Has the Evangelical Church finally strayed too far from the fundamentals of the Gospel?

The Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) lost 745,000 members in 2022, a record loss. In the same year the church only gained 170,000 new members, making a net loss of 575,000. The loss was up 36% from the previous year. 

The reasons for such accurate numbers are due to Germany’s system, which awards state payouts to churches based on the number of faithful. Thus, all German Christians are by default members of one church or another, and dropping, or changing membership requires the effort of a bureaucratic process. Thus, not only does loss of members cause an economic problem for the church, the fact that a person would go to such lengths to remove themselves from membership can illustrate how annoyed and frustrated ex-members are.

The main reasons for quitting centered around woke issues the church is involved in. It is known that some more conservative members have been put off by the denomination routinely blessing ships that facilitate illegal immigration in the Mediterranean, to the point that it even financed the purchase of the Sea Watch 4, a ship that is tasked by its owners with facilitating immigration off the Italian coast.

It can be guessed that immigration issues are not the only thing turning off conservative members. The flagrant support of LGBT, gay clergy and marriages, gender issues, and an overall leftist, anti-traditional stance in the Culture Wars have surely further alienated those who until now had considered themselves staunch Christians belonging to a normal church. As churches, especially Protestant ones, in the West continue to drift from the truths of scripture and traditional Christian practice, traditional and conservative believers will only continue to feel alienated and will eventually determine to leave, either to another church, or to no church at all. 

Roman Catholicism has also suffered in Germany in recent years, with a sharp rise in the secular population. Christians of any denomination are now a minority, with the EKD itself representing only 22.7% or 19.1 million of the German population.

While Annette Kurschus, chair of the EKD Council, called the record loss in membership “depressing,” she stated that, “constant change is a characteristic of the evangelical church,” and that “particularly far-reaching changes need to be made at the moment.” Afterwards she announced a baptism drive to attract the youth. 

Changes are needed indeed, but of what nature? It is clear, at least for the EKD, that if it continues to pursue the woke path, trying desperately to be the nerd that hangs out with the cool kids and pathetically apes them in order to be accepted, they will end up isolated, irrelevant, and eventually lose their reason for existence. 

The things and people ultimately driving woke culture will never ally themselves with Christ or anything that even remotely bears resemblance to Him, although they are happy to use organizations as useful idiots that, having abandoned their proper reason for existence, will work hard to make themselves vilified and irrelevant, before the woke culture deems them unnecessary and destroys them completely. 

They would do better to return to the fundamentals of the Gospel and preaching of Christ, lest like the salt that loses its flavor, they find themselves left with no flock at all. 

You can read more about this story here. (In English)