About chrismon

chrismon

chrismon is the monthly magazine of German Protestantism, published since October 2000 by the Gemeinschaftswerk der Evangelischen Publizistik (GEP) in Frankfurt am Main. It is distributed as a free supplement in selected German daily newspapers and the weekly Die Zeit, reaching a spread circulation of 1,444,956 copies (IVW, fourth quarter of 2025) and about 1.41 million readers (AWA 2025) — making it by far the largest-circulation Protestant publication in the German-speaking world. Its stated mission is to take part in the effort to interpret the Gospel anew for the present day and to bring the Christian faith to bear in all areas of life.

Overview

chrismon occupies a unique position in the German media landscape: a church magazine that reaches an audience far beyond the church. It is slipped into the newspapers its readers already buy — a monthly encounter with questions of faith, meaning and ethics in the middle of the daily news. Its readers consistently credit it with a unique selling point in the German magazine market: in their view, no other title fulfils a comparable journalistic function. The magazine presents religious content unobtrusively — readers describe it as "a real enrichment of the magazine market" — precisely because religion plays only a subordinate role in other media.

History

chrismon was launched in October 2000 as the successor to the Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt, the venerable Protestant weekly. The new concept was radical in its simplicity: instead of asking readers to buy a church newspaper, the magazine would come to them — as a free supplement inside the daily papers they already read. The gamble was that a well-made magazine about faith and life could hold its own between the politics and sports sections, and that it could reach precisely those people the church otherwise struggled to address.

The gamble paid off. Within a few years, chrismon had established itself as one of Germany's highest-circulation magazines of any kind, with a readership that the Protestant church could reach through almost no other medium: according to readership research, 70 percent of chrismon readers read neither their parish newsletter, nor a Protestant weekly, nor any of the other Protestant media. It is, in effect, the church's most effective ambassador to the religiously distant.

The magazine family has grown over the years. chrismon plus is the extended subscription edition (16,000 sold copies, IVW Q4/2025), with regional editions for Baden, Hessen-Nassau and the Rhineland — the Hessen-Nassau edition absorbed the readership of the Evangelische Sonntags-Zeitung when that paper was discontinued in January 2024, appearing as chrismon plus Hessen-Nassau with expanded regional content. chrismon spezial, the Protestant magazine for Reformation Day, has appeared annually on 31 October since 2012. The online offering at chrismon.de and a reader shop complete the brand.

Content and concept

chrismon covers faith as it intersects with everything else: portraits of people whose lives were changed by belief or doubt, reportage from the world's religious hotspots, essays on ethics and meaning, debates about the church's future, culture, and practical questions of living. The tone is deliberately unobtrusive — the magazine wants to interest, not to instruct — and its visual language is that of a modern magazine, not a parish bulletin.

The editorial leadership reflects the magazine's institutional anchoring: editor-in-chief is Claudia Keller, with Konstantin Sacher as deputy; the publishers (Herausgeber) include Anna-Nicole Heinrich, Kirsten Fehrs, Frederike van Oorschot, Yared Dibaba and Jakob Hein — a deliberately diverse group spanning church leadership, theology and public life. The GEP's managing directors are Ariadne Klingbeil and Stefanie Schardien.

Coverage and audience

chrismon's audience is the magazine's most remarkable fact. Readership research commissioned by the EKD paints a picture of a "likeable, educated middle-class target group" that the Protestant church otherwise barely reaches: 63 percent of chrismon readers describe themselves as distant from the church, 28 percent as close, and only 9 percent as highly attached. Seventy-two percent are church members — of whom 76 percent are Protestant and 22 percent Catholic — while 18 percent have left the church and 10 percent were never members. Readers give the magazine an average rating of 1.8 — good to very good, a score usually achieved only by paid subscription titles — with Catholic readers (a quarter of the audience) rating it 1.6, significantly better than Protestants, a finding the researchers noted with dry humour about the Protestant capacity for critical thinking.

With 1.41 million readers (AWA 2025), chrismon reaches more people than almost any other German magazine — a scale that makes it not just a church publication but a genuine mass medium, and the Protestant church's single most successful journalistic product.

Ownership

chrismon is produced by the Gemeinschaftswerk der Evangelischen Publizistik (GEP), the joint media enterprise of the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD), based in Frankfurt am Main. The GEP is the church's central media organization, and its portfolio shows how broadly "Protestant media work" is defined: alongside chrismon it produces the nationwide Lenten campaign "7 Wochen Ohne" — held every year from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, with more than 2 million participants it is Germany's best-known church campaign after Brot für die Welt — for which the GEP creates the annual motto, produces and sells the fasting calendars and accompanying materials, and handles press and online work. It also runs ein-jahr-freiwillig.de, a volunteer-service job portal where around 90 Protestant organizations present some 20,000 placements in Germany and abroad — online since 2015 and decorated with awards including a Stevie Award (2021) and the German Design Award (2019) — and markets advertising time through its Berlin-based subsidiary m-public. The magazine is published on behalf of the EKD, giving it institutional backing while its editorial concept deliberately addresses readers far beyond the church's core.

Digital presence

chrismon.de extends the magazine's mission online with articles, debates and multimedia content, while the reader shop offers books and devotional materials. The digital presence serves the same strategy as the print supplement: meeting readers where they already are, rather than asking them to come to the church. In a media environment where religious content competes with infinite alternatives, chrismon's model — a free, well-made magazine inside the daily newspaper — remains one of the most successful experiments in reaching the religiously curious and the religiously distant alike.

The Hessen-Nassau transition illustrates the model's adaptability: when the Evangelische Sonntags-Zeitung — a paper whose own history stretched back to a 1946 licensed founding under the title Weg und Wahrheit — was discontinued in January 2024, its readers were not abandoned but folded into an expanded chrismon plus Hessen-Nassau with additional regional content. The supplement model thus proved capable of absorbing a dying church newspaper's audience into a living magazine's structure — a quiet rescue operation in a shrinking Protestant press landscape. A quarter-century after its 2000 launch, chrismon has fulfilled its founding promise: it made the Protestant voice audible in the middle of the German public sphere, not by preaching to the converted, but by writing a magazine good enough that 1.4 million people read it voluntarily — most of them at a comfortable distance from the church that publishes it. In a country where church membership keeps falling and religious coverage keeps shrinking, that achievement looks less like a publishing curiosity and more like a model worth studying. The magazine's free distribution inside the daily newspaper remains its structural advantage — reaching readers the church could never reach on its own.