Mission Berlin: The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints And Its Nearly 170 Years In Germany’s Capital City
Elders Wyatt Smith and Joshua Obrist stand in front of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ward in Dahlem, Berlin. Photo by Ken Chitwood
BERLIN — A tireless desire to share their message with the people of Berlin — and Germany as a whole — has helped the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ mission in Berlin persevere over the years, up to the present day.
Despite criticism, shrinking numbers and the challenges of working in a diverse metropolitan area considered the atheist capital of Europe, numerous young church members fulfill their mission in Berlin and believe the city is rich with opportunity.
“Sure, we face difficulties, get tired or get nervous sometimes, but it’s all worth it to be able to represent Jesus Christ,” said Elder Wyatt Smith, 21, a missionary from Utah.
In the U.S., members of the faith have had a long on-again, off-again relationship with popular culture and the country’s religious mainstream. With the recent release of FX’s “Under the Banner of Heaven,” starring Andrew Garfield and based on the eponymous best-selling book by Jon Krakauer, Mormons — a colloquial term based on the church's sacred Book of Mormon — of various kinds have been thrust back into public conversation in a not-so-flattering light.
In Berlin, that relationship has perhaps been even more tenuous and tense. From resistance to their message and rejection by the Kingdom of Prussia in 1853 to their current mission to serve refugees fleeing the conflict in Ukraine, the church there has faced difficulties large and small.
Across the years and various challenges, the church has persisted. Today, there are 39,456 church members across 149 congregations in Germany as a whole.
Young Latter-day Saints in Berlin have shaped their mission to the city, and in turn, the city has shaped the church and its efforts to reach one of the most secular urban communities in contemporary Europe.
Elder Joshua Obrist of Switzerland, 24, partners with Smith in Berlin’s Steglitz district to share the church’s message, “the restored gospel of Jesus Christ,” sometimes on the street to passers-by.
On buses and trains, in front of cafés and kiosks, Obrist and Smith talk to anyone and everyone who has a moment to discuss questions about life, death and the ultimate meaning of the cosmos.
After five hours out on the streets, Obrist and Smith are on a bus headed back to the church’s ward — local congregation — in Berlin’s Dahlem neighborhood. But they are not yet done for the day. Starting around 6:30 a.m., a typical day in the life of church missionaries is relentless.
“We don’t really have time off,” Smith said. “We start early in the morning studying the Scriptures, catch up with contacts on Facebook, rehearse some conversations we might have that day, do our mission work and maybe have some evening meetings, but we aren’t done until around 9:00 p.m.
“And even though we have Mondays off,” he added, “we are still wearing our name tags if we go out.”
Asked if this schedule proved exhausting, Smith replied, “Not really. This is a calling for us, one we only get to know for a small window in our life.”
Cards that Latter-day Saints missionaries hand out in Berlin, with questions and QR codes to learn more. Photo by Ken Chitwood
From banishment to ‘raisin bombers’: a brief history of the church in Berlin
According to historian Kurt Widmer, author of “Unter Zions Panier,” Joseph Smith — founder of the church — already had high hopes by the 1840s for its spread in Europe’s German-speaking states. Therefore, in 1853, Orson Spencer and Jacob Houtz traveled to Prussia, optimistically planning to have an audience with Frederick William IV.
Spencer was the former president of the church’s British Mission from 1847-48 and traveled to Prussia to gain free passage for its expanding European missionary efforts. Although he and Houtz’s arrival in Germany was in some way a return of German sectarian Christianity to its geographical roots, their reception in Berlin was as cool as the city’s wintry weather.
The two were detained upon arrival on Jan. 25 in Berlin and “immediately surrounded with a moveable fence … guarded by soldiers armed with guns and bayonets,” according to Spencer’s diary from the day. Aware of their visit, Berlin newspapers published a critical story about their plans to “grow an anti-Christian, polygamous state” in the U.S., according to Widmer.
The mission to the German states, it seemed, would prove more difficult than those to Britain or Scandinavia before it.
Spencer and Houtz subsequently met with Prussia’s minister of public worship, Karl Otto von Raumer. While the conversation was cordial, it veered away from missionary efforts and toward the church’s doctrine concerning polygamy. As a result, the two men — and the church along with them — were banished from Prussia.
Nonetheless, the church carried on. By 1876, the first missionaries — Theodore Braendli and Rulon S. Wells, arrived in Berlin. They met with initial success, baptizing 18 people in their first year and establishing Berlin’s inaugural ward by the following year. Over subsequent decades, more wards were opened in Berlin neighborhoods like Spandau, Moabit, Charlottenburg and Schöneberg.
The church’s difficulties in the city, however, were not behind them. It faced intermittent resistance by city authorities and ruling governments. Wards were shut down, raided by police, and Mormons were banished from the city from time to time.
Nazi rule proved a dual challenge for the church. Feeling vulnerable as an American-led church under Hitler’s dictatorship, the First Presidency — the Latter-day Saints’ governing body — ordered the evacuation of missionaries from Europe in 1939. However, the local church formalized its support of the government as a means of survival after years of struggle. At times, that support was about more than persistence. According to historian David Conley Nelson in his book “Moroni and the Swastika: Mormons in Nazi Germany,” some church members — like many other Germans — drank deeply from the well of Nazi ideology.
After World War II, the fate of the church and its Berlin membership appears to have improved. Immediately after the cessation of conflict in war-devastated Europe, the church sought to reestablish contact with isolated members in Germany and to offer aid. Mormon servicemen in the military played an outsized role in this regard.
Most well-known among them was Gail Halvorsen, otherwise known as “the Candy Bomber.” During the infamous Berlin Airlift between 1948 and 1949 — in which Allied planes sought to deliver supplies to Berlin’s citizens behind the Soviet blockade — Halvorsen, a lifelong member of the church, gained fame for dropping candy to children below, signaling his arrival by “wiggling” his wings as he approached.
“Uncle Wiggly Wings,” as he became known, had a massive impact on Berliners’ perception of Americans and, in turn, the church. To this day, Halvorsen is remembered fondly, with an elementary school in Frankfurt and a secondary school in Berlin named in his honor.
Nevertheless, during the Cold War, the church found itself divided, with three stakes in West Germany — Berlin, Stuttgart and Hamburg — and one in East Germany. The latter, in an attempt to curry favor from the United States, permitted the construction of the Freiberg Temple in 1985. Although it was the only temple to be constructed in what was a communist bloc country, church membership declined throughout the history of secular, communist East Germany.
Then, when American troops withdrew after German reunification, numerous stakes consolidated. By 2003, the Berlin mission covered not only the country’s capital city but also urban centers like Dresden, Leipzig and Neubrandenburg.
Widmer argued in his book that because the local church was overly reliant on its American ecclesial leadership, it came to be viewed yet again as a foreign religion with which most Germans did not relate. Because of this, he wrote, the church’s effort to establish a foothold in Germany was “less than successful” and never met with the relative success of missions elsewhere in the world.
‘Nothing here is hard and fast’: serving a mission in Berlin
Nonetheless, numerous young church members continue to serve, and love, their mission in Berlin. Despite its reputation as a hub of atheism and apathy toward things religious, elders Smith and Obrist find Berlin to be a spiritually vibrant place that offers them plenty of opportunity to share their faith.
On the day we spent together, they talked at length with a man who immigrated from Ghana, a young woman whom they sat across from on the subway and a middle-aged woman on the bus who “had heard about Mormons before, but never met one in the flesh.”
Outside of a stall selling “currywurst” and “döner” sandwiches, they approached a group of young men with new outreach cards that both elders were excited about using. With questions like “Who is Jesus?” and “How can I know the truth?” printed on them and featuring QR codes to connect with the local church on social media, Smith and Obrist had eagerly rehearsed conversations that might prompt the passing of one of the new cards.
What they had not rehearsed was the young men laughing them off.
“That happens from time-to-time,” said Obrist, “but we don’t see it as persecution or anything.”
Nonetheless, such interactions can compound the difficulties that many missionaries face in the field, in Berlin and beyond. Beyond the awkward encounters and the 24/7 schedule, numerous missionaries past and present have shared online that amid the immense growth and companionship of service can lurk anxiety, strict behavioral expectations, and the pressures of spiritual conformity. Many wrestle with serious emotional and mental health struggles during their 1.5- to 2-year service.
Obrist and Smith said that while the schedule can be challenging and the demands high, they remain enthusiastic about the opportunity to serve, especially in Berlin.
“I still get crazy nerves before talking to someone,” said Smith, “but we’ve found that many people in Berlin are open to having spiritual conversations.
“They may not be religious per se, but they believe in a higher power or are into things like astrology,” he said. “That’s enough to start a conversation.”
Hannah Gruse, a 26-year-old “Urberliner” — original Berliner — also served her mission in the city. Now, she works in the mission office and helps orient new missionaries to the field. She said Berlin can be both overwhelming and welcoming to fresh missionaries coming from all over the world. “It’s an atheist’s city in many ways,” she said, “but it also has a really vibrant religious dimension to it.”
In the end, Gruse said Berlin is an open city where people are willing to talk about anything and everything. “Whoever you are, you can find your people and a place to fit in, in Berlin,” she said.
That’s also true of the missionaries, who not only form a quasi-family with those they serve with but also come to love the city itself. That clicked for Hannah during her own service as she and a group of fellow missionaries were drawing chalk art in Berlin’s infamous Alexanderplatz square.
“We were drawing pictures that invited a conversation — like an image of Darth Vader with a speech bubble that asked, ‘Who’s your father?’” she said, “and people would come talk and talk to us.”
It was in that moment that she came to realize that Mormons had a true home in Berlin. The key, she said, is to be open and honest with yourself and with others.
“That’s what everyone else in Berlin is doing, so Mormons should do it too,” said Gruse.
“Nothing here is hard and fast — everyone here is one thing and something else,” she said. “It’s all an ongoing conversation, and so it’s easy to have a conversation about God in this city, to help people feel a little more peace in the circumstances of the world we are living in right now.”
“I had heard about Mormons before, but never met one in the flesh,” said a woman to Elder Obrist while on a bus in Berlin’s Steglitz district. Photo by Ken Chitwood
A welcoming city?
Since March, many of those conversations have been happening amid the war in Ukraine, whose borders lay just 531 miles by car from Berlin. In part because of that proximity, some 10,000 refugees were arriving at Berlin’s central station every day in late March and early April.
When the first refugees arrived, missionaries in Berlin were assigned to train stations across the city, holding large signs showing what languages they speak, helping orient those arriving on trains from Poland and pointing them in the direction of further transportation or support in the city.
Miro Stanojevic, a 27-year-old social media manager for a Berlin start-up and local ward, said the church mobilized quickly to offer a place to stay, organized groups to gather supplies and provided other assistance to those fleeing war back home.
Among his fellow church members in Berlin, Stanojevic felt a particular affinity for the refugees. Stanojevic’s own family has a Serbian background, and he was baptized in the Orthodox Church when he was 10. According to the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project, Ukraine is 85.8% Christian, and 3 in 4 Ukrainians are Orthodox.
It was when Stanojevic’s family came to Berlin that they first got to know the church. When his father was 18, he met some missionaries in the city, invited them over to talk and later joined the church.
“In our family, it’s pretty common to be Orthodox and not change,” said Stanojevic, “it was a really big step for my dad to change that.”
Stanojevic grew up between the Orthodox Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, attending both services as a child, alternating between weekends with different sides of his family. In part, this dual religious identification embodies the multiplicity and permissibility of the city itself, he said.
“When someone moves to Berlin, they immediately understand how diverse, multicultural and constantly changing each Kiez (neighborhood) is,” said Stanojevic.
That’s because “Berlin welcomes people from all nations and backgrounds really well,” he said, “giving them an opportunity to settle down here.”
But while Berlin’s residents are largely enthusiastic in welcoming Ukrainian refugees, the same cannot be said of popular attitudes toward people who arrive from Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan — who are often viewed as a burden by the general public. Although Berlin might be a better place than most for those fleeing conflict in the Middle East, Stanojevic said it has room to improve.
In 2015, for example, Stanojevic and other church members were working in Berlin’s Neukölln district, where the buildings refugees were housed in were not “super nice,” he said. Local missionaries and church members helped renovate some of the rooms, painting walls and generally sprucing up the new digs.
Knowing what it is to receive a cool welcome in the city, Stanojevic said Mormons in particular try to work with the diversity of peoples and cultures represented in Berlin — whether they be African or American, Ukrainian, Serbian or somewhere in between — and make them feel at home.
Stanojevic said, “With every organization, there is always need for progress, but the church here has the capacity to welcome people who might feel alone or anxious and help them find connection.”
Referencing the work of missionaries like Elders Obrist and Smith — and even those who first came to Berlin in the 19th century — Stanojevic said that part of the church’s resilience and persistence over the years is because its members are always willing to keep talking to others.
“Berlin has a deep history, an interesting spiritual story — and so do Berliners,” he said. “The church invites us all to share our stories, our spiritualities in a positive and welcoming way, to connect with each other.
“In the end, all we want is more peace in our lives,” said Stanojevic, “and that’s our mission as a church, but also as citizens of Berlin.”
Ken Chitwood is a religion nerd, writer and scholar of global Islam and American religion based in Germany. He is currently doing post-doc research at the Free University of Berlin at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies and is a journalist fellow in the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture. Follow Ken on Twitter @kchitwood.