicit flustered and occasionally hostile responses. Like the time he presented his concept for a school religion lesson at a parent-teacher meeting and was booed out by parents who had grown up in a socialist state where religion was not forbidden but by no means encouraged.
The Catholic church in Germany has made domestic missionary work a priority too, though with special training for seminarians rather than special missionary priests.
In the eastern diocese of Erfurt, where just 8 per cent of the population is Catholic, Bishop Joachim Wanke has encouraged his priests to try a new approach of what he calls "humble self-confidence" and an outreach programme to encourage non-believers to come to Christmas Mass and other services.
"People here really only have a rudimentary idea of Christianity," said diocese spokesman Peter Weidemann. "And 40 years of East Germany has made people suspicious of group gatherings where, in the past, Stasi informers might have been listening." Mr Weidemann is hopeful there will be recognition for domestic missionary work from Pope Benedict XVI when he begins his six-day visit to Bavaria today.
According to a poll for Stern magazine, the religious euphoria of last year has dissipated somewhat in Germany. Some 57 per cent of Catholics and non-Catholics said Joseph Ratzinger's election as pope last year and his visit to World Youth Day in Cologne hadn't changed their opinion of the church. But bishops hope the one-in-five who said it had improved their opinion is a sign that their new domestic mission is the right approach.
As Peter Weidemann puts it: "We have to get used to the idea that we are missionary Christians here in Germany now."