Since 2015
After affiliating with New International in 2004, Ben Seidl moved back to Berlin, Germany to minister in a German church that was in its infancy while he had been studying theology at the Humboldt-Universität as an exchange student. Ben grew up all over the Midwest and South of the US but has strong state-side roots in the Washington DC area. In 2005, he married an artist from southern Germany, Jasmin, who has called Berlin home for close to 16 years. Together they live and work in the avant-garde artist neighborhood of Neukölln with their two cats, Lenka and Liilii.
As Regional Director, Ben serves NI’s cross-cultural workers in Eastern and Western Europe, helping them navigate the waters of language learning and enculturation 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 a posture of 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, campus ministry with a focus on church planting in Italy, to building long-term care facilities with national churches that bring dignity and a home to physically and mentally handicapped men and women aging out of orphanages in Eastern Ukraine—and that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Ben also serves as the worship coordinator for Projekt:Kirche, a German church that meets in a local art gallery in Friedrichshain. As Music & Worship Arts Coordinator, Ben helps Projekt:Kirche create weekly liturgies and worship experiences while fostering relationships with singer-songwriters in the Berlin music scene. 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
