Do you ever say yes to something and then later regret having said yes? This is exactly what happened to me a while back. Roger, a professor from my Undergrad University was planning to lead a juniors-abroad trip through Europe and asked me to translate for his group while they visited a pastor in Leipzig, Germany. I had told him I would do it. However, this particular Sunday, the day before meeting the group, I felt totally drained, and was swamped with work. Driving to Leipzig the next day, somehow did not sound as good as it did a few month back. The group was meeting the pastor from the Nikolai Kirche (church) and they needed me to translate for him because growing up in the GDR (German Democratic Republic) he learned Russian instead of English in school. It was too late for me to cancel with the group and it also would not have felt right to do so, so I drove the next day to Leipzig.
While I was driving, I was wondering whether or not the Nikolai Church was the one that played the important role in the German reunification. I really had no idea what to expect. Usually I like to read up on places and people before I meet them, but like I said earlier, I was swamped and had no time to prepare. When I finally arrived in Leipzig at the Nikolai Church, I walked around on the outside and looked around in the inside, but I saw nobody that looked like the people I was trying to meet. I did not know how Christian Führer, pastor of the Nikolai Kirche looked like. I also could only vaguely remember what Roger the professor looked like. My way of finding them would be to find the 20 American Students. I looked everywhere but I did not see them. I started to wonder: "Did we say that we were going to meet at a specific place? Shoot, was I supposed to meet them next Monday?" Off course I had forgotten my calendar and I did not have my cell phone with me to call my wife and have her check my calendar. I said to myself: "Darn, all this driving for nothing?" I decided to wait in front of the main entrance of the church for a while.
I am a people watcher (not a stalker – big difference!), and I was watching a poor man begging in front of the church doors. He was kneeling on a pillow stretching out both of his hands and his head was slightly bowed but with his eyes he was looking up. He had darker skin but I could not make a good guess where he was from.
I watched a man step out of the church and pull a few coins out of his pocket which he gave to the poor man. He walked a few steps away from the man begging and then stopped. I noticed that he was carrying a leather case that was full of stickers, some of them Christian. He pulled out a button and pinned it on his vest and it had Nikolai Kirche and something else written on it which I couldn't read. Was this Pastor Führer? He didn't look like a German pastors to me. I went up to him and asked him, if he was the one that was waiting for an American group. He said yes, and I was relieved to hear that because I did not wait in vain. (Picture Arnold who is a native German speaker say: "I'll be back, you won't wait in vain"). Just as we had met, I saw a man out of my peripheral vision walking straight towards us. As I turned I saw Roger and the group of about 20 students approaching. They had finally made it to the church.
At this point I was still wondering why the American group had decided to come to this particular church which was not nearly as pretty as dozens of other churches in Germany.
Pastor Führer led us into the church, straight to the Altar area. There he gave us a brief history of the church building. When it was built and when it was expanded and because one person asked, he also talked briefly about a carved wooden cross that was hanging on the wall. Before leading us into the chapel room, off to the side of the altar room, he made this odd seeming remark that where we were standing priests used to only be allowed access to. Out of all the things he had said thus far, this one made his eyes light up the most.
As we finally settled into the chapel room and everyone had found a place to sit, Pastor Führer, after the standard introduction with names, started sharing about all the things that had taken place since the time he had become Pastor of the Nikolai church in the 1980's.
One of the first things that Pastor Führer told us about was how he opened the doors of the church to people who were concerned about the current political developments in the cold war. A lot of people in Germany were worried about the arms race because they would be the battlefield if a full fledged war would brake out between the U.S. and Russia. At their first meeting at 10 a' clock at night they expected 10 or 15 people to come. Over 150 people showed up most of them young people, dissidents who were not getting along with the SED communist leadership in East Germany. They all gathered in the area where the altar stood and sat on the floor of the church along the walls. Pastor Führer had placed a cross on the floor in the middle of the Altar area. If someone wanted to offer a frustration they could take a candle voice their concern and place the candle on the cross. To Pastor Führer's surprise, almost every single one of the youth voiced his or her frustration and brought it before God.
At the beginning of our meeting, Pastor Führer had mentioned that up until recently (Reformation) only priests could come into the altar-area. It dawned on me what Pastor Führer was getting at and why this thing about the altar room had made his eyes sparkle so much earlier. For the longest time the church denied people access to God. Let me explain what I mean by that. One sad part of our history as the church is that we tend to become an inward-focused community which is closed to the outside of the Christian faith. Instead of creating pathways for people to encounter the living God, the church created barriers with specific parts of their Liturgy, with closed (intimidating) building structures and with inward-focused communities. It seemed to me that Pastor Führer was hinting that his own church had been closed to people for far too long but that this meeting with the dissident youth was a turning point for the faith community. Pastor Führer shared on several instances about how the Nikolai Church became a church with open doors for all people in Leipzig. The Barriers that keep people out of churches were lifted and the church was anew a place where people encountered the living God. This outward change of open doors, symbolizes the change that has taken place on the inside of the church community. Another way this new outward orientation was manifested was through the starting of weekly Monday night peace prayers.
This opening up the Church to the greater Leipzig community in the early 80's had a significant impact on the people in Leipzig as well as on the church itself. Pastor Führer was replaying for us the historical events that took place in East Germany in 1989. A lot of people were fleeing from East to West Germany via Hungry. I remember how excited my dad was about all the things that were taking place before the German reunification. Every night we watched the news with eager anticipation to learn more about the people fleeing East Germany. It did not take long until we met people who fled to West Germany. My little sister befriended a little girl named Mendy that started going to her elementary school. Her family had fled via Hungary to West Germany and had ended up in our hometown in Germany.
The Nikolai Church faith community did not want to abandon East Germany and so they continuously pushed for a reform. On Monday evenings after the prayer meeting the people went on the city loop to demonstrate for freedom, for visas and continuously pressured the government for change. In contrast to some other demonstrations in the GDR, the demonstrations in Leipzig were by far the biggest and peaceful. On October the 9th 1989 the demonstrating reached its zenith. The military and STASI (secret police) had warned them not to demonstrate again. They had tried to intimidate them by imprisoning people during the previous demonstrations. On this day, the military and STASI had shut down schools and stores around the church and even build up some road blocks. The secret police had guns and sharp ammunition and pulled up some Tanks. Pastor Führer said they feared that the secret police would use the "Chinese Solution" as he called it to solve their problems with the resistant movement. Only later did I understand that he was alluding to the massacre that took place in 1989 on the Square of Heavenly peace in Beijing.
As always the crowd met that Monday evening at the church to pray. Pastor Führer pleaded with the people not to use violence and encouraged them to break the chain of violence just like Jesus had taught us in the Sermon on the Mount. After the prayer meeting 300000 people started to march around the city loop. The secret police and military was everywhere, but as Pastor Führer said: "Our fear was not as big as our faith." Pastor Führer pointed out that in one hand the people demonstrating held a candle and with the other hand they protected the flame. There was no hand left for violence. After the demonstrations, a member of the STASI told Pastor Führer that they were prepared to counter any type of action, except for candles and prayer. In all of this Pastor Führer saw the Holy Spirit at work that in a crowd of 300000 really frustrated people no violence broke out, for him this was a miracle.
Pastor Führer emphasized also that October the 9th and not November 11th was the significant date that enabled the German reunification. October 9th was the day when the Government gave way to the demands of the people. This was the true turning point in his mind. Noted scholar, Mary Fullbrook points out the significance of this day, when she writes:
"In the event, there was a major turning point on 9 October, when the authorities renounced the use of force to suppress the Leipzig demonstration, and effectively conceded the legitimacy of demands for dialogue."[1]
Pastor Führer and his Christian Community led the people in Leipzig in a non violent resistant which played a key role in the peaceful revolution that led to the German reunification.
When our meeting came to an end, and we walked out of that little chapel room back into the altar area, it dawned on me what had just happened to us all. I told one GFU student that Pastor Führer is like "the German Ghandi". It was one of those moments where I was explaining something to someone else, but really I was in the process of explaining it to myself.
I have been chewing on this encounter since May. My experience that day was so deep that each time I told friends or family about it I was frustrated afterwards because what I tried to convey came out flat in comparison to what actually had been experienced. I was really shaken up after the meeting. Every few Minutes something clicked or I made some kind of new connection that I did not make before – continuous-aha-moments. While I was driving, I had so much thoughts rushing through my mind that I finally decided to pull out a note book and to jot down all the thoughts and insights that I had gained from this encounter. I am always scared of forgetting things and so I made it a habit of trying to write insights down before they are gone. I am kind of obsessive compulsive in that way. What I learned from this meeting was that when the church leads others into an encounter with God both are changed. The Nikolai church, is the church with open doors in Leipzig. The faith community got to experience in a really powerful way how God can move and work through them in remarkable ways. The church has become a symbol of hope all throughout Germany. Recently two German engineers from the Leipzig area where taken hostage in Iraq and the church was filled with people immediately praying for release of the hostages (shortly after the hostages were released). The people were changed as well. Their hope and faith that God can do something even in this scientific age is revived. God is at work in Germany today. I learned that everyone has access to God through Jesus' sacrifice on the cross that tore the veil in the temple and opened up the possibility for us to have fellowship with God. I want to be a person that lets people know that they can come to God and that he has resources and ways of speaking into our lives that lie far beyond our imagination.
After all, the curtain in the temple was torn when Jesus Christ was crucified and that symbolized that now all people could have access to God through Jesus Christ, even apart from the Temple and the church. And it made me even more aware that we need to be the kind of community that is one that lives out the fact that the curtain in the temple was torn when Jesus Christ was crucified and that all people have access to God because of his self giving.
But the people in Leipzig were not the only ones changed. The church was changed as well. The church did not do theology from the pastoral study room anymore, but there theology became a theology of the streets a theology that addressed the needs and concerns of the people. A theology that was in touch with peoples lives and that cast a vision of how life can be lived in another way (particular instance how revolution can take place in a peaceful way). A space was created where the concerns of the people could encounter the living God and the church was no longer an archaic institution that only dealt with fictitious or out of date issues that were created and addressed in some pastoral study room.
--
Tim Buechsel, M.Div.
Director of Youth Ministry
Evangelical Community Church
2732-7318
No comments:
Post a Comment