Germany’s Federation of Free Evangelical Churches has released new statistics showing its strongest recorded wave of conversions and baptisms in recent years, signaling fresh momentum for the denomination after a period of stagnation.
According to the federation’s latest two-year evaluation, member congregations reported around 2,700 “decisions for faith in Jesus Christ,” a figure the statistics describe as higher than in any comparable reporting period in recent years. In the same data set, the number of baptism services rose from 554 to 822 over four years, while the tally of people baptized climbed from 1,491 to 2,624, an increase of roughly 76 percent. The federation notes that these totals represent a clear upswing from the years leading up to 2021, when recorded decisions regularly remained below 2,000 and only began to rise significantly in 2023.
Reporting translated and summarized by several international Christian outlets indicates that, as of December 31, 2025, the federation comprises 504 congregations with around 40,933 members across Germany. The network, known in German as the Bund Freier evangelischer Gemeinden, functions outside the state-church system and has grown over decades from a small free-church movement into a nationwide fellowship of local congregations. While the latest figures do not point to dramatic membership expansion overall, they highlight an internal dynamic in which many congregations are drawing new people into committed church life.
The federation practices baptism on personal profession of faith rather than infant baptism, meaning its baptism totals largely track people who have consciously identified as followers of Jesus in adult or teenage years. Commentaries on the statistics in Portuguese and Chinese-language Christian media stress that this practice sets the numbers apart from those published by Germany’s historic Protestant regional churches, which include infant baptisms alongside adult professions of faith. As a result, the 2,624 baptisms reported by the federation over the four-year span represent individuals making a public declaration of faith rather than the broader cultural participation reflected in some state-church statistics.
The federation’s report emerges against the backdrop of continued membership decline in Germany’s mainline Protestant body, the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), which has lost millions of members over the past decade. Earlier analyses of free-church statistics noted that, even when state-church numbers were dropping, the largest German free-church federations were experiencing modest gains tied primarily to baptisms and local evangelism. Evangelical Focus, which has tracked these trends over multiple reporting cycles, has pointed out that the Federation of Free Evangelical Churches publishes its statistics every two years, offering a regular snapshot of how its congregations are faring relative to the broader religious landscape.
Researchers studying free churches in secular European contexts have observed that conversion growth and overall church growth tend to be closely linked, with younger congregations often growing faster in both respects than older ones. One scholarly analysis of German free churches found that younger plants in urban centers such as Berlin outperformed older congregations in conversion growth, even though net gains across the movement remained relatively modest. Those findings suggest that the surge in recorded decisions and baptisms within Germany’s Federation of Free Evangelical Churches may be connected to broader patterns in which newer congregations and intentional evangelistic efforts drive much of the reported growth.
Elsewhere in Germany’s free-evangelical ecosystem, denominational leaders and church planters have been pursuing ambitious expansion goals, reporting the establishment of around 200 new congregations over the past decade and laying out plans to launch dozens more in the coming years. A recent profile of European church-planting efforts noted that German free-evangelical networks hope to accelerate the pace of new congregations through 2030 and beyond, viewing church planting as a primary avenue for evangelism in an increasingly secular society. The federation’s latest statistics, with their sharp rise in baptisms and conversions, appear to align with these wider efforts to combine local evangelism, new congregations, and sustained discipleship.
Leaders commenting on the figures in international coverage have emphasized that the data reflect a growing spiritual hunger among people in Germany, with one report summarizing the federation’s message as a recognition that “people are seeking God” and turning to local congregations for answers. The federation is expected to continue publishing its statistics on a two-year cycle, giving churches and observers a regular way to track whether the current surge in conversions and baptisms marks a lasting trend or a short-term spike. For now, the numbers have drawn attention to a free-evangelical movement that, while much smaller than Germany’s state churches, is reporting renewed growth in the very areas most closely associated with personal faith commitment.