Radoslav Tisma has lived in Hamburg for 34 years. He came to Germany from what was back then called Yugoslavia. "His" church, the Serbian Orthodox Church in Germany, recently consecrated the Church of St. Michael the Archangel in Hamburg. The Serbian Patriarch Porfirije Peric even traveled to Germany for its inauguration.

This Serbian Orthodox church in Hamburg is an example of how the Orthodox faith is thriving in Germany. The community purchased the building in 2001, and Tisma served as chairman of the community's board during its renovation.

"Since that time, ever more people have been coming to us — they have found their spiritual home here," he told DW.

While many Serbian families arrived in Hamburg in recent years, Tisma explains that a large number of Orthodox Christians moved to the city much earlier: they included engineers, medical specialists, and business people. The community has also recently grown as younger people converted from other churches. Tisma himself is an aircraft engineer and has been a German citizen for a long time.

Orthodox churches across Germany have been growing substantially, while the Catholic and Protestant churches' membership has been declining.

In 2023, Germany's Catholic Church lost more than 591,000 members through church departures and deaths. It had 20.3 million members at the end of that year. The Protestant Church lost around 560,000 members, and its membership now stands at 18.5 million. The percentage of Germans belonging to either of those churches has fallen to about 47.5%. This starkly........

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