Germany and Austria
(and parts of Switzerland)
Map of the German-speaking countries showing lampstands | © Amana Trust
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Germany
October 2017 is the five-hundredth year anniversary of Martin Luther’s publication of his 95 Theses and the beginning of the Reformation.
Martin Luther’s 95 Theses | Source
Martin Luther was born in 1483 in Eisleben, Germany. Originally planning to study law, Luther later decided to dedicate his life to God and become a monk, after he was almost struck by lightning. While at the St. Augustine monastery in Erfurt from 1505 to 1511, Luther lived a very strict life and was tormented by his sense of guilt, confessing excessively and believing that only physical suffering could bring him closer to God. However, he could not find peace. During this time of struggling, Luther began reading the Bible. One day, while in Psalm 22, he read the first verse: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” Luther realized that this must have referred to Christ and that God forsook His Son because He bore all of our sins. Gradually, Luther realized that one’s sins were not forgiven by outward ritual or behavioral changes; forgiveness was through faith in what God accomplished in Christ.
Portrait of Martin Luther | Source
On a visit to Rome, Luther saw the wealth and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church and became disillusioned. Luther testified of his regeneration as being at the time that he read Romans 1:17: “The righteous shall have life and live by faith.” Receiving this revelation and being influenced by the legacies of Huss, Wycliffe, and other reformers, Luther began to develop the main ideas of the Reformation—the centrality of the Bible and justification by faith. On October 31, 1517, Luther published his 95 Theses in Wittenberg on the corrupt practice of selling indulgences. In 1520 and again in 1521 at the Diet of Worms, he refused to recant. His famous response in 1521 was, “Here I stand; I can do none other so help me God.” The next day he said,
Unless I am convicted by the testimony of the Scriptures and clear reason—I do not trust the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen. (Quoted from Roland Bainton, Here I Stand, Lion Publishing, 1953, p. 185)
After this trial Luther was kidnapped by his friends and brought to Wartburg Castle, where he translated the New Testament into German. Luther’s translation and his stand for the truth revolutionized Germany and Europe. His close relationship with the German princes who protected him, however, linked Lutheranism with the German state church, and this practice spread throughout northern Europe.
Regarding Luther’s legacy, Brother Lee says, “Eventually, the Lord used Martin Luther in the sixteenth century to unlock the Bible, to release the Bible from ‘prison.’ The interpretation of the Bible advanced during this time of the Reformation with the recovery of the truth concerning justification by faith” (The World Situation and the Direction of the Lord’s Move, p. 29).
The Reformation began around 1517. Martin Luther had no intention to rebel against the Catholic Church. His writings show that his intention was only that the doctrine of justification by faith would be made clear to the people. However, after Luther many reformers began to leave the Catholic Church. Luther made a mistake when he supported the establishment of state churches in Germany. This mistake resulted in the formation of many state churches in Germany and abroad. The state churches separated from the Catholic Church, yet they kept many organizational aspects of the apostate church, especially the hierarchy of the clergy. This organization kills the function of the members. Today in the Catholic Church and in the state churches, the members do not all function. Hired clergy carry out spiritual functions for the lay people. (The Recovery of Christ in the Present Evil Age, p. 35)
One of Luther’s contemporaries in Germany also recovered important truths. Caspar Schwenckfeld, originally from Silesia (a region that covered Poland and small parts of Germany and the Czech Republic), emphasized the need of the subjective experience of the truths. He saw that justification should not be just a doctrine but should result in life. He even used the term the life-giving Spirit and saw the truth of transformation by God’s life.
Portrait of Caspar Schwenckfeld | Source
Regarding Schwenckfeld, Brother Lee says, “Although Schwenkfeld was not as famous as Luther, he did see something along the line of the Spirit and life” (Perfecting Training, pp. 35-36).
Caspar Schwenckfeld saw that justification must result in life. He may be regarded as one who touched not only the “skin” of the revelation in the Bible, but also began to see the “meat” under the skin. One day I was very surprised to learn that Schwenckfeld used some of the expressions we use today to speak of life. He even spoke of the life-giving Spirit. My point in referring to Luther and Schwenckfeld is to say that the Lord wants to recover not only the skin, that is, certain fundamental doctrines; He also wants to recover the meat under the skin of the Word. (Life-study of 2 Corinthians, p. 166)
Philipp Jakob Spener and the Pietists continued the recovery of the experience of Christ as life in the late seventeenth century. Reacting against the deadness of Lutheranism, the Pietists emphasized the experience of the Holy Spirit, the functioning of the believers, and the gathering in homes.
Portrait of Philipp Jakob Spener | Source
Brother Nee says of Spener,
At this time in Germany, God raised up Philipp Jakob Spener. He became a pastor in a Lutheran Church in Frankfurt in 1670. By that time the Lutheran denomination had fallen into a kind of formal religion. By reading his Bible, Spener found out that the church at his time was full of human opinions, something forbidden by God. He saw that the believers should return to the teaching of the New Testament. For this reason he began to lead others into the practice of 1 Corinthians 14. In his meetings he began to teach others to reject the traditional formalities and to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit. Unfortunately, his practice did not last long. (Collected Works of Watchman Nee, vol. 11, “The Present Testimony (4),” pp. 846-847)
Spener was a godfather of Count von Zinzendorf, the leader of the Moravian Brethren in Herrnhut. The Moravian Brethren were originally from Bohemia and Moravia, in the present-day Czech Republic, but fled their homeland because of persecution. In 1722 Count von Zinzendorf welcomed them to his estate in Saxony, which is in the eastern part of Germany. They built a small community at Herrnhut, and there they recovered the unity of life among the believers, returned back to the organic function of the church, and began overseas missionary work. In 1727 Zinzendorf asked all of the refugees to be in harmony, and when they broke bread together for the first time, the Holy Spirit was poured out upon them. Moved by the Spirit, they were burdened for the spread of the gospel to the entire earth, and they began to pray continuously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This prayer lasted one hundred years and became the driving force for the sending out of hundreds of believers to preach the gospel. The Moravian Brethren also had a great impact on John and Charles Wesley.
Portrait of Count von Zinzendorf | Source
The Lord continued to move in Germany in the twentieth century, when the ministry of the age brought many young believers into the Lord’s recovery. The church life began in 1971 in Freiburg, Germany, and in 1974 all of the saints migrated to Frankfurt. The Normal Christian Life and other books of Watchman Nee’s ministry had been distributed in Germany prior to this time, and small groups of believers were reading the books. The beginning of the church life in Germany reflected what was happening in Elden Hall in Los Angeles around that time. Saints testified of the rich enjoyment of calling on the Lord, pray-reading the Word, and the strong exercise of the spirit. Those who entered the church life at this time testified of the light and life they experienced. Groups of Christians began leaving their denominations and free groups to come into the church life. Many of the young people lived together in corporate living, where they had morning watch together. Several saints from a smaller town near the border of Switzerland and Austria called Friedrichshafen came into the church in the 1970s and began the Lord’s table in 1980. In 1976 many saints migrated to Stuttgart. This is where Brother Lee visited to hold conferences in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this time, he gave messages that became hallmarks of his ministry, such as The Kernel of the Bible (1977) and God’s New Testament Economy (1984). Stuttgart was also where saints began printing Life-study messages in German. The church life was also spreading to a number of other places in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.
Several churches in Europe were helped by fellowship with Germany, since it had the most established churches and the most saints. Some of the brothers who eventually became pillars in the church life in London came into the church life in Germany.
In the early 1980s the church life in Germany was affected by the publication and the subsequent translation of The God-men (a book opposing the Lord’s recovery) into German. However, despite the persecution by some of the saints’ families and from Christianity, the saints continued to stand with Brother Lee’s ministry. But by the middle of the 1980s a turmoil began to brew in Germany, around the time that Brother Lee began the full-time training and began speaking on the God-ordained way. A number of saints from Stuttgart went to Taipei to join the training for forty days, but the leading ones in Stuttgart became negative, and their negativity affected many of the saints. Brother Lee sent six brothers to Stuttgart to speak with the saints, but trouble spread throughout Europe, with the result that about a thousand saints in Europe were lost at the time.
There was still a remnant, however. According to the testimony of a brother, a major factor of his and his wife’s remaining in the Lord’s recovery was their experience in Taipei and of blending with the saints from all over the earth. The continual visits of brothers from the US and London sustained the saints. Some of the saints went back to Christianity and to the world, but more than a decade later, the Lord turned them, brought them back in contact with saints and back into the church life. A small number of saints in Switzerland also remained, and they had regular fellowship with each other. The saints continued to go on, holding video trainings, coming to the live trainings, and meeting in their various localities.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany from 1989 to 1990, saints in the Lord’s recovery were burdened for the move of the Lord in Germany, and some saints were sent to serve and distribute the ministry in Berlin. A Lebensstrom bookstore was set up in Berlin in 1996. Along with the publication work in German, the church in Berlin was established between 1996 and 2000. Following a one-month migration training in late 2000, twenty saints from the US, the UK, and Russia came together with those meeting in Berlin to help further establish and build up the Lord’s testimony there. In addition to beginning to contact students on local campuses, a wide door was opened throughout the country to contact and shepherd those of German descent who had already been and were constantly being repatriated to Germany from the former Soviet Union. Most of those contacted were already believers, and many had been in the newly established churches in the former USSR. The Recovery Version of the New Testament and free ministry publications in the Russian language played a large role in gaining this increase. More than two hundred had been contacted, and around seventy had been gained by 2004, mostly in former West Germany, as the free ministry publications and the Recovery Version of the Gospel of John in German first became available. During the 2009 spring conference in Germany, there was a call for saints to pray and consider moving to Berlin to strengthen the church life further. A number of German saints, largely from among these repatriated ones, responded to the call for migration. One year earlier, in 2008, a cluster of FTTL graduates were sent to begin the church life in Düsseldorf. Several saints also moved to Frankfurt in 2011 for the church life. In addition to all the migrations, the German Recovery Version of the New Testament was published in 2010.
More recently, the refugee crisis, which began in 2015, has had a significant impact on the churches in Germany in relation to the Lord’s current move. From 2015 to 2016 Germany took in more than 1 million refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and other countries. They were fleeing from civil war, repressive governments, and economic hardship.
Map of the European migrant crisis 2015 | Source
This sudden, large movement of peoples from the Middle East into Europe sparked a strong burden in the Lord’s recovery for Germany. Scouting trips were undertaken in the autumn of 2015, saints from Europe and the US migrated to key cities in Germany (Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart), and saints from all over the earth participated in gospel trips to these four cities. They visited the refugee camps, preaching the gospel and nourishing the new believers from the Middle East, and preached the gospel on the university campuses to German students. Shepherding trips (2016-2017) continued the initial work of these gospel trips, and more saints have since migrated to Germany.
A migration training was held in the summer of 2017, and in the autumn several saints will emigrate to Germany for the Lord’s move. They will first move to Düsseldorf for blending and language studies before being sent out to either strengthen existing churches or to begin new churches in Germany.
Austria
By the year 1545, shortly after the Reformation began in Germany, approximately half of Austria had been converted to Lutheranism, but as a result of the Counter-Reformation, the dominant influence of the Roman Catholic Church was quickly restored. Today the majority of the Austrian population is considered Catholic.
The development of the Lord’s recovery in Austria is still in the initial stages. In the 1990s a few saints migrated to work or study in Vienna. A couple living in Switzerland began to visit them in 1999, and they continue to visit the saints in Austria.
In 2002 a brother with his family moved from the Netherlands to work in Vienna. He had a burden for the church life and opened his house for meetings, until they had to move to Australia. The saints continued to meet at a young couple’s apartment up to the end of 2006. In the following years, there was no open home for shepherding, but a sister from Malaysia kept in contact with the other saints who were in Vienna.
In 2011 a sister brought her friend to her home to be baptized by two brothers from Switzerland and Bratislava. Since then, a few saints began to meet regularly on the Lord’s Day, and the Lord has added more members to the church life. In 2015, with the help of other saints, an apartment was rented for meeting. Today there are about twenty saints in Vienna, with a new Austrian brother having recently started to meet.
In 2011 a brother, who was a pastor in Salzburg, began to contact the ministry and brought his group into fellowship with the saints. They are now meeting as the church in Salzburg and have been participating in the annual conference and blending meetings in Germany and the one-week trainings in London. They are in fellowship with the saints in the other localities in Austria regarding blending together.
In 2016 a Romanian couple living in Graz (the second-largest city in Austria) were contacted by the saints. This couple began meeting with a sister in Graz, and later, a couple who were relatives of the Romanian sister also joined them in fellowship. In January 2017 some saints from Vienna, Switzerland, and Bratislava went to Graz for a blending meeting, and the sister’s son was baptized. The saints are praying that the Lord would strengthen His testimony in Graz.
Portrait of George M
Portrait of Henry Clay Trumbull | 
Portrait of Hudson Taylor | 
