I want my church to be more open to new activities or things that they don’t usually know, just like our project. Also, being ecumenical, because ecumenical questions are a big personal problem for me, and it’s important to show that we can be one church and not separated communities. More ecumenical projects or statements that we do together as followers of Christ.

Finding Luther trees that have been planted in Germany and all over the world and to connect them with geocaching, a popular leisure activity for people all around the world. We created a website for that and linked trees from Germany and other countries. Young people have told us that they like it very much because they didn’t know about the Luther trees at all and through geocaching and through the project, they have made new connections with the places they live and their local histories. Many Luther trees have been planted for Luther’s birthday or other things martin luther did in the places where trees are planted or to remember him, and so they had fun going out and searching for the geocaches but also learning about martin Luther. They liked it very much.

The project was very connected to the youth workers of the church, because through their projects and organization we were able to reach many people, 3 people were directly responsible for the creation of the project. Not easy to count those who were reached through the website. But for one example, we planted a tree during a youth festival at our church and went geocaching together with a group of about 40 to 50 (14-15?) young people. There were at least 400-500 direct participants. There are about 100 trees on the website from all around the world, and groups are involved with geocaching at each tree.

The hardest was communicating with each other, because the each member of the project group lived in different places. Had to connect via skype, email, travel. Had to wait for answers sometimes, which made it difficult to reach some timelines. The challenging thing with the website was connecting the church geocaching website with the official global geocaching site, had to get new system for logging the geocaches. Trees were often already planted, but in some instances people used their own budgets for setting up the geocaches. Had good support from the church so no problems there, they helped design postcards to advertise the project, some youth workers were not interested in geocaching or Luther trees so we tried and continue to try to motivate people.

We did not have point by point plan, our plan was more open. The only thing that didn’t go as planned was designing the website. It took longer than expected, so the website was not up and running until a month after the goal.

The Luther trees were a great project idea which engaged youth and people of all ages. People could connect with others around the world when they joined the initiative to plant a Luther tree. The participation is in Germany but also internationally, and we want to continue because it is important for us and for the church.