After affiliating with New International, Ben Seidl moved back to Germany to minister in a Berlin church that was in its infancy while Ben was studying theology at the Humboldt-Universität. Ben grew up all over the Midwest and South of the US, with family ties in Virginia. In the early 2000s, he married an artist from southern Germany, Jasmin. For 20 years, they have lived in the avant-garde arts neighborhood of Neukölln, building a community with fellow artists, songwriters, and small business owners in and outside the church. Residing now in Weimar, the Seidls continue ministering to and with cultural creatives in Germany and beyond.
As Regional Director, Ben provides pastoral care, coaching, and strategic oversight to all NI cross-cultural workers in Europe, helping them navigate the ups and downs of language learning and enculturation, all while cultivating a robust missiology tailored by them and their national partners. Cross-cultural ministry is an exercise in relational stewardship and faithful presence. It is most healthy when trust, good communication, and transparency are given and received with grace-filled patience while growing in a nuanced sense of discernment for Spirit-led risk-taking and leaps of faith.
Our affiliates are supporting and pioneering exciting work in the region—many for more than a decade. Everything from leadership development and groundbreaking women’s ministry in Macedonia, church planting in Italy with a focus on recovery ministry, to building long-term care facilities with national churches that bring dignity and home to physically and mentally disabled men and women aging out of orphanages in war-torn Ukraine—and that is just the tip of the iceberg.
In his free time, Ben writes, records, and performs as Roemer, a folk music project part of Old Bear Records.
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"Mission is doxological: it is doing what is good and beautiful in love for a God who loves us freely. Perhaps we should use different metaphors here. Rather than using traditional militaristic or business metaphors, we might think of mission as creating art. Art radiates beauty and meaning that does not depend on its possible usefulness. On the contrary; precisely because of its lack of usefulness, art helps us understand that goodness and beauty are not necessarily useful in terms of impact or money. Mission might be a work of art. It is a cause of joy and gratitude; it is a work of free and undemanding love; it is serving a God who is sheer love and beauty." - Stefan Paas, Pilgrims and Priests: Christian Mission in a Post-Christian Society
“The church has an unconditional obligation toward the victims of any social stricture, even if they do not belong to the Christian community. … If the church allows the state to practice too much or too little law and order, it will find itself called not only to help the victims who have fallen under the wheel, but it will find that it has fallen into the spokes of the wheel itself.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Love is that liquor sweet and most divine, which my God feels as blood, but I as wine.” - George Herbert, The Agony