Jayson Casper
Evangelicals have critiqued the ecumenism of former World Evangelical Alliance head Thomas Schirrmacher.
Christianity Today
June 25, 2026
Image courtesy of Thomas Schirrmacher
Eleven American Pentecostal pastors sat nervously with Pope Francis at the Vatican in June 2016. The meeting, arranged by Thomas Schirrmacher, then chair of the theological commission of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), was an opportunity for the guests to ask the pontiff anything they wanted. Two years earlier, Francis had publicly apologized for past Catholic persecution of the charismatic movement.
At the time, the Italian Evangelical Alliance had cautioned against growing ecumenical openness where “insurmountable” doctrinal obstacles exist. The American delegation was similarly opposed to Schirrmacher’s engagement but had agreed to the meeting. No one wanted to ask the first question. Amid the awkwardness, Francis took the initiative.
He asked the delegation to pray for him.
Schirrmacher said what followed was a life-changing experience for the Pentecostals. They prayed for the pope. He prayed for them. By the end, he said, their theological concerns didn’t matter much anymore as they agreed with Schirrmacher that Francis was a genuine believer and had no intention to convert them to Catholicism.
Matters of theology and doctrine have always mattered to Schirrmacher, who turns 66 today. The German theologian has four doctoral degrees and authored more than 100 books, including a six-volume treatise on ethics. Committed to Christian unity, he served as general secretary of the World Evangelical Alliance from 2021 to 2024. Yet his life has been a lightning rod of controversy—particularly when he neared the halls of power.
Even seemingly straightforward truths, he finds, have prompted critical reaction.
“If I say, ‘God is love,’” said Schirrmacher, “it could start a global discussion.”
Born in 1960, Schirrmacher traces his family history to 18th-century Huguenots exiled from Austria to Prussia. His father served on the board of the missions agency World Evangelization for Christ, and Schirrmacher interacted with many visiting missionaries. He met Billy Graham as a child, and again in 1983. By then, Schirrmacher was a young pastor who had planted seven churches. Graham advised him to continue pursuing advanced theological studies.
Two years later, a covered-up scandal at his church led Schirrmacher to resign, he said. He and his wife Christine started a publishing house in Bonn. Secular titles sold, while religious books sustained his passion. Schirrmacher described these as “some of the best years of their lives,” as they focused on their business, child-rearing, and academics—he in ecumenical theology and she in Islamic studies. Her focus supported his fledgling interest in religious freedom, leading to a 1985 visit with the Orthodox ecumenical patriarch in Turkey.
But Schirrmacher did not only aim for unity abroad. In 1994, despite his cessationist upbringing, he brought Pentecostals into the Bonn Evangelical Alliance. Two years later, he also navigated opposition to integrating them into the national Evangelical Alliance of Germany. All the while, he continued his academic studies, teaching missions at the Reformed Episcopal Seminary in Philadelphia and founding the Martin Bucer Seminary in Bonn in 1996.
Then the Pentecostals tested his ecumenism.
The European Assemblies of God approached Schirrmacher to send its pastors to study at his newly formed institution. At first he refused, as their beliefs didn’t match with the school’s Reformed theology. Eventually he accepted, but first Schirrmacher asked to preach an anticharismatic sermon at the largest Pentecostal church in Germany.
He spoke against pride in the spiritual gifts while also validating God’s continued use of signs and wonders to draw people to Jesus—emphasizing they also point to the importance of the Scriptures and the church. After his closing prayer, the senior pastor ran up to the stage and asked, “When can you come back?” as the audience jumped and clapped in appreciation.
Schirrmacher felt convicted.
“I felt like Peter in that story, as if God told me directly, ‘I am using the Pentecostals to evangelize the world, so you cannot bypass them,’” he said, referring to Peter’s meeting with Cornelius in Acts 10.
The Assemblies of God were not the only outliers at Martin Bucer. Schirrmacher’s connection to Turkey led to Turkish minority Armenian and Syrian Orthodox Christians also enrolling based on the trust of the ecumenical patriarch. Though the Turkish government had shut down the Orthodox church’s historic Halki seminary, Schirrmacher was able to establish a Martin Bucer-affiliated study center in the country.
Overwhelmingly Muslim, Turkey is officially a secular nation. Schirrmacher’s cooperation with the Orthodox church went beyond education, however. Through Martin Bucer and the evangelical alliance of Turkey, he has provided donations for Halki’s renovation. And since his initial visit in the 1980s, he has regularly advocated for the Orthodox seminary within the European Union’s human rights agenda. Turkey recently authorized discussions that could lead to its reopening.
“Evangelicals will never get rights if others don’t have them,” Schirrmacher said. “We must defend the Christian faith.”
A lifelong interest in missions led the theologian to advocate for freedom of religion and belief. In 1998, he helped establish the WEA’s International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church and joined its commission for religious freedom.
This too led to controversy. After he included a plea for Syrian Maronite nuns raped in a monastery in the WEA’s year 2000 prayer calendar, an evangelical blog criticized the addition because they were “not Christians,” Schirrmacher recalled. Meanwhile, his efforts to put persecution on the agenda of the German government also fell flat. A year earlier, his champion—then the leading member of parliament in the conservative Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) parties—gave Schirrmacher what he eventually recalled being a “momentous rebuke” for providing thin and unreliable data.
It took several years to merge academic rigor into his advocacy, but in 2005 Schirrmacher founded the International Institute for Religious Freedom. And in 2011, when global advocacy regularly cited that there were more than 100,000 martyrs per year, Schirrmacher called for a shift to count only Christians specifically killed for their faith, not by general political or military violence. His numbers reduced totals to the low thousands. Robust discussion followed, but within a few years many adjusted their figures downward.
Schirrmacher has now spoken eight times in the German parliament and received the title of honorary commissioner of the CDU/CSU’s religious freedom working group. The German newspaper Die Welt called him one the world’s leading experts in Christian persecution as well as “the pope’s favorite Protestant.”
Schirrmacher visited Pope Francis on the day of his installment in 2013 and more than 30 times after that. His Catholic outreach, however, began seven years earlier. He and then-WEA general secretary Geoff Tunnicliff risked their jobs, Schirrmacher said, to represent evangelicals as they forged an agreement with the Vatican and the World Council of Churches on the boundaries of legitimate evangelism.
It took five years and contentious in-house WEA discussion, but in 2011 all parties signed the slender document titled “Christian Witness in a Multi-Religious World.” Eventually more than 100 national alliances endorsed it, Schirrmacher said. Two voted against it, two abstained, while an additional six wanted to keep their support kept private. Given the history of persecution, he has found that evangelicals in majority Catholic countries struggle with ecumenism.
“How can we achieve anything if we don’t talk to Catholics or Orthodox?” asked Schirrmacher. “And we cannot help with reconciliation if we always fight ourselves.”
Schirrmacher has also built bridges with Muslims.
In 2016, Schirrmacher became the mentoring bishop of Communio Messianica, a movement to unite Christians from Islamic backgrounds to eventually create a functioning church structure that can protect their human rights.
Schirrmacher is clear that a goal of religious freedom is for people to be free to evangelize each other. His argument with Muslim government leaders is that religious extremism destabilizes society and sours many Muslims on Islam. You will have far fewer converts away from Islam, he says, if you let everyone preach.
In 2021, Schirrmacher helped craft an understanding on religious liberty between the WEA and Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization. The two groups subsequently copublished a festschrift, a collection of essays honoring him as an academic, titled God Needs No Defense: Reimagining Muslim-Christian Relations in the 21st Century.
That same year, Schirrmacher was elected general secretary of the WEA. His tenure included UN advocacy for persecuted Christians, focus on issues of climate change and economic development, and initiatives to promote theological reflection.
Controversies inevitably followed.
When he laid a wreath at the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem in 2022, he kindled divisions among the WEA’s Europe and Middle East and North Africa alliances over the definition of antisemitism. The following year, Schirrmacher faced criticism for having diplomatic engagement with Iran, being accused of whitewashing the Islamic Republic’s persecution of Christians.
But perhaps the most severe crisis came in 2024, when Schirrmacher joined an ecumenical prayer with Pope Francis in Saint Peter’s Square. The Italian and Spanish evangelical alliances publicly rebuked him for “crossing a line.”
Schirrmacher said the prayer came at a “peak time of Catholic acceptance.” Alongside him was the head of the Pentecostal World Fellowship. One part of the WEA celebrated how the Roman church no longer called them heretics. Another part, he said, flooded the global body with criticism.
Immediately he flew to Latin America to engage evangelical leaders there. “I don’t care what you have to tell your people,” Schirrmacher told them. “But what would you have done in my place?”
Thirteen of 15 alliances told him they would have joined the prayer, he said.
But less than half a year later, Schirrmacher resigned his position. Fatigue from the continuing symptoms of long COVID had drained his ability to maintain travel and leadership responsibilities. By 2025, however, he was significantly recovered, visiting 71 countries and 27 so far this year.
Schirrmacher said he is more active than ever.
His schedule has included a trip to Washington, DC, advocating for international religious freedom; a trip to Abu Dhabi promoting Muslim-Christian-Jewish dialogue; and a visit to Pope Leo at the Vatican. He has since published an analysis of the pontiff’s first 100 days, remarking that despite his broad education as a global American, Leo seems to have little familiarity with evangelicals.
“My dream,” Schirrmacher said, “is to bring everyone together.”
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