van Dijk, Gerrit and Kooiman, Christiaan (2025) Being Church in a Post-Atheist Culture: Mission in East Germany. Vista, 47.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
East Germany, once the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation, is now among the most irreligious regions in Europe. Religious institutions are largely absent from daily life and many people grow up without ever encountering the Christian faith. In this context, how can churches be meaningfully present? And what does it mean to speak of mission in a society shaped by religious indifference? The roots of this reality lie in the era of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, 1949–1990), where religion was systematically sidelined through state-sponsored secularism. Religious education was replaced with ideological instruction, and Christian rituals—especially the Protestant confirmation (a rite of passage into church membership around age 14)—were deliberately supplanted by the Jugendweihe, an explicitly atheist coming-of-age ceremony created to draw young people into loyalty to the socialist state. Rather than persecuting faith, the state normalised its absence. As a result, two to three generations grew up religiously unformed.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | religious Indifference, secularisation, post-Christian Europe, incarnation |
| Subjects: | B Mission theology/theory > Contextualization/Inculturation G Christian traditions/Denominations > Evangelical |
| Divisions: | Eastern Germany |
| Depositing User: | Katharina Penner |
| Date Deposited: | 02 Jan 2026 22:05 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Jan 2026 22:05 |
| URI: | https://ceeamsprints.osims.org/id/eprint/3219 |
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