About Frohe Botschaft

Frohe Botschaft

Frohe Botschaft is a German Protestant monthly newspaper published by the Wichern-Verlag in Berlin. First published in 1897 as a distribution paper for the "Sonntagslosen" – people who could not or would not attend Sunday services – it has grown into one of Germany's oldest and highest-circulation church magazines, with nearly 30,000 subscribers nationwide. The monthly's program is its title: to proclaim "the joyful message of Jesus Christ, offered to all people," by means of a magazine – with interpretations of the current sermon texts, a picture meditation on the monthly motto, testimonies of faith, biblical impulses, pastoral topics, reports on missionary opportunities, a letter for the sick and a page for children.

Overview

Frohe Botschaft appears monthly with 16 pages in A4 format, delivered by post to subscribers' homes – the magazine that comes through the letterbox, the physical connection between the church and the household. Each issue contains four nested weekly sections – the monthly as a collection of weeklies, structuring the readers' devotional life across the four weeks of the month, one section for each week.

The readership's core areas are the Erzgebirge, the Vogtland, Brandenburg, Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern – the eastern German heartlands where Protestant piety has deep roots and where the magazine's missionary tradition is strongest – but the magazine also reaches readers in Baden, Bavaria, Württemberg and the Rhineland, a nationwide Protestant readership. The sold circulation is reported at 8,500 copies (m-public.de), while the subscriber count is given as nearly 30,000 nationwide – the figures reflecting different counting bases and distribution channels for one of Germany's most widely distributed church periodicals.

The content follows the church year and the devotional needs of its readers: exegesis of the current preaching texts connects the magazine to the Sunday services; the picture meditation on the monthly motto (Monatsspruch) provides the visual-devotional centerpiece; testimonies of faith and biblical impulses nourish personal devotion; pastoral topics address the questions of everyday Christian life; reports on missionary opportunities document the church's outreach; the "Krankenbrief" (letter for the sick) serves readers in illness and isolation; and the children's page brings the youngest readers into the magazine's world.

The magazine's tone is pastoral and accessible – the voice of a church speaking to its people in their homes, not the academic theology of the seminary but the devotional journalism of the parish: clear, warm and practical, addressing the faith as it is lived in families, in workplaces, in sickness and in aging.

History

Frohe Botschaft was first published in 1897 in Berlin as a distribution paper for the "Sonntagslosen" – the people who on Sundays could not or would not go to church. The founding idea was missionary and diaconal at once: to reach those outside the church's regular worship life with the printed word, carrying the gospel to the homes of the unchurched, the shift workers, the sick and the indifferent. The title – the "joyful message," the German rendering of the Greek "evangelion" – was the program.

Through the twentieth century's upheavals – the German Empire's final decades, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era with its church struggle, the Second World War, the division of Germany and the forty years of the GDR, and reunification – the magazine continued its monthly mission. The GDR years were the sternest test: in a state that promoted atheism and marginalized the churches, a Protestant monthly distributed to homes was an act of quiet persistence, sustaining the faith communities of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg and Saxony.

Since 1992 the magazine has appeared in the Wichern-Verlag with a circulation reported at 40,000 – the Protestant monthly that survived the GDR era and found new readers in reunified Germany, reaching back to the western regions as well. The Wichern-Verlag, the easternmost Protestant publishing house in Germany with a full publishing program, gave the historic title a new institutional home.

The magazine's longevity – well over 125 years of continuous publication – makes it one of Germany's oldest church periodicals. Its persistence through the secularization of German society, through two world wars and through forty years of state atheism, testifies to the loyalty of its readership: the subscribers, many in the eastern German regions where the church's institutional presence was weakened by decades of official hostility, who have kept the monthly as their connection to the church's devotional life.

Content and Sections

The editorial program of Frohe Botschaft follows the devotional year. The interpretation of the current sermon texts anchors each issue in the church's preaching – the magazine as the companion to the Sunday service, for those who attend and for the "Sonntagslosen" who do not, the exegesis that continues the sermon into the week.

The picture meditation on the monthly motto provides the contemplative centerpiece: a visual reflection on the biblical verse that guides the month – the combination of image and word that has been a staple of Protestant devotional publishing since the illustrated broadsheets of the Reformation era.

Testimonies of faith and biblical impulses address the personal spiritual life: the stories of believers – their conversions, their trials, their experiences of grace – and the scriptural reflections that nourish daily devotion. These are the magazine's most personal pages, the voices of the faithful speaking to the faithful.

Pastoral topics – "seelsorgerliche Themen" – address the questions of Christian living: family and marriage, work and vocation, suffering and consolation, aging and dying, the everyday matters of faith that the pastor addresses in the counseling conversation and that the magazine addresses in print.

Reports on missionary opportunities document the church's outreach work – the continuation of the founding mission to reach the unchurched, the reports from the mission fields at home and abroad that connect the readers to the wider work of the gospel.

The "Krankenbrief" – the letter for the sick – serves the readers in illness and isolation: the devotional words for the hospital bed and the sickroom, for those who cannot come to church and for whom the magazine is the church's visit. The children's page introduces the youngest readers to the biblical stories and the Christian faith – the magazine's investment in the next generation.

Publisher and Organization

Frohe Botschaft is published by the Wichern-Verlag in Berlin – the easternmost Protestant publishing house in Germany with a full publishing program, led since 2001 by Elke Rutzenhöfer. The Wichern-Verlag, named after Johann Hinrich Wichern (1808–1881), the founder of the Inner Mission and the Rauhes Haus in Hamburg, also publishes the Protestant weekly newspaper "Die Kirche" (circulation around 12,500 in Berlin, Brandenburg and parts of Upper Lusatia), the Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift of Humboldt University (since 1984) and a book program, with an integrated agency that takes on design commissions for church and diaconal institutions and produces printed matter for parishes, associations and organizations.

The editor-in-chief of Frohe Botschaft is Sibylle Sterzik. The magazine carries the ISSN 1615-4037 in print and appears monthly. The Wichern-Verlag's periodicals – the weekly "Die Kirche," the monthly "Frohe Botschaft" and the theological quarterly – make it one of the significant Protestant media houses in eastern Germany, the publisher that serves the church's public communication from the parish newsletter to the academic journal.

Digital Presence

The digital home of Frohe Botschaft is frohe-botschaft.de, the portal that extends the monthly newspaper into the digital channels. The site provides access to the magazine's contents, subscription information and the publisher's offerings, serving the readers' devotional and informational needs between monthly issues.

The Wichern-Verlag's digital infrastructure supports the magazine's online presence, carrying the 125-year-old title into the formats of contemporary church communication – the missionary impulse of the 1897 distribution paper continuing in the digital age.

With well over a century of publication history, a monthly rhythm, its missionary founding for the "Sonntagslosen" and its position as one of Germany's oldest and most widely distributed church magazines, Frohe Botschaft remains the Protestant monthly that carries the joyful message into German homes – from the 1897 Berlin distribution paper to the contemporary magazine, from the Erzgebirge to the Rhineland, from the monthly issue to the daily click.