Is there a common mission of churches from the North and the South that are churches in their own contexts and testify the love of God which they recognize in Jesus Christ?
Four German and two African churches are connected with each other for more than 150 years. Today, the member churches of Bremen Mission in Ghana and Togo are something like an easily understandable community. They are very close to each other. It is important for them to celebrate church services together and to pray for each other. The African members of this community call the church their “family” because they have a lot in common: They have a common history, they trust and rely on each other.
Especially because the two churches are connected to each other in so many ways and because of their membership in the Bremen Mission for already five years through which they feel responsible for "their Mission work", we wanted to ask what our common mission is in the different contexts in God's one world.
What does a pharmacy project in Ghana have to do with a concept of the renewal of church services? What are possible relations of persecuted Togolese Christians in a dictatorship to an alternative parishshop? What is the connection between the commitment of an economical one-world-shop and the support of fulltime and honorary church workers or a public office in the city centre?
As different as the "missionary situation" in Germany, Ghana and Togo is, so are the projects, the "missionary projects” of the church. For German Christians, it is astonishing that a pharmacy, which they associate rather with merchandizing or maybe with social welfare, in Ghana is conceived as a missionary project. And for African Christians it cannot be taken for granted that an exclusively communicative project like the drop-in centre of a city church can be associated with the missionary topic without having a social or welfare aspect.
Those questions and other "strange topics" are discussed in many ways within the Bremen Mission. For this interchange there are theological consultations and also our exchange program “changing perspectives” which continues to develop the common basis as churches in Germany and West Africa.