Former President Barack Obama will visit German Chancellor Angela Merkel as part of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, a German church announced Tuesday.

The trip will reunite Obama with Merkel, who doubled as the closest European ally of his presidency and the face of the expansive Syrian refugee policy that President Trump denounced throughout his 2016 campaign. The location of the encounter, at the Brandenburg Gate, sets the scene for what the organizers hope will be an especially-political celebration of the German church's history.

"Together, as people of faith, we live from the firm hope for a better world," Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, who chairs the umbrella organization of Germany's protestant churches, said after issuing the invitation. "Anyone who is pious also has to be politically minded. I am looking forward to enthusiastic debates during the Reformation Summer 2017."

Merkel received Obama's final phone call as president before leaving office when Trump was inaugurated, after writing a joint column with her following the 2016 elections. "There will be no return to a world before globalization," they wrote in a German business magazine. "We owe it to our companies and our citizens, indeed to the entire world community, to broaden and deepen our co-operation."