Germany
Summary
As Europe’s largest economy and second most populous nation (after Russia), Germany is a key member of the continent’s economic, political, and defense organizations. European power struggles immersed Germany in two devastating world wars in the first half of the 20th century and left the country occupied by the victorious Allied powers of the US, UK, France, and the Soviet Union in 1945. With the advent of the Cold War, two German states were formed in 1949: the western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR). The democratic FRG embedded itself in key western economic and security organizations, the EC (now the EU) and NATO, while the communist GDR was on the front line of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. The decline of the USSR and the end of the Cold War allowed for German reunification in 1990. Since then, Germany has expended considerable funds to bring eastern productivity and wages up to western standards. In January 1999, Germany and 10 other EU countries introduced a common European exchange currency, the euro. [1]
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Statistics
From the The Joshua Project [2]
In the News
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Prayer Guide
The EKD is a federation of 23 Lutheran, Reformed and United Protestant regional/national churches, but it suffers deep divisions on many levels. The more evangelical/conservative groups and congregations are concentrated in Württemberg, Siegerland and south Saxony. Steadily declining attendance – and therefore income – translates into not only low morale for congregations, but also increasingly empty and crumbling physical structures. Many of the Lutheran clergy do not even believe in life after death; it is often difficult for born-again ministers in the EKD to openly minister in their own churches! Since 2001, the need for evangelization is recognized, and new church-development concepts enjoy popularity; without a return to genuine faith in the Bible, however, new concepts and programmes will never replace the need for renewal.