Similar to most Western nations, Germany has experienced a history of secularization, resulting in church decline. However, some Christian communities have been less affected by decline. The historical free churches (Freikirchen), usually of an evangelical nature, have not only developed a more explicit missionary identity than the mainline churches, some of them have also been able to experience church growth against the larger trends. In this paper quantitative and qualitative data are presented based on a study of the Bund Freier evangelischer Gemeinden (BFeG) in Germany. These data show that general church growth and conversion growth are correlated, that young churches grow better (in both respects) than older churches, that the net conversion growth (conversions minus decline) of younger and older churches is overall largely the same, and that growth results in Berlin outperform the results in other cities and in the BFeG as a whole. These results are put into context by extended case studies of two churches, one old and one young, and they are discussed with a view to existing studies of (free church) mission in the West.

与大多数西方国家一样，德国经历了世俗化的历史，导致教堂倒塌。但是，一些基督教社区受衰落的影响较小。通常具有福音派性质的历史悠久的自由教堂（Freikirchen）不仅比主线教堂发展出更明确的传教士身份，而且其中一些还能够抵抗较大趋势而经历教会的成长。本文基于对上海外滩的研究，给出了定量和定性的数据。（BFeG）在德国。这些数据表明，一般教会的增长和conversion依增长是相互关联的，年轻教会的成长（在两个方面）都比老教会好（两个方面），年轻和较老教会的净conversion依增长（转换减去下降）总体上是相同的，并且柏林的增长结果优于其他城市以及整个BFeG的结果。通过对两座教堂（一老一年轻）的扩展案例研究，将这些结果作为背景，并对它们进行了讨论，以期对西方（自由教会）宣教的现有研究进行讨论。