Along the quiet, tree-lined streets and avenues of Berlin’s middle-class Steglitz district, police in plain clothes were staking out a church on Monday.
Their target: an Afghan man living in the basement of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church.
The man didn’t know it, though, and “dared to go a few steps outside of the church on the sidewalk,” pastor Gottfried Martens told CT. The man was immediately arrested.
According to Martens, the man is a Christian convert who will face “immediate danger to life and limb” if he is deported back to Afghanistan.
The congregation, which is part of the Selbständige Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche (Independent Evangelical-Lutheran Church), a small denomination connected to Missouri Synod Lutherans in the United States, has welcomed hundreds of Farsi- and Dari-speaking refugees since 2011. According to Martens, many of them have become Christians, and the church is “committed to protecting converted Christians from deportation to their deaths.”
In recent days, that has become a contentious position in Germany.
For more than four decades, churches like Trinity have offered temporary sanctuary and shelter to refugees. Church asylum—Kirchenasyl—has no firm legal basis, but authorities have respected that limit on state power nonetheless. People in Germany commonly see the practice as an expression of long-held Christian and humanitarian values.
But as debates over immigration and asylum roil the country, the practice has become contentious again. Some political leaders are calling for police to go into churches and make arrests.
On July 15, Hamburg’s mayor, Peter Tschentscher, a center-left Social Democrat, joined a chorus of voices calling the practice into question. In a sharply worded letter, originally reported by the Berliner Zeitung, to his Berlin counterpart, Kai Wegner, a center-right Christian Democrat, Tschentscher accused the Berlin city government of “systematic abuse of church asylum.” The mayor of Hamburg demanded four Afghan refugees currently under church asylum in Germany’s capital be arrested and sent to Hamburg and then to Sweden, where they first entered Europe.
After processing in Sweden, the men could be deported to Afghanistan. The man staying at Trinity was one of the four named in the letter.
Tschentscher claims that Hamburg is responsible for the men whose right to remain has already been reviewed and that it is “unacceptable” for churches to get in the way of legitimate government action. Numerous outlets reported the Hamburg Office for Migration had a search warrant in hand and had planned to enter the Berlin church but decided not to.
The number of deportations is on the rise across Germany. And Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s coalition government, which came into office in May, has promised to deport even more people.
Meanwhile, the number of church asylees has increased significantly, especially in 2024. The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) reports 2,386 people sought asylum in churches last year, up from just 335 in 2020. A spokesperson for the German Protestant church said regional churches have reported a fourfold increase in requests. Government records already show 617 new cases in the first quarter of 2025.
Almost all these asylum seekers are “Dublin cases,” which means the migrants entered Germany from other countries and, according to EU law, are required to go through their asylum procedures in those countries.
Across Europe, some people have advocated stricter enforcement of this requirement, pressuring authorities across the continent to extradite people to their points of entry.
At the same time, more leaders have argued for sharp limits on the number of refugees. The head of BAMF, Hans-Eckhard Sommer, even questioned whether asylum should be “an individual fundamental right,” as it is currently described in the German Constitution.
At Trinity in Berlin, Martens said the asylees are not a threat but a blessing.
“We are grateful from the bottom of our hearts for the wonderful people whom Christ himself has led into our church and whom we may serve with our very limited means,” he told CT in 2020. “They will enrich our community and church in the future.”
He has been continually frustrated—and flabbergasted—at how often the government denies asylum to Christians. Authorities frequently conclude that persecution is not a real threat, despite pressure and threats from family, friends, and the state in their countries of origin. Instead, courts often decide that converts are not really converts but are just trying to find an easy way to stay in Germany, despite church leaders’ testimony to the contrary.
Martens has personally attested the veracity of the faith of many asylum seekers, only to see the government disregard what he has to say.
“Politicians repeatedly focus their deportation efforts on converted Christian refugees,” he said.
For now, however, Martens has the support of some important politicians in Berlin. Mayor Kai Wegner rejected the mayor of Hamburg’s demands, taking issue with the tone of his counterpart’s letter and standing up for the sanctity of church sanctuaries.
Trinity has some support from Christian leaders as well. Berlin’s Protestant bishop Christian Stäblein has defended the practice of church asylum in general, calling it “a service to society, which is thereby reminded of its foundation of mercy.”
And Martens’s bishop, Hans-Jörg Voigt, stands firmly behind him.
“The basic question is simple: Can we force baptized people converted to the Christian faith to return to a country ruled by an Islamist?” Voigt said. “Anyone who answers this question with ‘yes’ must of course find a way before his conscience to deal with the fact that these Christians, who have fallen away from Islam in Afghanistan, are expecting death with a probability bordering on certainty.”
Voigt is convinced of the seriousness of the asylees’ conversions. The Berlin church requires a rigorous three-month theology course and an exam before baptism. A third of the asylum seekers who take it do not pass.
For now, Martens is doing everything he can to protect the baptized men living in Trinity’s basement. With police officers stationed around his parish ready to grab them, he said the storm is far from over.
“We are still in the middle of a tornado,” he said.
